June 9, 2016 • 40 mins
Starting a fire to prevent fire seems counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense once you understand it. But controlled burns aren't just to help prevent forest fires. They're also a vital part of keeping the local ecosystem healthy and thriving. Learn all about how controlled burns work right here, right now.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace.
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House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:27):
I'm Josh Park. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's
over there, and there's some coffee. Let's see a few posters. Uh,
there's a Beasley brand storage thing. You're getting. You're getting
some of that Beasley catch come in your way? Maybe
what was that all about? I hope it's Beasley, it
could also be Bisley. I don't know. You know, I
(00:50):
got a listener mail from someone who went to get
a Bond side tree in Boston after they were inspired
after our episode, and the dude she's like, have you've
been busy? Think? I was like, this week we've been
like people want Bonds eye trees. The phone has been
off the hook. No way. Yeah, we could be getting
some of that bonds ie scratch. We definitely should be.
(01:10):
We're getting nothing. Japan should be giving us money. Man,
what's their monetary unit again? Is it still the end?
The Japanese yen? We we need many in coming our way. Yeah,
soon many yet, and they're gonna try to flash some
numbers that you know you'll be like, wow, that's a lot.
Just remember it's about a hundred yend to one dollars.
I'll just ten. I'll let you negotiate that one. I
(01:33):
think it's ten now, Yeah, I remember, uh. And the
other night I turned on the television and Karate Kid
was on that just moments before the Wonderful Bonds I seen. Yeah,
I thought you took a picture of your television and
I put it on Instagram, our instagram s, y s
K podcast. Yeah, we're trying to take more pictures that
(01:56):
what you do share ourselves. Yeah. Uh, but this isn't
about one. No, I've got one more shout out though. Um.
There's a dude named Aaron Sits who remember when we
had our horror fiction contest years back, and we said
that anybody who was a part of it, if they
ever published anything, we give him a shout out in perpetuity.
In perpetuity, and Aaron Sites published something. He published a
(02:19):
short story collection called The Andrew Jackson Stories, UM. And
he says that it was published by Lockjaw magazine. And
he said they're about Andrew Jackson about as much as
Richard Broad against trout fishing in America's about trout fishing.
That means nothing to me. Well, it wasn't really about
trout fishing. Um. But the the it's a slim little book.
(02:39):
He sent it to us. I haven't read it yet,
but he swears up and down that it's awesome. So
we're gonna go ahead and take his word for it.
But congratulations Aaron Sites And if you want to go
get your hands on Andrew Jackson's Stories, go look it up,
go to the Lockjaw magazine side I would imagine. So
that's done, and now we can talk about Controlled Burn. Yes,
(03:02):
good band name, Control Burn, Yeah, depending on like maybe
if it was like a soft rock group. Yeah, yeah,
they're like a eighties wedding band, Controlled Burn. Good evening
we were Controlled Burn. And this is by E. L
O right or Loggins and Messina. Yeah, I'm not dissing
(03:23):
l O. By the way, I love No Llo was great.
Did you see Kenny Loggins on documentary now Parter yeah,
which episode is that? It was the two part one
about them? What were the what? What did uh? What
was their thing? Oh? They were a band? They were Um,
oh that's right, that was the band. Yeah yeah, yeah,
(03:44):
it was like the greatest band name ever. It was
I want to say California Chrome, but that was that Racehorse.
I don't remember what they were called. Was it Controlled Burn? No?
But that that was a good one. That two parter.
Great show. I love that show. Uh, there's a new
season coming out right, Uh they should Okay, so um
(04:06):
again we're talking about Control Burning, not a band, an
actual thing. Yeah. And this ties into our Wildfires episode yeah,
which we did um years back. Yeah. Um, but Chuck,
I always loved the opportunity to talk about Oh here
we go and here's what now? Alright, so um, it
(04:27):
wasn't until about fourteen on one. The book by the way,
if you're new to the show, Josh's long uh stated
favorite book so long, and you've talked about it a lot,
at least fifty sixty times. And I would have read
it by now if you hadn't have talked about it
so much. You don't even need to now you know
the whole book so fourteen one. One of the premises
(04:48):
of it is that they're like, our understanding of UM,
Native America in North and Mezzo and South America prior
to Columbus coming over is like just totally wrong. There
were way more people, they were way more advanced then UM.
Anthropology and archaeology has long given them credit for the Internet.
(05:09):
Pretty much they did, UM. But it wasn't until like
the early two thousands that this idea of the noble
savage who treaded lightly on the on the ecosystem, on
the environment started to crumble, right and UM. We started
to realize that a lot of the features, what what
(05:31):
the early explorers thought were natural features of North and
South in Mesoamerica were um actually really well managed ecosystems,
right um. And one of the ways that Native Americans
used or managed ecosystems was through fire. But again there
was this idea that Native Americans just had no idea
(05:52):
what they were doing with anything. So whenever archaeologists up
until about two thousand, two thousand one or two, the
late nineties maybe and it time they came across evidence
of like a fire and it seemed like the Native
Americans had said it they just assumed that either the
Native Americans had said it to amuse themselves because they're
big dummies, or because a campfire got out of control
(06:13):
because they're big dummies. But this is what they came
up with their like, oh, well, they clearly wanted to
set some fires for fun. They couldn't have possibly had
any any point to it. But then more and more
investigation has shown like, no, actually, not only did they
know what they were doing. Like, if you step back
and look at North America, the whole continent was a
(06:34):
managed set of ecosystems, and one of the ways they
did it was through fire. The other thing that interested
me too was depending on the the explorers and the
Europeans and the settlers that came over to to North America. Um,
some of them came and that was not anything new
to them. It turns out that using fire to manage
(06:55):
ecosystems is almost universal. Basically, yeah, I mean so of
the reasons they might have done it. Of course, these days,
one of the main reasons we do it is to
prevent forest fires from spreading, which we'll get to. But
back then, uh, they would use it to improve the
foraging conditions for free ranging cattle. Uh, increased visibility, access.
(07:18):
There were all kinds of great reasons to burn things
in a controlled way. Yeah. Supposedly the early explorers didn't
really think about it, but the historians went back and
looked at it. That the explorers who used to say, like,
you can't you can't get through the forests in North America.
We're talking about swamp land like lands that wouldn't burn. Ye,
but you could drive like a car through a forest
(07:40):
in like Ohio or something like that. Although there's swamps
in Ohio, a non swampy part of Ohio because of
the use of fire. The swamps in Ohio, Yeah, there were.
They filled them in and built to ledo over it. So, uh,
you were talking about the um when Europeans came upon
the scene. Um, it's really interesting. I read this article
(08:03):
called the Historical Foundations of Prescribed Burning for Wildlife colon
a Southeastern Perspective Beautiful by A. Sydney Johnson and Philippe Hale,
and it was I think it was an academic paper
or something, but it started dawn on me when they
were talking about the founding of America. Why we ended
up like we ended up. Um, it just kind of
(08:25):
all came together for me. I love reading stuff like
that that connects dots that weren't connected before, and this
was a simple dot I should have connected before. But basically,
in the northeast of the United States, it was largely
settled by people from the southern lowlands of England, people
that lived in cities and people that had not for
(08:45):
the most part, lived on farms and didn't have a
lot of experience with agriculture, and certainly not with prescribed burning,
which is another name for a controlled burn. Uh. And
then in the south, particularly the southeast, we were more
populated by people from rural areas of the UK and
Scotland and Ireland and western England. They had a lot
(09:07):
of experience with farming. And then I started to think, oh,
wait a minute, that all just makes total sense. That's
why the Northeast became industrialized. Why the South we're a
bunch of yokels. They were agrarian, and uh, it just
sort of it was very obvious thing, but it just
sort of like coalesced in my mind. Yeah. I knew
that part already, the industrialization aspects of it. But one
(09:31):
of the things that coalest for me was wondering how
much of the Civil War was driven by by rivalries
that go back to England and Scotland and Ireland rather
than you know, the just the context of North America
in the US. Absolutely, because I think for the most part,
once people came over here, they did things like they
(09:54):
did them were there, which makes sense. Like Scarlett O'Hara's
father had Irish brogue. Remember, No, Yeah, her dad he had.
