I'm John Bachelorette. This is the new John Bachelorette show CBS Audio Network. It's a great pleasure to welcome Holly Fretwell of the Property Environmental Research Center Perk, a Bozeman Montana. Recently, Holly and her colleague, Jonathan Wood, have published a new guide to American Forest.

This entitled Fix America's Forest reforms to restore national forests and tackle the wildfire crisis. Wildfire crisis, Holly, congratulations and good evening.

Wildfire crisis is vaguely appropriate to the scale of this. In California in 2020, I covered these fires. They ranged right up to the edge and into the wealthiest parts of the state and also the most remote and beautiful parts of the state.

The statistics say 9,600 fires burned 4.7, 4.4 million acres, 4% of the state's roughly 100 million acres in California alone. You're describing something much more vast. These wildfires, do they weigh on the states where they range across or do people shrug and say, business is usual, we live out west. Good evening to you, Holly.

Good evening and thank you so much for inviting me, John. For sure, people feel these fires heavily, heavily when they come across the landscape. And even if it's not in your own state but in another state, we are often suffering the smoke that's coming from other states. California fires, Idaho fires, we feel those here in Montana. And we had a number of fires here in Montana last year, one right in our backyard that took out 28 homes.

And these fires, I thought they're part of nature. You know, you read about Native Americans who had forest fires and they dealt with it. I thought it was part of nature, but it turns out I learned from your book. It's not part of nature. There are federal lands. The number I have is vast.

Federal lands, 193 million acres of federal lands. And in those 193 million, you've identified 80 million that need attention. What kind of attention, Holly?

Well, they need some attention for restoration, but to be fair, fire is an inherent part of the forest. And it's a really important part. But we have managed our forest in such a way for the last 100 years that the fires that we see in many of our forest now, particularly on our federal lands, are just much more intense. They're much more severe. They're hotter.

They're longer. They're more damaging. And we also have a number of people that are living along the edge of that, that those federal lands, what we call the wild urban interface.

And in that area, when these fires come in, they take out a lot of these homes. And so we need to do something and we can do something. That's the point.

We can actually manage fires. You know, a healthy forest really is a human construct. We are the ones that define what is healthy and what is not healthy. And we are the ones that define what we want from our forest. And we can manage for that as well.

There are drivers for the wildfires that we have seen in the news these last years. What is the 10 AM rule? How does that work, Holly?

Well, the 10 AM rule is one that's been in effect for a very long time. And basically it says if the fire is continuing to burn that we'll get out there at 10 AM to put that fire out.

And one of the problems that we see is that we continue talking about suppressing the fires and putting the fires out, even though they are natural. And we're allowing those fires to take off instead of stepping back and years in advance, or at least a year in advance, let's start doing some restoration.

We can do some forest restoration. We can remove some of the woody debris, some of the litter as we call it. That's on the ground. That's the really flammable stuff, those pine needles and small twigs, et cetera.

That actually get these fires to take off and to burn really hot. And once they get out of the bottom, they just start to go up into the crown. And that's when we have some really serious problems.

And again, we need to be fair. Some forests naturally burn that way and some forests used to burn every five to 25 years.

So those forest types that used to historically burn every five to 25 years are the ones that we really can do something to manage them by removing some of the small diameter timber and making them a more open landscape so that when that fire does get in, which is natural, it actually does drop to the ground and just burn that stuff on the floor instead of taking off and burning everything around it.

And then shooting out for acres and acres and acres and taking everything around in addition to emitting all that carbon into the atmosphere.

My reading of your book is that the drivers for these wildfires are man-made. These are man-made policies. And I want to explore those first because the solutions you have are rich, but we need to see how the policy got us into this place.

The forest service over the last 30 years has evolved from a mix of foresters and experts and technicians to what becomes a fire company.

It's dominated by fire fighters. I don't believe that had to happen, Holly. Is that a product of the 10 AM rules? Did the forest fighting and forest fire fighting create the forest fires?

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