I'm John Bachelor.

This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network.

It's a great pleasure to welcome Holly Fretwell of the Property Environmental Research Center,

Perk of Bozeman, Montana.

Recently, Holly and her colleague Jonathan Wood have published a new guide to American Forest.

It's entitled Fix America's Forest, Reforms to Restore National Forest, and Tackle the Wildlife

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 9600 fires

burned 4.7, 4.4 million acres, 4% of the states 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 as 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 another state, we are often suffering the smoke that's coming from other states.

California fires, Idaho fires, we seal 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.

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