About this episode
What does it mean for a scientist to say that they didn’t choose their field of study—their field chose them? Dr. Lisa Micheli is a wildfire resilience expert who traded water science for fire prevention. From managing a 3,200-acre preserve in Northern California and helping it recover from devastating fires to pioneering AI-powered wildfire prediction, Lisa shares crucial insights about living with fire in a warming world.
This episode was filmed before a live studio audience at 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:00)
Well, thank you everyone for being here for the first ever live in-person recording of my podcast, Climate Swings. Some of you might be familiar with climate swings. If not, the idea is based on the concept of Tarzan economics, which views disruption as a swing that companies, institutions and individuals need to make from one vine to the next. So this podcast sort of plays on that idea and it features people reaching for the next vine of sustainability in their professional lives or who have made that swing like my guest today. You can find episodes every other Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts and now also on YouTube, which is why I’m doing the recording here. You can find it at Climate Swings Pod and we are filming right now. Big thanks of course to 9Zero and the whole team for hosting.
We are both 9Zero members and if you’re interested in finding out more, you can inquire with the team. And also shout out to climate education and action platform, Terra.do for helping to promote this podcast as well. So my name is Michael Gold. I am the host and the producer of Climate Swings. I am a climate and sustainability communications consultant, formerly in editorial positions at Reuters and the Economist Group across both the United States and greater China where I lived for over a decade.
Now I work in freelance capacity for clients ranging from media to venture capital to startups to large corporates. And I started this podcast last October to capture both my passion and the passion of others for solving the climate crisis. So my guest today is Lisa Micheli. She is a wildfire resilience expert. I’ll let her do her own self-introduction. So Lisa, go ahead and take it away.
Lisa Micheli (01:44)
Thanks, well, thank you everyone for coming today. I’m excited to have a conversation with you all. And I will just say, how many people have been personally impacted by a wildfire here? Anyone you have?
So smoke and other things have happened. Does anyone have serious loss of home or family? Okay. So just holding a space for that. One of the things talking about wildfires, you really have to think about what I think of as a sort of trauma-informed approach. And even for myself, the trauma I went through by being in the heart of the Northern California wildfires and some wildfires since then.
Just kind of holding a space for that because I’m a scientist and I’m gonna talk some about the science today. I also tend as a shy person to use humor and I don’t want anyone to think I’m making light of any of the seriousness of today’s topic. I will just say I consider myself sort of a wildfire resilience practitioner as someone who’s trained in the hard sciences. I wouldn’t claim to have like a PhD in wildfire science and so.
If any of my colleagues are watching this, they know this. And my foundational expertise and background as a scientist is around water. So I chose to study water and watersheds. So I sometimes say, you I chose water as my field of study, but wildfire chose me, right? And my friend, Jennifer Gray Thompson, who runs a group called After the Fire USA, which is one of the best groups I know in terms of really helping people in survival mode after a wildfire.
We started in the North Bay of California. I’m on her executive board. She’s been serving Maui and now she’s in Los Angeles working with Los Angeles about community to community support around wildfires. So a little bit about my background because I know Michael wants me to talk about sort of the trajectory and when I think about myself as a young person going to college, I have so much compassion for people I know going to college right now because
I was not nearly as serious as the average young person I speak to who’s really thinking about their career when they got there. So I was a math geek in high school. I was lucky that I had women math teachers ensure that I stay on the sort of AP math track. I probably would have dropped out without that support. And so I started my undergraduate education in an accelerated physics program. And the first or second week of school, I was like, my gosh, all I’m gonna be taking is physics.