I'm pretty sure he didn't. I'm losing my mind. R. Well,
it's been a while since i've seen that movie. H
I'm pretty sure I believe it. But it makes sense.
(10:15):
And like you said, maybe the attitudes came along with that.
Maybe that carried over into how people felt about each
other pre Civil War. Yeah, I'll bet it. But the
point of all this is that up north there was
fire suppression that was the key driver, right, Like they
would they would try to keep fires from breaking out
(10:35):
under any circumstances. Yeah, and don't get confused, because a
suppressing fire is a controlled burn. Fire. Suppression is putting
out fires. So maybe we should just say up north,
they didn't think that starting fires on purpose was smart. Yeah,
they were like and down south they said no, no, no,
this is We've been doing it in England for years.
They were like fire, Yeah, fire is a good way
(10:57):
to manage things. Yeah, and that's how the sation was divided,
at least at first, and then the Civil War happened,
and interestingly, UM the Yankees came down and said, hey,
this old plantation, UM will make a really great hunting preserve,
and I'm going to buy it now that I own
this enormous tract of land in the South, I'm a
(11:19):
Yankee and we don't believe in fire, so I'm gonna
make sure no fire ever breaks out here, even though
everybody's been using UM fire techniques for generations. Yeah. And interestingly,
to the fire techniques that the founders in the South
used where the same kind that the Native Americans in
(11:41):
the area used, so like they're on the same page,
thousands of miles apart, and basically came and kind of
started doing the same thing or kept doing the same
thing that Native Americans were doing. And what makes that
even more interesting is that UM It's using fire is
not universal to ecosystems like you. There's different techniques or
(12:02):
not using it at all, depending on the type of
ecosystem you're dealing with. Well, yeah, because in the in
the UH Southern Lowlands, apparently the forests were like fire
sensitive hardwoods and spruce tree. So it's sort of depended
on what kind of forest you had, right, I guess
there's weren't as flammable, right, or inflammable, which is a
(12:25):
word I think we should just get rid of entirely. Inflammable. Yeah,
it means the same thing, is flammable, but it sounds
like it means the opposite. It's just a stupid word. Really, Yeah, inflammable,
I've never heard of it. Well, that's great, that's all
the more reason to get rid of it. That's crazy.
Inflammable means flammable. What's the point, man? What a dumb language.
(12:48):
So um, the point of the whole thing is that
fire is a natural feature of a living, thriving ecosystem.
It's it's something humans terrified of, but on the on
the environmental level, on the ecological level, it's a necessary
component to keep any or most ecosystems healthy. Right, And
(13:11):
some groups of people understood this. The people who ended
up running the show after the Civil War did not
believe this, and it actually has had a very large
impact throughout the twentieth century in the United States, which
were just now overcoming. We can actually thank one guy
for changing the attitude toward fires and using them for
(13:32):
um wildfire management. And we'll talk about him right after this.
(13:57):
All right, So you tease the name drop it did
right before the break uh in Well, there was there
was this one particular northern landowner that came down south
and brought up a bunch of plantations. Name was Henry
Bedell and he hated fire. Uh. Fire had burned his
favorite horse maybe you never know, Um, so he hated fire.
(14:19):
He was appalled at the idea of burning land. And uh,
but other people, you know, like we're saying, in the South,
so now it's a good thing. So in uh they
commissioned the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey, which was
precursor to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and uh it
was headed up at the time by guy named Herbert L. Stoddard,
who was the name that you teased. And Stoddard actually
(14:40):
the thing that kicked it off the most was that
these guys who um, who bought these huge plantations and
turn thement and preserves, they like to hunt quail, and um,
they right, and they noticed that the Bob white quail
population was declining every year and they had no idea why.
So they brought Stoddard it in and Stoddard became a
(15:02):
Bob White quail expert. Well he already was. Oh, he
was already that's why they brought him in. Yeah, he
was the He wrote a book about it, and um,
this guy was awesome. He he helped found the literally
helped found a profession of wild life management. Right, the
whole field is like basically this guy. Yep, he wrote
like some legendary books that are still used today. Uh.
(15:22):
He was like literally the first critic of industrialized agriculture.
He's just this sort of champion and a Georgian, a
transplant to Georgia. Yeah, yeah, I think he things from Chicago,
but did a lot of work here for sure. Yeah.
So he Um, he starts looking into the quail situation
down here and he's like, well, you need to burn him.
There's your problem. You guys have a woody undergrowth problem.
(15:47):
And I looked into this and Bob white quail requires
some of the most complex habitats you've ever heard of. Right,
So they thrive in areas where you've got what's called
woody cover, which are dense shrubbery that's like mostly woody.
That they can use is what's called umkovie headquarters. It's
(16:09):
like little escaped patches, and they need them all over
the place. But in addition to this, they also need
food sources, so they need like crops of a certain variety,
and then they also need some grassy areas. And they
need all this stuff in certain proportions. And if you
have the proportions right, which apparently they did, the quail
populations thrive. But if you have too much of one thing,
(16:29):
then the coil populations diminished. And that one thing that
had that had grown up was the woody undergrowth. And
the reason the woody undergrowth was allowed to grow up
was because the Yankees came in and stopped using fire.
That's right, and that interesting. So it was all because
these rich guys, um, these rich industrialists who wanted to
(16:49):
hunt quail were like, war's all the quail, and they
hired the government to come look into it. And this
government guy came in and was like, oh, here's the problem.
You guys need to set this on fire. But the
thing is is no one listened to him. Well, no,
he had he had a few people that um I
mean they hired him for his expertise, so he had
a few people that got on board. But he fought
(17:12):
for many many years. UM. Like the history of control burning,
it wasn't until post World War two is when it
started to catch on a little bit, and then in
the fifties and sixties it became more commonplace. But it
wasn't until ninety one that the U. S. Forest Service
had their very first symposium on UH on prescribed burns,
(17:34):
and that's what really turned the tide. But this was
the nineteen twenties, and it took all the way till
the nineteen seventies for it to become like completely accepted
that's the right way to do things. And in the
meantime we had a lot of unnecessary wildfires well. And
one of the reasons too was apparently all the forestry
um workers in the South were from the North UH
(17:56):
and so they had these bad experiences in England and
elsewhere with like devastating fires that kill people in wiped
out villages. And apparently they also had this German influence,
like a protectionist influence from Germans in forestry school that
was taught to them that way, so they were they
were doing it all wrong. Well, one of the other
explanations I saw for why the forestry services like, no,
(18:17):
you can't burn down here is because um one I
guess one of the spoils of winning the Civil War
was the North came down and just clear cut the
south of its pine and they figured, well, the pine
forests have been so devastated for what for timber uh huh,
that we can't let any fire happen or else. No, no,
this pine is never gonna recover, so we really can't
(18:38):
do any burning now. And yeah, so eventually everybody started
listening to Stoddard and um. Now we use fire um
pretty much everywhere in the United States. And there's a
couple of reasons to set fires on purpose. And the
coolest one is that if you set fires on purpose,
(18:59):
you actually prevent wildfires down the down the line. Yeah.
And and you know we're not talking about like completely
burning down every tree in the forest. Yeah, they're mainly
burning uh that that you know, the stuff that will
catch everything on fire, like the the understory, the underbrush,
the dead leaves, dead branches, stuff on the ground, right,
(19:20):
and if you if you burn that on purpose, you
burn out the fuel for again a future out of
control wildfire. One of the other things you do is
you open up the canopy, right, So you're burning out
some trees, but for the most part, the older, more
established trees can survive. And since that canopies opened up,
(19:43):
more sunlight can come through. And when more sunlight can
come through, you have smaller trees that can start to grow,
so there's more reproduction. Actually, yeah, and and if you're
listening thinking, well, this all sounds great, but uh, doesn't
that release a ton of carbon emissions in the air
when you're burning things? And if you're burning thousands and
(20:05):
tens of thousands of acres a year on purpose, aren't
you just adding to the problem? No, I was being KOI,
But the answer is no. Well it depends, so it's
a little bit of both. I thought this was a
little strange for the way that this was parceled out.
