NPR.

About five years ago, Penny Hegey and her family built a house on five acres in Montana.

And her backyard is the forest.

There's nothing better than the smell of pine trees on a hot summer day.

So there's lots of ponderosa pine, some spruce, and a lot of dead forest underneath

and a tremendous amount of thick duff.

Okay, so this sounds like a beautiful scene.

Duff, though, seems like forest jargon.

I had to Google it myself.

So it's kind of actually at the heart of what I'm here to talk about today.

Duff is like the stuff that sits on the forest floor, like pine needles that fall down.

Right, so organic debris, if there's a fire, I imagine this is going to smold her a lot.

Bingo.

Penny recently hired someone to do wildfire mitigation, like clear out the old wood and

underbrush that would catch really fast.

And this cost her $3,600.

She applied for a government grant to pay for this and never heard back.

If it was money to put out that you really didn't plan, you could, I mean, you could look

out there and forest and go, it's fine, you know, I don't really care, but it's important.

And what Penny's doing represents this big shift happening in America.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Darian Woods.

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