You know, and my mom’s an English teacher. I guess I understood that a liberal arts education could be good. But I went from sort of straight physics that got into quantum very fast and decided to move into natural sciences and apply physics to the natural world. So a lot of my background is in how water moves, what the hydrologic cycle is, physical oceanography. That’s a lot of what I did as an undergraduate. I found myself my junior year of college on a research vessel, a training vessel in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, it’s probably the most remote part of the world you can be in. And here I was thinking about my mathematical model about circulation, et cetera. And then it kind of struck me like, I can learn all of this science and understand the natural world, but I am more more confused about people. Like people are very unpredictable compared to ocean currents, right? And so I kind of had this revelation that when I got back to school, actually moved out of a pure science and engineering major into an interdisciplinary major that was called history and science. And I took sociology classes and political science and history. I did very poorly in them and I remained completely confused about why people do what they do. But it comes to bear and sort of what a resilient story looks like. I left school and there weren’t really environmental majors. So now as a young person, there might have been an environmental science major, environmental studies that didn’t really exist. But I knew I was interested in sort of physics and science and history and policy and how those things came together. And so when I graduated, I was like, okay, there’s two big threats to humanity, Nuclear armament and the environment. And which one do I want to work on? And I thought, oh, the environment seems more fun.
So I was very lucky right out of school, I was able to join the Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9 office here in San Francisco. I was 21 years old when I started there. I was in the Office of Federal Activities where we negotiate directly with other federal agencies to try to improve the outcomes of their projects. And I also ran a wetlands enforcement program for four states. So I was there about six years. I learned a ton.
I also ran into a problem that we had an administration in board who wanted to terminate my program of protecting wetlands. So they invalidated our manual for identifying wetlands. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will say it. My senior colleague said, so what am I going to do? I can’t do my job. They said, you’re going to write down how bad this policy is going to be for wetlands, and we’re going to leak it to the Environmental Defense Fund.
That was my last assignment. And I said, this is a great time to go to graduate school. So I got to go to UC Berkeley. My mentors at EPA really encouraged me to look at hydrology because I was clearly interested in interconnections. And that’s kind of what I care about is how do these things connect? All these different factors and water ties everything together. But I did go to the Energy and Resources Group, which was one of the leading climate change research units at the time.
I got a master’s in civil engineering, water resources. And when I left, I went into river restoration. So I spent about eight years doing river and watershed restoration. I worked a lot with communities, especially agricultural communities, private businesses, getting them to restore whole links of rivers in the North Bay, including the Napa River. That was fun, but about after about eight years, I mean, there’s sort of a question Michael had about like, what was climate change about? Like I was in a department that specialized in climate change, but I felt like, oh, that’s in the future. Like that’s a computer model. That’s not happening right now. Like we’re having a freshwater crisis, right? So get back to me when the climate thing is happening, cause I got all this other stuff to do. But it was about 2008, 2009, inconvenient truth had come out. It was just undeniable that climate change was happening.
And I had sort of another aha moment where I was like, here I am getting all these people to donate tens of millions of dollars to restore rivers. The restoration design is based on history. How are we going to prepare for the next hundred years? How could someone doing ecological restoration understand the future climate? So as it happened, I got recruited to be the founding director of a field station called the Pepperwood Preserve. It was a partnership between two major philanthropists in the North Bay and the California Academy of Sciences. And I was literally handed the keys to a brand new, beautiful building in 3,200 acres, which is about five square miles. And they said, what do you want to do with this? And it was a flabbergasting moment. But I said, this is going to be a research station measuring the impacts of climate change. We are going to measure water, weather, and biodiversity all in one place because this big experiment is happening and we don’t even know how it’s going to turn out. So I got my boss and the board on board with that and I just completed that service. I was there for 15 years building out the whole project. Pepperwoodpreserve.org. It’s an amazing organization that does research, engages students, but then also brings those results back to the community. So that is where I got involved with Wildfire.
Our reserve was in the heart of the Tubbs fire on October 7th, 8th. And next thing you know, I was the person running a five square mile property that had completely burned to the ground. I was in charge of a staff where people had lost family members in the fire. I had to deal with an entire team that literally had to flee flames and help get the rest of the community to safety.
