Life with Fire Amanda Monthei

The long-awaited beaver episode! In this episode, we learn about how beavers are not only champions of wildfire resilience but are also sleeper endurance athletes (climbing mountains to find new watersheds), dedicated anti-capitalists (not giving a **** about the regulatory or material concerns of humans), expert engineers (casually restoring entire watersheds) and pretty handy companions to have in our pursuit of restoring wetland habitat and landscape resilience across the West (and beyond).
Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Sophie Gilbert joined us to talk about everything from nature-based climate solutions to why we should learn to better coexist with beavers to that one time Idaho Fish and Game decided to trying airdropping beavers into mountain meadows in Idaho. Rest assured there were also a lot of beaver puns.

Today's episode is a special one. We collaborated with the Montana Media Lab—a program of the University of Montana's School of Journalism—to help support their winter "Youth Voices" workshop, which empowers young Indigenous storytellers to learn more about audio storytelling while sharing stories from their communities. This episode features five stories from high school students in Browning and Florence, Montana, all of which are centered around wildfire's presence in their communities.
Story one (timestamp: 6:32) centers on the experiences of volunteer wildland firefighters on the Blackfeet (Niitsitapi) Reservation, as well as on the history of Indigenous burning on Blackfeet Nation ancestral lands.
Story two (12:29) is a profile of one of the student's grandfathers, who spoke about his experiences as a Chief Mountain hotshot back in the 70s and 80s.
Episode three (16:34) focuses on the experiences of a few modern day members of the Chief Mountain Hotshots.
Story four (19:49) highlights how wildfires impact wildlife, and provided an opportunity for students to speak with employees at their reservation's fish and wildlife office.
Finally, story five (24:11) shows the unexpected impacts of having an incident command post pop up at your high school during a major summer wildfire in your area.
This episode and collaboration were made possible with support from the American Wildfire Experience and Mystery Ranch Backpacks.

In this episode, we had a chance to sit down with author John Vaillant, who published a new book last summer about the 2016 Fort McMurray fires in Northern Alberta. The book, "Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World" is an in-depth exploration of the fires, which released in June 2023. We not only spoke about his reporting process in the aftermath of a catastrophic wildfire, but we also touched on some of the book's major themes and how these were, in many cases, paralleled by the 2023 fire season in Canada.

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Jessica McCarty—who is the Biospheric Sciences branch chief at NASA's Ames Research Center—about her career, her work on fire in boreal and arctic ecosystems, her perspectives on fire technology (spoiler: she's a bit fan of predictive modeling) and so many other topics that I couldn't possibly list them all here. Here's her NASA bio, which explains her background better than we ever possibly could: Dr. McCarty has more than 15 years’ experience in applications of Earth observations and geospatial and data science to accurately quantify wildland and human-caused fire management and emissions, agriculture and food security, climate change impacts and adaptation, and land-cover/land-use change.

In our second Backbone Scholarship episode—sponsored by Mystery Ranch and the American WIldfire Experience—we chatted with Nez Perce wildland firefighter Riston Bullock, who spoke about his experiences working in fire over the last decade, about the challenges that have come up as he has gotten older and become a father, as well as the challenges of the Nez Perce Reservation to have more authority over their own fire management. Riston also spoke about his experience of seeing a fatality on a wildfire last summer, as well as the processing he's had to do in the aftermath of this incident.

Life with Fire Podcast, Mystery Ranch Backpacks and the American Wildfire Experience (AWE) have joined forces to bring you this episode with Junior Lazaro—a wildland firefighter who received a Backbone Scholarship from AWE to share his experiences of fire through the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series and Life with Fire Podcast.
Junior is a young wildland firefighter who shared his experiences of working in fire during his third season on a BLM handcrew out of eastern Oregon. In this episode, he spoke to some of his challenges and triumphs in pursuing wildland firefighting, and spoke especially to the role his father had in inspiring him to pursue this job.