So on the one hand, in this article it says, nope,
Actually they've done studies and the the large established trees
(20:30):
that can survive a controlled burn actually lock in more
carbon um in the long run than uh, So the
control burn releases less than say, a wildfire that's burning
out a control that burns those trees and unlocks that carbon. Right.
And then later on in the last like section of
this article, the authors like, Yeah, that really just depends
(20:54):
on what kind of forest you're talking about. In some forests,
it doesn't make a difference at all. And and yes,
and in that case it's bad for the for the environment.
I don't know about that last part. I'm the same.
I just think it was weird. Well, I think it's
cool though, Like what you just said, the the large
trees capture that carbon, and if you burn off the
(21:17):
small stuff underneath what you said earlier, it's gonna open
up that canopy and let those big trees grow bigger.
And uh, that's gonna you know, that's gonna be good
in the long run, short long term gain for a
short term carbon emission output. Right. So and then also
in addition to opening up that canopy allowing more sunlight
(21:37):
so reproduction can happen, there's actually they found, um some
species of trees that depend on fire to reproduce. In
chief among them is the giant sequoia in Yosemite. And
I think the sixties, Yeah, the sixties. Um, they were like,
the sequoias aren't reproducing. What's going on? And somebody, a
(21:59):
guy in aimed um. Dr Richard Hartsfeldt said, I think
it has to do with fire. We stopped doing fire,
and we want to do fire, so let's do some fire.
And they're like, shut up. Hearts felt you can't even
talk right. And he's like, I'm gonna go burn some
stuff and prove you guys wrong. So he started doing
some tests. He did, he'd do fire tests, and um,
(22:20):
he found that when fire was applied to a sequoia forest,
the sequoia cones opened up and their seeds could germanate. Yeah,
and the big daddies are very fire resistant. So they
were like, I'm a little hot underneath in the undercarriage,
but it feels nice. But it feels pretty good, and
I'm gonna stand strong. But what I'm gonna do, like
(22:43):
you said, is I'm gonna open my cones. Uh. And
the other thing it does is, you know, when you
drop seeds, if you have a woody understory and understories
another word for that under brush under what'd you call it? Uh?
Under cover under coverage? What do you cover for a
Bob White coil. That's what the Bob White coils call
(23:04):
it amongst themselves. All right. So imagine a seed dropping
from a pine cone from a hundred feet up and
the ground is covered in leaves and sticks and things.
That seed might fall on a pile of leaves six
inches deep and just sit there, just sit there and
be like I'm unfulfilled. A ka. It never makes contact
with the soil where it needs to be to establish roots, right,
(23:28):
or even if it did, the sunlight is being blocked
out by that understory. And fire solves all those problems.
It does. Because fire pops that pine cone open, the
seeds come out. Uh, they are in the newly burned ground,
which has a lot of carbon fertilizer now in the
form of ashes and um, lots of sunlight coming through
(23:48):
because the understoy has been burned away. So fire is
the greatest thing ever. Pretty amazing. Um. But again we
said before, it depends on the ecosystem, right. So, especially
out in California, they got kind of burned happy. They're like, oh, wait,
fire can actually suppress wildfires. We have tons of wildfires
out here. We need to burn all the time. And
(24:10):
they started burning and burning and burning in southern California
and it had zero impact on, um, diminishing wildfires, and
they couldn't figure out why. And they finally said, well,
maybe we should study the ecosystem we're setting on fire
and see what's what. And they found that they really
shouldn't be burning the the southern California ecosystem to prevent wildfires.
(24:32):
So that actually makes it worse in this case. Yeah,
in southern California, they have what's called chaparral, and it's
the uh I mean, if you've ever been to southern California,
you know that. Um it looks lovely now in the
neighborhoods because people planted stuff everywhere, but the hillsides are
kind of gross. They're brown in there, forny and they're shrubby.
(24:53):
It's like all tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's just it's not uh,
it's just just sort of gross in those canyons. And
that's just my opinion. Yes, well that's chaparral, right, yeah, okay,
and uh that chaparral. Uh, well, if you leave everything
to itself there, apparently it's super fire resistant, so every
like if you left it naturally, it would only catch
(25:15):
flame every hundred years or so, right, But they were
setting fire to this every few years um in order
to try to prevent wildfires. And what they were ultimately
doing was burning the chaparral, which was naturally flame resistant, right,
And in favor of the chaparral. What was since it
took a long time to grow back, the stuff that
(25:35):
was beating the chaparral out that could grow faster, was
actually very flammable. So they were promoting the growth of
wildfire fuel in southern California by burning these the chaparral.
Too much good stuff, it is, it's really interesting, all right. Well,
let's take a break and we'll come back and talk
about a little bit about climate change and how that
(25:56):
factors in, and then how you can do your un
control burn all right. By the way, I was kidding,
(26:22):
no one should try this ever ever. Ever, we should
have probably not broken for a minute or so before
you said that. I don't think anyone just paused and said,
oh my gosh, I'm gonna run out because we didn't
teach him yet. Oh that's a good point. You should
never start a fire. Yeah, don start fires. Okay, I
got that out of the way. Uh, climate change is
having an impact on these wildfires. Um. From between nineteen
(26:47):
seventy nine, there's a season of fire, wildfire season, we
talked about it in our episode, when it's just more
likely to happen. In between nineteen the global fire season
increased by almost nineteen Yeah, which means like the fire
season grew longer around the world by that much, which
is bad. And at the rate of eight hundred and
(27:09):
sixty four million acres worldwide of wildfire that burned every year,
which is an amazing number. Um. Apparently that emits more
than half the amount of carbon that fossil fuels put
out in the atmosphere. Yeah, so that's awful. That's a
tremendous amount, right. Yeah. And it's a feedback loop. It
is because um it the it contributes c O two
(27:32):
to the atmosphere, which promotes the greenhouse effect. Right. The
greenhouse effect creates drought conditions, It heats things up, it
lowers humidity. Um. And it becomes a vicious cycle, right
because when you have drought conditions, you have more dead
trees that provide more fuel for more wildfires, and more
wildfires put more c O two into the air, which
(27:53):
promotes the greenhouse effect and it gets worse and worse
and worse. More wind to problem. Yeah. I was reading
about the Fort McMurray wildfire um up in Canada, and
apparently they just had some freak weather, the Fred McMurray wildfire. Yeah,
he was like, I got no Fred Mury to um
(28:13):
he uh? When not? He the city for McMurray, like
a little outside town there. They think the fire started
somewhere out there. They're not sure what did it yet,
but they had some freak weather where it was like
ninety one degrees. They still have like frozen lakes up
there right now. But the temperature was like one degrees,
humidity was at like and winds right about forty five
(28:35):
miles an hour. So it was just ripe for a wildfire.
And now it's up to like about four hundred fifty hectares,
which is exactly a ton of acres. I think, Yeah, man, alright,
so how do you start a controlled burn? How do
you do this carefully? Well, first of all, you want
(28:56):
to work for for a service or fishing game or Yeah,
the the author of this article says, go to local authorities.
I'm like, you can do this if you're not a
local authority, Yeah, but I guess you could. Like He
also mentions the landowner in the pine bearings of NuGen
that does his own control burns. Surely you have to
get you got permitted and if you're doing it yourself, right, Well, yeah,
(29:19):
he's saying go to local authorities. But I was surprised that, Yeah,
you can do it if you're not a local authority. Yeah.
I didn't know that either. In fact, I'm still not
quite convinced at the very least you want to collaborate
closely with local authorities if you're not one, that's right, Okay,
uh so yeah, I mean this beginning stuff is you know,
get your permits, find out what the best time a year,
(29:40):
and all that stuff. What you need to do is
just leave it to the people who do it best.
But this is what they're gonna do. Um. But the
first thing that you want to do after you've gotten
all your equipment and all that good stuff is look
at the weather and pick out a good time to
do it. Yeah. You want it kind of damp, Sure,
you want the humidity above, low winds. Yeah, basically everything
(30:05):
the opposite of the weather like it was in Fort
McMurray on May one. Yeah, less than eighty degrees ideally. Um.