So that’s how I entered into wildfire work. I’ve been involved with, and we had been involved with taking climate models and projecting fire threats. And basically all our high risk areas are the places that ignited in 2017. So there was a lot of attention on us. And I would say on me because we had been sort of trying to educate the community about this and then we experienced it. So I will say, I feel like I’m in a swing now after that 15 years where, when I came out of that and I joined 9Zero, there’s just so much new kinds of work in the climate space and so many new companies. so I’ve just been really enjoying getting to meet all of you and learn more about what other people are doing. And I’m much more involved now in partnerships between tech, philanthropic investors. Wildfire is one of the things I work on, but I also am very interested in getting more involved with mitigating climate and getting to the source of the problem and bringing the voice of frontline communities who’ve been directly impacted by a climate disaster to bear on the conversation we’re gonna have, which I think about missions, this is gonna be a private sector effort, right? So I’m really excited because working with communities in the grassroots is now gonna be, I guess when I was thinking about this podcast, resilience is a very local thing, whereas I think we’ve been thinking about curbing climate change is a very global thing, but I think those are gonna meet resilience. So for me resilience is both adapting to the changes but then reducing the changes that are to come.
Michael Gold (12:03)
Thank you. I have to break the fourth wall for a second. Would you mind moving your hair just from the mic in case it picks up any noise from can have loud hair. Live recordings, everyone. Yeah. Well, thank you for that very thorough introduction. So I guess I’d like to start by just acknowledging that we’re here in California. You’ve based your entire career, has been here in California. California has been lauded for its scenic beauty, its Mediterranean climate, it’s drawn people for decades, for centuries to come here. When you started your career and you were focused on water, what was the discussion of climate kind of as a practice or sort of as a field? it, because I mean, at the time, probably the science was becoming more more established, but it was not part of the mainstream zeitgeist by any stretch of the imagination.
Lisa Micheli (12:59)
I mean, I would say when I started, it was barely a field. That’s how old I am. I mean, there certainly were climate scientists. And again, at UC Berkeley, we were sort of at the cutting edge. And Peter Glick, who founded the Pacific Institute, had just done his PhD on what the water supply of California was going to look like under climate change. But that was really early stuff. And I don’t think there was like the climate. I think it was still like a topic of projecting change, understanding the mechanisms of change. And I mean, the climate is now in everything.
Michael Gold (13:34)
Was it kind of like a resource to resource, field to field sort of discussion? Because you talked about obviously water is probably one of the, has been, throughout the climate fields, the existence been one of the biggest fields of impact for climate.
Lisa Micheli (13:51)
I’ll just tell you, it felt like a village of people. I mean, I got a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to try to evaluate what the impacts of climate change were going to be on the natural areas they protected in this area. And there were like 15 people to talk to about that at that time. So it was really such a micro specialty that you had to go find someone who was actually thinking futuristically about the problem.
And they didn’t necessarily know each other, which was the fun part of like bringing in someone who works on weather and fog and introducing them to a vegetation ecologist. So this was very early days. And then I think there became sort of climate adaptation specialists that I worked with. And this is, know, the County of Sonoma founded the Regional Climate Protection Authority, one of the first of its kind. We founded a North Bay adaptation project, first in California, the county scale. So it was really like groundbreaking efforts. And if you were working in climate at that time, like before the inconvenient truth, you felt like you were there by yourself. You’re sort of a lone voice in the wind. And that’s why it’s so interesting now the professionalization, particularly on adaptation, there’s an association of adaptation practitioners now. And there’s just been a lot of progress where we’re starting to mainstream those roles. Yes, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Michael Gold (15:24)
No, yeah. I mean, I guess the idea of, I’m sort of glomming onto the idea of a regional climate protection authority, given that climate change is obviously a global problem and you have people here trying to work on global solutions, scalable solutions, and we see with wind and solar and renewable energy that these solutions can scale. But how do you think that the idea of a regional climate protection sort of can meet the moment given that it’s such a global problem?
Lisa Micheli (15:54)
Well, and it’s been a struggle. So I’ll just say I love the county of Sonoma. Everyone there is amazing. But I think it’s a great example. They founded this regional climate protection authority, which was supposed to connect the cities and the county into a unified strategy. And it’s actually in the transportation department. So it really started with reducing vehicle miles traveled and having a climate action plan, which ended up being challenged legally by a quote unquote environmental attorney. So there were big setbacks in even trying to set emission reduction goals. And then they partnered with us to start with a vulnerability assessment, right? So it was one of the first places that you had a very fine scale. know, the IPCC models are very coarse. So we were downscaling those to the scale of the county and being able to tell that authority, you know, what’s vulnerable where. But then the challenge is, how do you respond to that? What do you do? You’ve got private property, you’ve got public property, the county doesn’t have all this jurisdiction.
