Living with Smoke and Fire in the Era of Climate Change
By: I, Climate Voices
Tags: Indigenous Rights, Climate Change, Workers Rights, Smoke, Wildfires

A conversation with Marshall Burke, Emma De La Rosa, Bill Tripp & Katharine Mach

This year’s extreme wildfire season continues to devastate communities and spread harmful smoke across the West, from northern California where seasonal winds stoked the deadly and destructive Glass and Zogg fires, to Colorado, where the Cameron Peak fire has grown to the state’s third largest on record.

In August, we heard from Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician who said the smoke from wildfires was overwhelming the air filtration system in the hospital’s NICU. In October, we talked with a panel of experts who understand wildfire behavior, contributing factors, impacts, and solutions.

The quotes below have been edited for length and clarity. You can find the transcript, audio recording and video recording of this webinar here.

Marshall Burke’s research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change. (Photo courtesy of Marshall Burke)

Marshall Burke

Associate Professor, Stanford’s Department of Earth System Science @MarshallBBurke

“For much of the US, air quality has overall improved over the last two decades. That’s mainly due to policies like the Clean Air Act. So wildfires seem to be changing this fairly fundamentally. These overall air quality improvements started to slow and then reverse across much of the West Coast in the last five years. Work by us and others has shown that is at least substantially can be pinned on changes in wildfire activity. So what we’ve seen is over the last decade or two, roughly a doubling of the number of smoke days, days with smoke in the air, and we can measure this pretty well using satellites.

“Given the best science that we have, what it suggests is recent exposure to poor air quality from wildfires across California likely resulted in thousands of excess deaths. These are deaths that would not have occurred otherwise were it not for the wildfire exposure.”

Emma De La Rosa distributes N95 masks to farmworkers in East Bakersfield, in Kern County, California. (Photo courtesy of Emma De La Rosa)

Emma De La Rosa

Policy Advocate with Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability @LCJandA

“We often don’t think about our farm workers and how they are being impacted by the smoke. As we know, smoke makes it very difficult to breathe, right? Especially while you’re bent over picking crops, especially while you are being sprayed by pesticides or working alongside these pesticides. Those two variables are causing health effects in our community.

“It’s really important to start thinking as a society, how much time are we going to be allowing our farm workers to be working in these conditions? Especially in Kern County — this is where the farm worker movement began and yet we are still seeing very harmful working conditions for our farm workers. When we’re talking about the long-term health effects of smoke, are we including our farm workers in that conversation? Are we tracking their health? It’s really important to think about that and advocate for healthy work conditions for our farm workers.”

Bill Tripp manages a controlled burn, which the Karuk People have done for millennia to balance the ecosystem. (Photo courtesy of Bill Tripp)

Bill Tripp

Director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources @CulturalFire

“Cultural burning is deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge practice and belief systems or the Karuk people. This was taken from us as Indigenous peoples. We were murdered for doing it. So I would hope people can understand why we can get so upset when we see the types of things that are happening today.

“Mismanagement of our forest is a significant stressor and fire exclusion is a significant stressor. The combination of these things exacerbate the negative consequences of fire and perpetuate a response founded in fear and heroism. The removal of Indigenous peoples from our natural role in balancing fire process and function is a root cause that has led to the impacts we all face today.

“We’re working to build a greater coalition of people to join this discussion and help to drive action in place. We’ve established multiple large landscape collaboratives both on a community scale and an inter-Tribal scale. One being the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership and another being the Indigenous Peoples Burning network. In doing that, we are rebuilding the community of practice needed to put fire back on the ground in a good way.”

Katharine Mach’s research assesses climate change risks and response options to address increased flooding, extreme heat, wildfire, and other hazards. (Photo courtesy of Katharine Mach)

Katharine Mach

Associate Professor at the University of Miami’s Department of Marine Ecosystems and Society, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science @katharine_mach

“As the toll from wildfires in California and the American West has been going up year by year, the question increasingly has become, what can we do? How can we manage the risks?

“There’s no easy way out of where we are now, but we do have a portfolio of options that we know will work. As we think about managing wildfire risk and a changing climate, the necessary place to start is really to look hard at the need to reign in our emissions of heat trapping gases.

“We also need to prepare for our current reality, which is one with increased risks that are going to go up further. It’s really about a portfolio, and these are actions that range from individual households to communities, to the federal government, and everything in between. It spans the full spectrum from emergency preparedness to thinking hard about how we build and work on the landscape more broadly. In the space of the fires that have been unfolding over the last weeks and months, in California and the American West, fuel treatments have to be high on the list as we think about the history that Bill [Tripp] described of criminalization of traditional Indigenous controlled burning, and also from a long history of fire suppression as he mentioned as well.

“Returning fire to the landscape has to be done with care, because right now in this hot, dry climate, we’re getting, obviously, these very intense, large conflagrations that are sending smoke high into the atmosphere and generating fire behavior at levels of intensity that is really unusual.”

Climate Signals is a digital tool and communications project that is reshaping how to communicate the extent, nature, and immediacy of the climate crisis. It connects extreme weather and climate events in real time to the long-term trends at work and curates a database of these events and trends, allowing people to identify the climate impacts nearest to them.