And then once you've got everything all set up and
you've got a great day picked out, um, you're going
to start a tiny little test fire in a corner. First,
you want to wake up and have a complete breakfast.
(30:26):
Then you can go start your test fire. UM. Test
fire basically just look at it and say, how are
you gonna behave today? Yeah? Um, Well, even before you
set the test fire, you've got you want to plan
out your area that you want to burn, and in
the area, you want to identify natural fire breaks. These
are things like roads, bodies of water, that kind of stuff,
(30:47):
things that the fire is not going to spread across,
right ideally, And then you want to create even more
fire breaks around it where there aren't natural ones. You
want to plow and dig and cut and um basically
create an area to where the fire can't spread outside
of the place you want to contain it into. I
wonder if dropping an atom bomb on a wildfire woodwork
(31:09):
operation plash here. Sure, I don't think so. Probably, I
think that would make everything a lot worse. So, once
you've got all your fire breaks, both natural and the
ones that you've just made yourself with your hands. You
want to start your first fire, called the backfire, and
the backfire is down wind. It's against that fire break,
(31:34):
so you know it's only gonna be going in one direction. Um,
it's against the wind, so it's not gonna be super fast,
and you're gonna be able to control it. Like you're
kind of starting off nice and easy. Yeah, just don't
cut yourself out of the gate. Yeah, just take it
nice and easy, like you said. Then after you got
the backfire going, you create flank fires, one on each side,
(31:54):
right and um, they are not necessarily going against the wind,
so they're gonna burn a little bit faster. Yeah, they're
right angles to the wind. Um. And one of the
neat things about fire when you're creating a control burn
is the places you're burning first actually create fire breaks
(32:15):
themselves as they burn the fuel. Have you ever seen
the gods must be crazy too, didn't see the second one.
There's like a bush fire and um, I can't remember.
The main guy's name is awesome. Um. He saves his
like companions by um setting fire to the grass around
them so that the brush fire has nothing to burn
(32:36):
when it gets to them, so he creates a firebreak
basically by burning the area around him before the fire
gets there, so he controlled it himself. Was that good
the sequel? Sure? Yeah, yeah, both of them are really good.
And I remember that when it came out, it was
like kind of one of the first, uh foreign sort
of indie movies that made a big dust up. I
(32:58):
feel like, you know, they got a lot of attention.
It's good to be crazy. Holds up, does it not?
To check it out again? Uh? So where were we?
We've got our flank fires, we've got our back fires,
were creating larger fire breaks. And then you want to
ignite the big daddy, the head fire. The head fire,
it goes in the direction of the wind. It's it's
(33:22):
up wind, so it blows very quickly downward and spreads quick.
But because you said it last, there's less fuel for
it to burn. It's gonna finish out the fire for
you pretty quick, but it's not gonna go beyond the
areas that have already been burned because you just created
those fire breaks by burning them on the backfire and
the flank fires. So after that happens, your fire should
(33:44):
be done and you can go home, just forget about it.
After you set that head fire, just getting your truck
and go home. No, there's a little bit more. You
gotta stay there with my friend until afterward. And then
they call it mop up duty when you obviously put
out all the flame is completely with water, cut down
any little trees that are on fire, and just extinguish
(34:05):
everything and leave it a big, smoldering, nasty mess that
is actually going to be good for the environment. And
you gotta tell everybody who drives by and shouts at
you for setting a fire that you're doing this because
it's better off in the long run. Say, the end
justifies the means pretty neat. Yeah. Another tip, don't wear
(34:26):
rubber clothing when you're part of a fire setting crew
because it can melt and stick to your skin. I
wonder this is something I didn't look into. I wonder
if the surely they're they're they're just wildfire fighting teams
that are doing this. Right, it's the same people, right,
I would guess. I would guess I would hope, because
(34:49):
the thing is is like, yes, you can, you can
be told how to set a fire. I think that's
probably the easy part, like figuring out how to adjust
when it starts to get out of control or doesn't
do what you think it's gonna do, or the weather
conditions change, or if it jumps that firebreak that you
think is big enough, Right, that's when I think you
need somebody who's like experienced it's gonna be. There should
(35:13):
be the same people doing this who know what they're doing.
I'm sure it is. And if that's what you do,
we want to hear from you, so shout out to us. Well, yeah,
I think we heard from some fire jumpers in the
last episode we did from the wildfire one, and that
was a good one to go back and listen to that.
Everybody do it now. If you want to learn more
about controlled burns, you can take those words in the
(35:35):
search part house to works dot com since they said
search parts time for listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this
mind blown, not my mind listeners, pind Hey, guys, I
was listening to the Landfills episode and the most important
issue you brought up the song Powerhouse by the Raymond
Scott Quintet. Josh had hummed a snippet and Chuck said
(35:58):
it was Leoney Tunes. That was a moment of cognitive
dissonance that rivaled almost anything I've suffered in my forty
one years, because Josh was actually humming a bit of
love Villa or Levia Strangiato by Rush, not some dumb
fifties ban I know that song. So this scot my
attention powerhouses from the thirties, and it was like an
(36:20):
orchestral right on the fifties band. This guy out of
his mind? Well maybe so. I couldn't believe you were
singing a part of one of my favorite songs by
one of my favorite bands and crediting someone else. As
I watched the Raymond Scott video, though, the universe refocused,
like when the candle holder resolves into faces, or the
Canadian flag is irreversibly changed into two angry guys pressing
(36:44):
their foreheads together case closed. Have you ever seen that
the Canadian flag? No, and I've seen when that says
like Jesus loves you or something like that. I never
knew that the Canadian flag, if you look at a
certain way, looks like two guys. Uh. I went and
looked into sort of what about the man on the moon?
You ever seen that? I don't know, But well then
(37:08):
you haven't. Okay, you would know. Yeah, it's it's kind
of like, yeah, I guess I can see that. It's
like the arrow and the FedEx logo, like once you
see it, you can't unsee it unless you really want to,
and then you can't. Okay, I don't see what this
guy is talking about with the Canadian flag. Well, you
have to type in Canadian flag faces and then someone
(37:29):
will have It's a bit of a stretch. If you
ask me, have you ever seen any Sister Wendy stuff. No, Um,
she is a nun who um it just understands art
and art history like no one else on the planet.
And she had like a PBS show for a little while,
and she just she would just point out things in
(37:51):
art that you just never think to look for, like
in the negative space, like the sometimes but also more
like um, like the shadows surrounding a family and being
it makes him look isolate and you're like, oh, yeah,
I didn't really put my finger on that or whatever.
She's just got this really great knack for explaining art
and really interesting way. And I think it's online for free. Alrighty,
(38:12):
sorry about that. Now that's all right, So where are
we Canadian Flag too angry. Guys, thanks for broadening my
understanding of one of the first Rush songs I learned
to play on drums and then I found this on
song facts dot com and it sounds credible. Apparently this
was an issue, and Rush did not give credit to
Scott for using Powerhouse. By the time Raymond Scott's publisher
(38:34):
notified the band's management of the infringement, the statute of
limitations had expired of the challenge, but rusha's management, out
of deference to Mr or Mrs Scott uh and being
the class act that they are, offered a one time
penance payment, feeling it was the ethical thing to do
all involved. We're happy with the resolution and Rush has
no further financial obligations under the story. I know under
(38:56):
the settlement they were required not required to uh accord
Raymond Scott partial songwriting credit on the Beast. So apparently
Powerhouse and rushes Labilla strangeata or similar and they nicked
it from there. Huh. Never knew I didn't either, Uh.
And that is uh. From Ken Wrinker in Colorado Springs.