And the RCPA itself has kind of splintered into different groups because again, the jurisdiction started saying, well, wait a second, we don’t want to be part of a multi-jurisdictional effort. We want to be more standalone. but it really, when it comes to resilience, which I know is our main theme, it is all about hyper-local. It actually gets down to the scale of your neighborhood. You know, your county is responsible for a lot of things that are going to affect you in a climate disaster, like your water supply, your fire protection, even if it’s a partnership with Cal Fire, land use, which is really one of the big elephants in the room around wildfire resilience. The counties really influence those things, not the federal government and hardly the state government. But then it comes down to that when the fire comes, it’s your neighborhood that needs to respond. Your neighborhood needs to have built that capacity. It’s going to be so hyper local because you don’t necessarily have first responders coming. You have to have your plan. You have to know how to support your neighbors. So it gets hyper local very fast. that we know in Sonoma County after the fires, we have this whole block captain system and those block captains are the head of their blocks. And that is the most effective way to have real resilience.
Michael Gold (18:07)
So let’s go back a little bit again to sort of the earlier stages of your career and you discussed kind of how wildfire like basically found you. Can you just give a little bit more color about that? was there kind of like an aha moment? I you described, I think it was the Tubbs fire, right? Who destroyed, you know, huge, most of what you were working on at the time, but that was, you know, 2017. So I’m curious, you know, what’s kind of, what was kind of the inception point of that?
Lisa Micheli (18:36)
Really, it was this collective that the Moore Foundation funded where we wanted to look at climate threats. And because we’re hydrologists or I’m a hydrologist, we started with the hydrologic cycle. And so we were able to predict parts of the landscape that would dry out. And then we worked with the fire ecologists to say, well, how would you rank that in terms of fire hazard? So you end up with this map of how warming temperatures are going to dry out the soil and then how that will increase your flammability. So I’m not sure how many of you know the Tubbs Fire area in Santa Rosa, kind of between Calistoga and Santa Rosa. And our property was right in the heart of what we then determined was a fire corridor, because that corridor had actually burnt in 1965, which we were well aware of through our scientific studies. It also burned in 1923, and it also burnt in the 1870s, almost the same footprint because it really captures those Santa Ana winds. But in 1965, the fire started in Calistoga and it took six days to get to Santa Rosa. In 2017, it took six hours. And this is one of the first big mega fires, like no one had ever seen anything happen. you I knew all the fire responders and our fire chief talked about driving down from Lake County and watching this fire move.
And he had to make the call like, are not fighting this fire. We are getting people out. And it was 1130 at night. That’s why my staff played such a pivotal role because they literally had to call people and wake them up and take them out. And this is the interesting thing. Like scientifically, we knew we were in a fire prone zone. Scientifically, we knew the whole ecology and landscape had been shaped by fire. Our theory about the stewardship and ecological challenges of our property was actually the interruption of indigenous stewardship. And I think there’s been a lot of coverage on this lately, but the data shows and oral history shows that the indigenous people to our area probably would have been burning every piece of the landscape at least once every 10 years. And by suppressing that fire, we had a huge buildup of fuels, particularly Douglas fir moving into parts of the landscape where it didn’t naturally, didn’t occur because natural in our region includes indigenous people for at least 14,000 years. So there was this shift in the density of the fuel and then this drought really was worse than almost anything we’d experienced before. And I will have to say, I can’t say that the winds are worse because of climate change. I think that’s very debatable at this point because there have been high wind events. But that combination of the high winds having an electrical system that’s basically threaded and laced through the fuels and having 17 ignitions happen simultaneously in our area just created this mega fire situation. even our own team was, you’re just shocked. It’s awesome. You cannot, it was the unthinkable. So even though rationally we knew it could happen when it did happen, we’re just as impacted as everyone else.
Michael Gold (21:58)
Have you been personally threatened by wildfire?
Lisa Micheli (22:02)
My home was not on the property. So I did not personally get impacted. I was the person who ended up on the phone with the insurance company first thing in the morning after we confirmed that everyone was alive. But when you are in a community with that impact and I call it the smoke bubble, it was actually very surreal because we were literally in this dense smoke bubble that hadn’t moved to San Francisco and, but you leave there, and I think that’s how Los Angeles is right now. You can go to another part of the Bay Area, and life seems to be going on normal. And for me, I had to go to the Cal Academy of Sciences one night, and it was just so strange, like leaving. It’s like a bomb zone when you’re in there. know, everyone’s masked up. It’s totally dangerous for your health. Everyone was helping each other with all the different parts of their crises and then you step into like, oh, downtown San Francisco is cool and foggy. So there’s this surreal back and forth. So certainly it impacted me. And I have to say we burnt again in 2019 during the Kincade fire. And as a leader of an organization, my response was very different because after the first fire, was very like command and control. Everybody go home. I’m getting on the phone with everyone. We’re going to fix this.
And my team got back and said, you know, we really just need you to treat us as people right now. Like we just really want to see each other and have personal time. And that is what we did after the 2019 fire hit us, which I will just say the difference between the two fires was really marked partly because of how our community responded. And because of our partnership with Cal Fire, I had six buildings that were getting rebuilt that we had lost in the 2017 fire. And I did wake up and go, if my construction sites are burnt down today when I get to work, it’s going to be a pretty bad day. But Cal Fire had camped out at our property. We had installed the first of four fire cameras that became a network for all of Northern California. The whole community was watching our cameras. Cal Fire was sleeping in my building and they were able to stop that fire partly because we had done a lot of fuels reductions to stop it from getting into Santa Rosa. So it was sort of the evolution of my relationship fires on that property.
Michael Gold (24:22)
Yeah. So you discussed some of the characteristics of those fires moving more quickly, the drought was worse, where obviously, you the winds are kind of up for debate, probably, you know, for the foreseeable future. But how much can you confidently ascribe climate impact to the intensification of wildfires in this region at least, right? I mean, it’s a global problem.
And how is that, and how also how has that thinking evolved over time with the maturation of climate science and the spread of climate awareness?
Lisa Micheli (24:57)
Well, the interdisciplinary research group that I chaired, we started using pepperwood to look at the water cycle. So I’m coming back to water again. But we could show that we have been incrementally creating more arid conditions, even just the period of the last 20 years. And we can measure that impact. And that is, to me, the biggest climate influence on the fire threat is that these droughts are more intense. The plants are more stressed.
And they’re just so much more flammable than anyone can imagine. And so I just, if you want to take one science factoid home, people always think, well, when it’s hot, we might be at risk of a fire. We’re having fires in the winter now. It’s when it’s dry. And the heat is one of the factors that accelerates the drying out of these soils. But they’re clear, and that was sort of the breakthrough of our research because there could be a lot more rain or a lot less rain in our future, but everywhere, every way we ran that model, you were still getting drier conditions at the end of the season. So the dehydration of the landscape and just the incredible flammability, because these plants are fire loving, you know, they are going to survive it. But, you know, they are a great vehicle for burning, they kind of want to burn, especially our chaparral species. So, you know, when you watch what happened in Los Angeles, you’re seeing that phenomenon of just such a flammable landscape.
And then the other big piece on the scientific model, I’m looking at Russell Hamilton here, whose organization Thornton Family Foundations helped us incubate new ways of modeling fire hazards because our fire hazard models were so out of date and didn’t take this into account. The other thing is that old fire hazard models considered anything urban not to be flammable. So you have a hazard reading in the trees, but you don’t take into account the flammability of your structures. And I’ve heard Cal Fire chiefs say, people think we’re protecting the trees from the houses. We’re protecting the, sorry, people think we’re protecting the houses from the trees, but we’re really protecting the trees from the houses. Because the houses are very dense fuel, they burn way hotter than a forest, and then they become this big pack of embers that blow and help ignite things.
So that’s a big adjustment that’s having to happen in the science and in the planning world is starting to realize this false sense of security like, on the map it’s gray, it’s urban, it doesn’t burn. Well, if you get the things going, it’s just can be just unbelievable.