Thanks a lot, Ken, and he says best to Jerry
(39:17):
in the game. Jerry says thanks. I think yeah, uh, Ken,
that was awesome. I take back that you're out of
your mind. You're interesting instead, how about that? Uh. If
you want to get in touch with us, you can
tweek to us as by Eska Podcast. You can join
us on Instagram as by Eska podcast too. You can
join us on Facebook dot com h slash stuff you
(39:39):
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com
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website apart. Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from
House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:27):
I'm Josh Park. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's
over there, and there's some coffee. Let's see a few posters. Uh,
there's a Beasley brand storage thing. You're getting. You're getting
some of that Beasley catch come in your way? Maybe
what was that all about? I hope it's Beasley, it
could also be Bisley. I don't know. You know, I
(00:50):
got a listener mail from someone who went to get
a Bond side tree in Boston after they were inspired
after our episode, and the dude she's like, have you've
been busy? Think? I was like, this week we've been
like people want Bonds eye trees. The phone has been
off the hook. No way. Yeah, we could be getting
some of that bonds ie scratch. We definitely should be.
(01:10):
We're getting nothing. Japan should be giving us money. Man,
what's their monetary unit again? Is it still the end?
The Japanese yen? We we need many in coming our way. Yeah,
soon many yet, and they're gonna try to flash some
numbers that you know you'll be like, wow, that's a lot.
Just remember it's about a hundred yend to one dollars.
I'll just ten. I'll let you negotiate that one. I
(01:33):
think it's ten now, Yeah, I remember, uh. And the
other night I turned on the television and Karate Kid
was on that just moments before the Wonderful Bonds I seen. Yeah,
I thought you took a picture of your television and
I put it on Instagram, our instagram s, y s
K podcast. Yeah, we're trying to take more pictures that
(01:56):
what you do share ourselves. Yeah. Uh, but this isn't
about one. No, I've got one more shout out though. Um.
There's a dude named Aaron Sits who remember when we
had our horror fiction contest years back, and we said
that anybody who was a part of it, if they
ever published anything, we give him a shout out in perpetuity.
In perpetuity, and Aaron Sites published something. He published a
(02:19):
short story collection called The Andrew Jackson Stories, UM. And
he says that it was published by Lockjaw magazine. And
he said they're about Andrew Jackson about as much as
Richard Broad against trout fishing in America's about trout fishing.
That means nothing to me. Well, it wasn't really about
trout fishing. Um. But the the it's a slim little book.
(02:39):
He sent it to us. I haven't read it yet,
but he swears up and down that it's awesome. So
we're gonna go ahead and take his word for it.
But congratulations Aaron Sites And if you want to go
get your hands on Andrew Jackson's Stories, go look it up,
go to the Lockjaw magazine side I would imagine. So
that's done, and now we can talk about Controlled Burn. Yes,
(03:02):
good band name, Control Burn, Yeah, depending on like maybe
if it was like a soft rock group. Yeah, yeah,
they're like a eighties wedding band, Controlled Burn. Good evening
we were Controlled Burn. And this is by E. L
O right or Loggins and Messina. Yeah, I'm not dissing
(03:23):
l O. By the way, I love No Llo was great.
Did you see Kenny Loggins on documentary now Parter yeah,
which episode is that? It was the two part one
about them? What were the what? What did uh? What
was their thing? Oh? They were a band? They were Um,
oh that's right, that was the band. Yeah yeah, yeah,
(03:44):
it was like the greatest band name ever. It was
I want to say California Chrome, but that was that Racehorse.
I don't remember what they were called. Was it Controlled Burn? No?
But that that was a good one. That two parter.
Great show. I love that show. Uh, there's a new
season coming out right, Uh they should Okay, so um
(04:06):
again we're talking about Control Burning, not a band, an
actual thing. Yeah. And this ties into our Wildfires episode yeah,
which we did um years back. Yeah. Um, but Chuck,
I always loved the opportunity to talk about Oh here
we go and here's what now? Alright, so um, it
(04:27):
wasn't until about fourteen on one. The book by the way,
if you're new to the show, Josh's long uh stated
favorite book so long, and you've talked about it a lot,
at least fifty sixty times. And I would have read
it by now if you hadn't have talked about it
so much. You don't even need to now you know
the whole book so fourteen one. One of the premises
(04:48):
of it is that they're like, our understanding of UM,
Native America in North and Mezzo and South America prior
to Columbus coming over is like just totally wrong. There
were way more people, they were way more advanced then UM.
Anthropology and archaeology has long given them credit for the Internet.
(05:09):
Pretty much they did, UM. But it wasn't until like
the early two thousands that this idea of the noble
savage who treaded lightly on the on the ecosystem, on
the environment started to crumble, right and UM. We started
to realize that a lot of the features, what what
(05:31):
the early explorers thought were natural features of North and
South in Mesoamerica were um actually really well managed ecosystems,
right um. And one of the ways that Native Americans
used or managed ecosystems was through fire. But again there
was this idea that Native Americans just had no idea
(05:52):
what they were doing with anything. So whenever archaeologists up
until about two thousand, two thousand one or two, the
late nineties maybe and it time they came across evidence
of like a fire and it seemed like the Native
Americans had said it they just assumed that either the
Native Americans had said it to amuse themselves because they're
big dummies, or because a campfire got out of control
(06:13):
because they're big dummies. But this is what they came
up with their like, oh, well, they clearly wanted to
set some fires for fun. They couldn't have possibly had
any any point to it. But then more and more
investigation has shown like, no, actually, not only did they
know what they were doing. Like, if you step back
and look at North America, the whole continent was a
(06:34):
managed set of ecosystems, and one of the ways they
did it was through fire. The other thing that interested
me too was depending on the the explorers and the
Europeans and the settlers that came over to to North America. Um,
some of them came and that was not anything new
to them. It turns out that using fire to manage
(06:55):
ecosystems is almost universal. Basically, yeah, I mean so of
the reasons they might have done it. Of course, these days,
one of the main reasons we do it is to
prevent forest fires from spreading, which we'll get to. But
back then, uh, they would use it to improve the
foraging conditions for free ranging cattle. Uh, increased visibility, access.
(07:18):
There were all kinds of great reasons to burn things
in a controlled way. Yeah. Supposedly the early explorers didn't
really think about it, but the historians went back and
looked at it. That the explorers who used to say, like,
you can't you can't get through the forests in North America.
We're talking about swamp land like lands that wouldn't burn. Ye,
but you could drive like a car through a forest
(07:40):
in like Ohio or something like that. Although there's swamps
in Ohio, a non swampy part of Ohio because of
the use of fire. The swamps in Ohio, Yeah, there were.
They filled them in and built to ledo over it. So, uh,
you were talking about the um when Europeans came upon
the scene. Um, it's really interesting. I read this article
(08:03):
called the Historical Foundations of Prescribed Burning for Wildlife colon
a Southeastern Perspective Beautiful by A. Sydney Johnson and Philippe Hale,
and it was I think it was an academic paper
or something, but it started dawn on me when they
were talking about the founding of America. Why we ended
up like we ended up. Um, it just kind of
(08:25):
all came together for me. I love reading stuff like
that that connects dots that weren't connected before, and this
was a simple dot I should have connected before. But basically,
in the northeast of the United States, it was largely
settled by people from the southern lowlands of England, people
that lived in cities and people that had not for
(08:45):
the most part, lived on farms and didn't have a
lot of experience with agriculture, and certainly not with prescribed burning,
which is another name for a controlled burn. Uh. And
then in the south, particularly the southeast, we were more
populated by people from rural areas of the UK and
Scotland and Ireland and western England. They had a lot
(09:07):
of experience with farming. And then I started to think, oh,
wait a minute, that all just makes total sense. That's
why the Northeast became industrialized. Why the South we're a
bunch of yokels. They were agrarian, and uh, it just
sort of it was very obvious thing, but it just
sort of like coalesced in my mind. Yeah. I knew
that part already, the industrialization aspects of it. But one
(09:31):
of the things that coalest for me was wondering how
much of the Civil War was driven by by rivalries
that go back to England and Scotland and Ireland rather
than you know, the just the context of North America
in the US. Absolutely, because I think for the most part,
once people came over here, they did things like they
(09:54):
did them were there, which makes sense. Like Scarlett O'Hara's
father had Irish brogue. Remember, No, Yeah, her dad he had.