Michael Gold (27:36)
Yeah. And from the social perspective, the idea that, I mean, no one really disputes the idea that fires have gotten worse, they’ve impacted more people, the damages keep mounting, et cetera, et cetera. But how do you see the climate discussion weaving its way through? mean, presumably here in the Bay Area, people are pretty, pretty awake to that idea. But how have you seen that evolution particularly over—
Lisa Micheli (28:03)
I, I try to constantly, in my own mind and for others, help people realize that the wildfire crisis is a climate crisis, for the reasons I just explained. And it is interesting in the news. They’re really emphasizing, I think, that the climate exacerbated it. But once a wildfire happens, that is really what people fixate on. And in some ways, it can unify because climate is still politically divisive.
I work a lot in rural communities where I would just talk about extreme weather. I never use the word climate. And if you talk to people about wildfire, you can unify people across partisan boundaries. So I’m not averse to it, but in my own mind, it really is part of climate adaptation and adapting to a warmer world.
Michael Gold (28:46)
Can you talk a little bit more about how you talk to rural communities about that? Because they’re at the front lines of this, but oftentimes their thinking might be quite different than people sitting here in this room.
Lisa Micheli (28:58)
Well, I would say in rural communities, people have quite a bit of experience with wildfire. They’ll tell you different things. Where I live, it really does feel like you’re in the way back machine in terms of the people who live in these very rural places and small cabins don’t really want to join the 21st century.
When you get to those rural areas, there’s actually an economic challenge where people don’t even have the resources because it’s so overwhelming if you live in the middle of the forest and you’re told that you’re supposed to thin it or you’re supposed to clear your defensible space. I mean, those are big ticket items. So a lot of the listening sessions I participated in ended up in trying to get incentive programs, financial incentive programs that match people in disadvantaged communities with a forester to develop a plan. I mean, that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and then to cover 50 percent of the application.
But I think the other thing is back to the people part is tricky because there are some people who are very knowledgeable in leading their communities around this field or their neighborhood or their block. And there’s other people, especially when you’re between fires, which is what’s happening for us right now. Like our last big one I think was 21. And you forget. People have other priorities mount up, et cetera.
So it’s like a great question. It’s not rocket science, what you need to do to make your home more resilient. It’s just like one of those house projects you haven’t gotten around to yet. That’s why it’s so shocking when you look at somewhere like Los Angeles, you see these very affluent communities that didn’t do any defensible space clearing and califiers trying to get in there and chop down the bushes around their house right before the fire’s coming. You’re going, what’s wrong with this picture?
I have friends there and I have friends who live in those communities and they’re like, well, I just thought someone took care of it. There’s this whole idea like someone else is going to take care of that for me or why would they let me build a house that wasn’t safe? It’s like, it’s so much on you and on your own personal responsibility.
Michael Gold (31:01)
Yeah. And you discussed how, you know, pre-colonial times natives here would regularly see just sort of like entire swaths of, and, you know, they obviously didn’t really have the capacity to fight it. They would, I mean, it would just kind of burn through the landscape. And that’s, that’s not really an option now, given that you have so much developed land, but what are the kind of like learnings or like, how can we strike a balance between just sort of like letting fire burn? mean, you see a lot of controlled burns, but are they doing anything, you know, except making local people angry?
Lisa Micheli (31:32)
Well, at Pepperwood, we were one of the first to be reintroducing prescribed fire even before these fire seasons. And one of the great joys of working there is we had a Native Advisory Council who we worked with. So you’re right. I went into the woods with the chair of our local council whose people have been on that land time memorial, and the forest looked fine to me. And he was like, this is a disaster.
I’m like, well, what do you mean? He goes, look how much stuff is piled up on the ground. Look at all these dead branches. He’s like, this is a nightmare. So there’s this process of sort of resetting the landscape. And this is why it’s such an important opportunity after a fire comes through. At Pepperwood, we’re now doing 100 acre scale prescribed fire with our council. So sometimes it is a cultural fire. And the hope is that if you got the fuels, I mean, at Pepperwood, had 1,000 trees per acre, we think is 10 times as many as European contact.