I'm pretty sure he didn't. I'm losing my mind. R. Well,
it's been a while since i've seen that movie. H
I'm pretty sure I believe it. But it makes sense.
(10:15):
And like you said, maybe the attitudes came along with that.
Maybe that carried over into how people felt about each
other pre Civil War. Yeah, I'll bet it. But the
point of all this is that up north there was
fire suppression that was the key driver, right, Like they
would they would try to keep fires from breaking out
(10:35):
under any circumstances. Yeah, and don't get confused, because a
suppressing fire is a controlled burn. Fire. Suppression is putting
out fires. So maybe we should just say up north,
they didn't think that starting fires on purpose was smart. Yeah,
they were like and down south they said no, no, no,
this is We've been doing it in England for years.
They were like fire, Yeah, fire is a good way
(10:57):
to manage things. Yeah, and that's how the sation was divided,
at least at first, and then the Civil War happened,
and interestingly, UM the Yankees came down and said, hey,
this old plantation, UM will make a really great hunting preserve,
and I'm going to buy it now that I own
this enormous tract of land in the South, I'm a
(11:19):
Yankee and we don't believe in fire, so I'm gonna
make sure no fire ever breaks out here, even though
everybody's been using UM fire techniques for generations. Yeah. And interestingly,
to the fire techniques that the founders in the South
used where the same kind that the Native Americans in
(11:41):
the area used, so like they're on the same page,
thousands of miles apart, and basically came and kind of
started doing the same thing or kept doing the same
thing that Native Americans were doing. And what makes that
even more interesting is that UM It's using fire is
not universal to ecosystems like you. There's different techniques or
(12:02):
not using it at all, depending on the type of
ecosystem you're dealing with. Well, yeah, because in the in
the UH Southern Lowlands, apparently the forests were like fire
sensitive hardwoods and spruce tree. So it's sort of depended
on what kind of forest you had, right, I guess
there's weren't as flammable, right, or inflammable, which is a
(12:25):
word I think we should just get rid of entirely. Inflammable. Yeah,
it means the same thing, is flammable, but it sounds
like it means the opposite. It's just a stupid word. Really, Yeah, inflammable,
I've never heard of it. Well, that's great, that's all
the more reason to get rid of it. That's crazy.
Inflammable means flammable. What's the point, man? What a dumb language.
(12:48):
So um, the point of the whole thing is that
fire is a natural feature of a living, thriving ecosystem.
It's it's something humans terrified of, but on the on
the environmental level, on the ecological level, it's a necessary
component to keep any or most ecosystems healthy. Right, And
(13:11):
some groups of people understood this. The people who ended
up running the show after the Civil War did not
believe this, and it actually has had a very large
impact throughout the twentieth century in the United States, which
were just now overcoming. We can actually thank one guy
for changing the attitude toward fires and using them for
(13:32):
um wildfire management. And we'll talk about him right after this.
(13:57):
All right, So you tease the name drop it did
right before the break uh in Well, there was there
was this one particular northern landowner that came down south
and brought up a bunch of plantations. Name was Henry
Bedell and he hated fire. Uh. Fire had burned his
favorite horse maybe you never know, Um, so he hated fire.
(14:19):
He was appalled at the idea of burning land. And uh,
but other people, you know, like we're saying, in the South,
so now it's a good thing. So in uh they
commissioned the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey, which was
precursor to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and uh it
was headed up at the time by guy named Herbert L. Stoddard,
who was the name that you teased. And Stoddard actually
(14:40):
the thing that kicked it off the most was that
these guys who um, who bought these huge plantations and
turn thement and preserves, they like to hunt quail, and um,
they right, and they noticed that the Bob white quail
population was declining every year and they had no idea why.
So they brought Stoddard it in and Stoddard became a
(15:02):
Bob White quail expert. Well he already was. Oh, he
was already that's why they brought him in. Yeah, he
was the He wrote a book about it, and um,
this guy was awesome. He he helped found the literally
helped found a profession of wild life management. Right, the
whole field is like basically this guy. Yep, he wrote
like some legendary books that are still used today. Uh.
(15:22):
He was like literally the first critic of industrialized agriculture.
He's just this sort of champion and a Georgian, a
transplant to Georgia. Yeah, yeah, I think he things from Chicago,
but did a lot of work here for sure. Yeah.
So he Um, he starts looking into the quail situation
down here and he's like, well, you need to burn him.
There's your problem. You guys have a woody undergrowth problem.
(15:47):
And I looked into this and Bob white quail requires
some of the most complex habitats you've ever heard of. Right,
So they thrive in areas where you've got what's called
woody cover, which are dense shrubbery that's like mostly woody.
That they can use is what's called umkovie headquarters. It's
(16:09):
like little escaped patches, and they need them all over
the place. But in addition to this, they also need
food sources, so they need like crops of a certain variety,
and then they also need some grassy areas. And they
need all this stuff in certain proportions. And if you
have the proportions right, which apparently they did, the quail
populations thrive. But if you have too much of one thing,
(16:29):
then the coil populations diminished. And that one thing that
had that had grown up was the woody undergrowth. And
the reason the woody undergrowth was allowed to grow up
was because the Yankees came in and stopped using fire.
That's right, and that interesting. So it was all because
these rich guys, um, these rich industrialists who wanted to
(16:49):
hunt quail were like, war's all the quail, and they
hired the government to come look into it. And this
government guy came in and was like, oh, here's the problem.
You guys need to set this on fire. But the
thing is is no one listened to him. Well, no,
he had he had a few people that um I
mean they hired him for his expertise, so he had
a few people that got on board. But he fought
(17:12):
for many many years. UM. Like the history of control burning,
it wasn't until post World War two is when it
started to catch on a little bit, and then in
the fifties and sixties it became more commonplace. But it
wasn't until ninety one that the U. S. Forest Service
had their very first symposium on UH on prescribed burns,
(17:34):
and that's what really turned the tide. But this was
the nineteen twenties, and it took all the way till
the nineteen seventies for it to become like completely accepted
that's the right way to do things. And in the
meantime we had a lot of unnecessary wildfires well. And
one of the reasons too was apparently all the forestry
um workers in the South were from the North UH
(17:56):
and so they had these bad experiences in England and
elsewhere with like devastating fires that kill people in wiped
out villages. And apparently they also had this German influence,
like a protectionist influence from Germans in forestry school that
was taught to them that way, so they were they
were doing it all wrong. Well, one of the other
explanations I saw for why the forestry services like, no,
(18:17):
you can't burn down here is because um one I
guess one of the spoils of winning the Civil War
was the North came down and just clear cut the
south of its pine and they figured, well, the pine
forests have been so devastated for what for timber uh huh,
that we can't let any fire happen or else. No, no,
this pine is never gonna recover, so we really can't
(18:38):
do any burning now. And yeah, so eventually everybody started
listening to Stoddard and um. Now we use fire um
pretty much everywhere in the United States. And there's a
couple of reasons to set fires on purpose. And the
coolest one is that if you set fires on purpose,
(18:59):
you actually prevent wildfires down the down the line. Yeah.
And and you know we're not talking about like completely
burning down every tree in the forest. Yeah, they're mainly
burning uh that that you know, the stuff that will
catch everything on fire, like the the understory, the underbrush,
the dead leaves, dead branches, stuff on the ground, right,
(19:20):
and if you if you burn that on purpose, you
burn out the fuel for again a future out of
control wildfire. One of the other things you do is
you open up the canopy, right, So you're burning out
some trees, but for the most part, the older, more
established trees can survive. And since that canopies opened up,
(19:43):
more sunlight can come through. And when more sunlight can
come through, you have smaller trees that can start to grow,
so there's more reproduction. Actually, yeah, and and if you're
listening thinking, well, this all sounds great, but uh, doesn't
that release a ton of carbon emissions in the air
when you're burning things? And if you're burning thousands and
(20:05):
tens of thousands of acres a year on purpose, aren't
you just adding to the problem? No, I was being KOI,
But the answer is no. Well it depends, so it's
a little bit of both. I thought this was a
little strange for the way that this was parceled out.
So on the one hand, in this article it says, nope,
Actually they've done studies and the the large established trees
(20:30):
that can survive a controlled burn actually lock in more
carbon um in the long run than uh, So the
control burn releases less than say, a wildfire that's burning
out a control that burns those trees and unlocks that carbon. Right.
And then later on in the last like section of
this article, the authors like, Yeah, that really just depends
(20:54):
on what kind of forest you're talking about. In some forests,
it doesn't make a difference at all. And and yes,
and in that case it's bad for the for the environment.
I don't know about that last part. I'm the same.
I just think it was weird. Well, I think it's
cool though, Like what you just said, the the large
trees capture that carbon, and if you burn off the
(21:17):
small stuff underneath what you said earlier, it's gonna open
up that canopy and let those big trees grow bigger.
And uh, that's gonna you know, that's gonna be good
in the long run, short long term gain for a
short term carbon emission output. Right. So and then also
in addition to opening up that canopy allowing more sunlight
(21:37):
so reproduction can happen, there's actually they found, um some
species of trees that depend on fire to reproduce. In
chief among them is the giant sequoia in Yosemite. And
I think the sixties, Yeah, the sixties. Um, they were like,
the sequoias aren't reproducing. What's going on? And somebody, a
(21:59):
guy in aimed um. Dr Richard Hartsfeldt said, I think
it has to do with fire. We stopped doing fire,
and we want to do fire, so let's do some fire.
And they're like, shut up. Hearts felt you can't even
talk right. And he's like, I'm gonna go burn some
stuff and prove you guys wrong. So he started doing
some tests. He did, he'd do fire tests, and um,
(22:20):
he found that when fire was applied to a sequoia forest,
the sequoia cones opened up and their seeds could germanate. Yeah,
and the big daddies are very fire resistant. So they
were like, I'm a little hot underneath in the undercarriage,
but it feels nice. But it feels pretty good, and
I'm gonna stand strong. But what I'm gonna do, like
(22:43):
you said, is I'm gonna open my cones. Uh. And
the other thing it does is, you know, when you
drop seeds, if you have a woody understory and understories
another word for that under brush under what'd you call it? Uh?
Under cover under coverage? What do you cover for a
Bob White coil. That's what the Bob White coils call
(23:04):
it amongst themselves. All right. So imagine a seed dropping
from a pine cone from a hundred feet up and
the ground is covered in leaves and sticks and things.
That seed might fall on a pile of leaves six
inches deep and just sit there, just sit there and
be like I'm unfulfilled. A ka. It never makes contact
with the soil where it needs to be to establish roots, right,
(23:28):
or even if it did, the sunlight is being blocked
out by that understory. And fire solves all those problems.
It does. Because fire pops that pine cone open, the
seeds come out. Uh, they are in the newly burned ground,
which has a lot of carbon fertilizer now in the
form of ashes and um, lots of sunlight coming through
(23:48):
because the understoy has been burned away. So fire is
the greatest thing ever. Pretty amazing. Um. But again we
said before, it depends on the ecosystem, right. So, especially
out in California, they got kind of burned happy. They're like, oh, wait,
fire can actually suppress wildfires. We have tons of wildfires
out here. We need to burn all the time. And
(24:10):
they started burning and burning and burning in southern California
and it had zero impact on, um, diminishing wildfires, and
they couldn't figure out why. And they finally said, well,
maybe we should study the ecosystem we're setting on fire
and see what's what. And they found that they really
shouldn't be burning the the southern California ecosystem to prevent wildfires.
(24:32):
So that actually makes it worse in this case. Yeah,
in southern California, they have what's called chaparral, and it's
the uh I mean, if you've ever been to southern California,
you know that. Um it looks lovely now in the
neighborhoods because people planted stuff everywhere, but the hillsides are
kind of gross. They're brown in there, forny and they're shrubby.
(24:53):
It's like all tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's just it's not uh,
it's just just sort of gross in those canyons. And
that's just my opinion. Yes, well that's chaparral, right, yeah, okay,
and uh that chaparral. Uh, well, if you leave everything
to itself there, apparently it's super fire resistant, so every
like if you left it naturally, it would only catch
(25:15):
flame every hundred years or so, right, But they were
setting fire to this every few years um in order
to try to prevent wildfires. And what they were ultimately
doing was burning the chaparral, which was naturally flame resistant, right,
And in favor of the chaparral. What was since it
took a long time to grow back, the stuff that
(25:35):
was beating the chaparral out that could grow faster, was
actually very flammable. So they were promoting the growth of
wildfire fuel in southern California by burning these the chaparral.
Too much good stuff, it is, it's really interesting, all right. Well,
let's take a break and we'll come back and talk
about a little bit about climate change and how that
(25:56):
factors in, and then how you can do your un
control burn all right. By the way, I was kidding,
(26:22):
no one should try this ever ever. Ever, we should
have probably not broken for a minute or so before
you said that. I don't think anyone just paused and said,
oh my gosh, I'm gonna run out because we didn't
teach him yet. Oh that's a good point. You should
never start a fire. Yeah, don start fires. Okay, I
got that out of the way. Uh, climate change is
having an impact on these wildfires. Um. From between nineteen
(26:47):
seventy nine, there's a season of fire, wildfire season, we
talked about it in our episode, when it's just more
likely to happen. In between nineteen the global fire season
increased by almost nineteen Yeah, which means like the fire
season grew longer around the world by that much, which
is bad. And at the rate of eight hundred and
(27:09):
sixty four million acres worldwide of wildfire that burned every year,
which is an amazing number. Um. Apparently that emits more
than half the amount of carbon that fossil fuels put
out in the atmosphere. Yeah, so that's awful. That's a
tremendous amount, right. Yeah. And it's a feedback loop. It
is because um it the it contributes c O two
(27:32):
to the atmosphere, which promotes the greenhouse effect. Right. The
greenhouse effect creates drought conditions, It heats things up, it
lowers humidity. Um. And it becomes a vicious cycle, right
because when you have drought conditions, you have more dead
trees that provide more fuel for more wildfires, and more
wildfires put more c O two into the air, which
(27:53):
promotes the greenhouse effect and it gets worse and worse
and worse. More wind to problem. Yeah. I was reading
about the Fort McMurray wildfire um up in Canada, and
apparently they just had some freak weather, the Fred McMurray wildfire. Yeah,
he was like, I got no Fred Mury to um
(28:13):
he uh? When not? He the city for McMurray, like
a little outside town there. They think the fire started
somewhere out there. They're not sure what did it yet,
but they had some freak weather where it was like
ninety one degrees. They still have like frozen lakes up
there right now. But the temperature was like one degrees,
humidity was at like and winds right about forty five
(28:35):
miles an hour. So it was just ripe for a wildfire.
And now it's up to like about four hundred fifty hectares,
which is exactly a ton of acres. I think, Yeah, man, alright,
so how do you start a controlled burn? How do
you do this carefully? Well, first of all, you want
(28:56):
to work for for a service or fishing game or Yeah,
the the author of this article says, go to local authorities.
I'm like, you can do this if you're not a
local authority, Yeah, but I guess you could. Like He
also mentions the landowner in the pine bearings of NuGen
that does his own control burns. Surely you have to
get you got permitted and if you're doing it yourself, right, Well, yeah,
(29:19):
he's saying go to local authorities. But I was surprised that, Yeah,
you can do it if you're not a local authority. Yeah.
I didn't know that either. In fact, I'm still not
quite convinced at the very least you want to collaborate
closely with local authorities if you're not one, that's right, Okay,
uh so yeah, I mean this beginning stuff is you know,
get your permits, find out what the best time a year,
(29:40):
and all that stuff. What you need to do is
just leave it to the people who do it best.
But this is what they're gonna do. Um. But the
first thing that you want to do after you've gotten
all your equipment and all that good stuff is look
at the weather and pick out a good time to
do it. Yeah. You want it kind of damp, Sure,
you want the humidity above, low winds. Yeah, basically everything
(30:05):
the opposite of the weather like it was in Fort
McMurray on May one. Yeah, less than eighty degrees ideally. Um.
And then once you've got everything all set up and
you've got a great day picked out, um, you're going
to start a tiny little test fire in a corner. First,
you want to wake up and have a complete breakfast.
(30:26):
Then you can go start your test fire. UM. Test
fire basically just look at it and say, how are
you gonna behave today? Yeah? Um, Well, even before you
set the test fire, you've got you want to plan
out your area that you want to burn, and in
the area, you want to identify natural fire breaks. These
are things like roads, bodies of water, that kind of stuff,
(30:47):
things that the fire is not going to spread across,
right ideally, And then you want to create even more
fire breaks around it where there aren't natural ones. You
want to plow and dig and cut and um basically
create an area to where the fire can't spread outside
of the place you want to contain it into. I
wonder if dropping an atom bomb on a wildfire woodwork
(31:09):
operation plash here. Sure, I don't think so. Probably, I
think that would make everything a lot worse. So, once
you've got all your fire breaks, both natural and the
ones that you've just made yourself with your hands. You
want to start your first fire, called the backfire, and
the backfire is down wind. It's against that fire break,
(31:34):
so you know it's only gonna be going in one direction. Um,
it's against the wind, so it's not gonna be super fast,
and you're gonna be able to control it. Like you're
kind of starting off nice and easy. Yeah, just don't
cut yourself out of the gate. Yeah, just take it
nice and easy, like you said. Then after you got
the backfire going, you create flank fires, one on each side,
(31:54):
right and um, they are not necessarily going against the wind,
so they're gonna burn a little bit faster. Yeah, they're
right angles to the wind. Um. And one of the
neat things about fire when you're creating a control burn
is the places you're burning first actually create fire breaks
(32:15):
themselves as they burn the fuel. Have you ever seen
the gods must be crazy too, didn't see the second one.
There's like a bush fire and um, I can't remember.
The main guy's name is awesome. Um. He saves his
like companions by um setting fire to the grass around
them so that the brush fire has nothing to burn
(32:36):
when it gets to them, so he creates a firebreak
basically by burning the area around him before the fire
gets there, so he controlled it himself. Was that good
the sequel? Sure? Yeah, yeah, both of them are really good.
And I remember that when it came out, it was
like kind of one of the first, uh foreign sort
of indie movies that made a big dust up. I
(32:58):
feel like, you know, they got a lot of attention.
It's good to be crazy. Holds up, does it not?
To check it out again? Uh? So where were we?
We've got our flank fires, we've got our back fires,
were creating larger fire breaks. And then you want to
ignite the big daddy, the head fire. The head fire,
it goes in the direction of the wind. It's it's
(33:22):
up wind, so it blows very quickly downward and spreads quick.
But because you said it last, there's less fuel for
it to burn. It's gonna finish out the fire for
you pretty quick, but it's not gonna go beyond the
areas that have already been burned because you just created
those fire breaks by burning them on the backfire and
the flank fires. So after that happens, your fire should
(33:44):
be done and you can go home, just forget about it.
After you set that head fire, just getting your truck
and go home. No, there's a little bit more. You
gotta stay there with my friend until afterward. And then
they call it mop up duty when you obviously put
out all the flame is completely with water, cut down
any little trees that are on fire, and just extinguish
(34:05):
everything and leave it a big, smoldering, nasty mess that
is actually going to be good for the environment. And
you gotta tell everybody who drives by and shouts at
you for setting a fire that you're doing this because
it's better off in the long run. Say, the end
justifies the means pretty neat. Yeah. Another tip, don't wear
(34:26):
rubber clothing when you're part of a fire setting crew
because it can melt and stick to your skin. I
wonder this is something I didn't look into. I wonder
if the surely they're they're they're just wildfire fighting teams
that are doing this. Right, it's the same people, right,
I would guess. I would guess I would hope, because
(34:49):
the thing is is like, yes, you can, you can
be told how to set a fire. I think that's
probably the easy part, like figuring out how to adjust
when it starts to get out of control or doesn't
do what you think it's gonna do, or the weather
conditions change, or if it jumps that firebreak that you
think is big enough, Right, that's when I think you
need somebody who's like experienced it's gonna be. There should
(35:13):
be the same people doing this who know what they're doing.
I'm sure it is. And if that's what you do,
we want to hear from you, so shout out to us. Well, yeah,
I think we heard from some fire jumpers in the
last episode we did from the wildfire one, and that
was a good one to go back and listen to that.
Everybody do it now. If you want to learn more
about controlled burns, you can take those words in the
(35:35):
search part house to works dot com since they said
search parts time for listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this
mind blown, not my mind listeners, pind Hey, guys, I
was listening to the Landfills episode and the most important
issue you brought up the song Powerhouse by the Raymond
Scott Quintet. Josh had hummed a snippet and Chuck said
(35:58):
it was Leoney Tunes. That was a moment of cognitive
dissonance that rivaled almost anything I've suffered in my forty
one years, because Josh was actually humming a bit of
love Villa or Levia Strangiato by Rush, not some dumb
fifties ban I know that song. So this scot my
attention powerhouses from the thirties, and it was like an
(36:20):
orchestral right on the fifties band. This guy out of
his mind? Well maybe so. I couldn't believe you were
singing a part of one of my favorite songs by
one of my favorite bands and crediting someone else. As
I watched the Raymond Scott video, though, the universe refocused,
like when the candle holder resolves into faces, or the
Canadian flag is irreversibly changed into two angry guys pressing
(36:44):
their foreheads together case closed. Have you ever seen that
the Canadian flag? No, and I've seen when that says
like Jesus loves you or something like that. I never
knew that the Canadian flag, if you look at a
certain way, looks like two guys. Uh. I went and
looked into sort of what about the man on the moon?
You ever seen that? I don't know, But well then
(37:08):
you haven't. Okay, you would know. Yeah, it's it's kind
of like, yeah, I guess I can see that. It's
like the arrow and the FedEx logo, like once you
see it, you can't unsee it unless you really want to,
and then you can't. Okay, I don't see what this
guy is talking about with the Canadian flag. Well, you
have to type in Canadian flag faces and then someone
(37:29):
will have It's a bit of a stretch. If you
ask me, have you ever seen any Sister Wendy stuff. No, Um,
she is a nun who um it just understands art
and art history like no one else on the planet.
And she had like a PBS show for a little while,
and she just she would just point out things in
(37:51):
art that you just never think to look for, like
in the negative space, like the sometimes but also more
like um, like the shadows surrounding a family and being
it makes him look isolate and you're like, oh, yeah,
I didn't really put my finger on that or whatever.
She's just got this really great knack for explaining art
and really interesting way. And I think it's online for free. Alrighty,
(38:12):
sorry about that. Now that's all right, So where are
we Canadian Flag too angry. Guys, thanks for broadening my
understanding of one of the first Rush songs I learned
to play on drums and then I found this on
song facts dot com and it sounds credible. Apparently this
was an issue, and Rush did not give credit to
Scott for using Powerhouse. By the time Raymond Scott's publisher
(38:34):
notified the band's management of the infringement, the statute of
limitations had expired of the challenge, but rusha's management, out
of deference to Mr or Mrs Scott uh and being
the class act that they are, offered a one time
penance payment, feeling it was the ethical thing to do
all involved. We're happy with the resolution and Rush has
no further financial obligations under the story. I know under
(38:56):
the settlement they were required not required to uh accord
Raymond Scott partial songwriting credit on the Beast. So apparently
Powerhouse and rushes Labilla strangeata or similar and they nicked
it from there. Huh. Never knew I didn't either, Uh.
And that is uh. From Ken Wrinker in Colorado Springs.
Thanks a lot, Ken, and he says best to Jerry
(39:17):
in the game. Jerry says thanks. I think yeah, uh, Ken,
that was awesome. I take back that you're out of
your mind. You're interesting instead, how about that? Uh. If
you want to get in touch with us, you can
tweek to us as by Eska Podcast. You can join
us on Instagram as by Eska podcast too. You can
join us on Facebook dot com h slash stuff you
(39:39):
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com
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