So you can reintroduce fire. You have to be very careful about it. You’re right. You can’t just light a landscape that’s been neglected. But you can start restoring this work. And indigenous people across California are stepping into leadership roles in that. Near the border with Oregon is the strongest. Almost all native prescribed fire crews. And that is expanding to this area as well. So I would say there’s opportunities, but it’s lot trickier. But the idea is, especially after a fire, if you can get on it and get it to a more reasonable amount of fuel, you could probably safely burn. Because a cultural burn that’s done properly, the flames are only this big. It’s not this crazy mega fire that we’re looking at. And then I will just also say for context across that culture, I learned from my native friends, there is no native word in Northern California for drought. That is not a word.
Michael Gold (32:57)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Micheli (33:25)
So that’s why you really want to look at the whole landscape and think about the resilience of that landscape, water, fire, vegetation as a whole.
Michael Gold (33:34)
Yeah. And wildfires obviously not just a California problem. It is increasingly a problem around the world. You’ve seen mega fires in Europe and Australia and many other places. What are some of the global lessons that people, the kind of back and forth that you’ve experienced with some of your counterparts in other parts of the world?
Lisa Micheli (33:54)
Yeah, well I was lucky enough to get to go on a global Fulbright fellowship to Australia and Chile and Catalonia, all of which saw really horrible fires after I visited. I don’t think I was the reason why. But everyone’s in different stages. Like in Australia, prescribed fire is an industrial activity that the government does for you. They have no indigenous involvement hardly at all.
But it’s a very industrial thing and the ecologists are looking at it, but they’re also seeing it as a water benefit. Because when you clear out these extra trees, you have more water in the soil. So it is a water condition. Yeah, you have less straws taking the, and they are in a very dire water situation. In Catalonia, the landscape in Europe is so much more manicured.
Michael Gold (34:35)
Trees don’t suck up as much.
Lisa Micheli (34:48)
What worries me sometimes is I hear a lot about tree planting, right? Because we’re going to fight climate change by planting all these trees. I’m like, wait a second, hold your horses. Think about where is the right place to do that. And then Chile, similarly, they didn’t have fire. They’re not aware that there was prescribed fire history with the Mapuche people. But they just experienced these catastrophic fires about three years ago that just kind of woke them up.
Michael Gold (34:59)
Yeah.
Lisa Micheli (35:16)
And that’s a drought signal. They had a very intense drought. So again, one take home drought and fire. That’s really the combined problem we’re facing.
Michael Gold (35:26)
Yeah. And you have, discussed during your introduction about your sort of renewed focus on root causes, right? Is that kind of root causes in terms of like pure climate mitigation, just like we need to go whole hard and in renewables and is that kind of where your focus is now or like what do you, what exactly do you mean by root causes? Cause you come from a sort of a different perspective than a lot of other climate mitigation experts.
Lisa Micheli (35:49)
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, right? And so really, if you’re going to invest in some large scale effort, part of what I like to bring in is like, okay, you want to reduce your fire hazards, but let’s think about a solution that can also capture carbon. Like what is the most valuable way to capture carbon? Our wildfire smoke has thrown off all of our targets for wildfire emissions. It about 50 % the whole budget last year.
There’s a direct effect there. Then the multiple benefits of protecting our water supply, you know, et cetera. But I am interested, like I’m involved in a direct carbon capture with the Thornton Foundations right now in the marine world, which is kind of nice, bringing me back to oceans. And so I find right now my skill set is having those listening conversations and helping to build partnerships. And that could be both on the sort of adaptation resilience side and on some of these direct carbon removal projects as well. Because you always have to look at all the pieces in terms of the ecosystem and the other physical and biological effects.
Michael Gold (36:57)
Right. And we’re in a very tech enabled time and a very tech enabled place. And a lot of people here are working on next generation technologies and all sort of facets of the climate conundrum. And you’ve discussed using, you know, sort of trying to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to deal with this. Do you divide that kind of between the adaptation, resilience and mitigation? Like, how do you see technology and where the best application spots for it are?
Lisa Micheli (37:27)
All part of a resilience strategy. I guess that’s what I’m voting for is like in my own work as well, integrating it. AI has been incredible. I am not an AI expert, but when we started doing these fine scaled climate models that you really need to make decisions at a micro scale, at time steps you can use, the first thing we had was our data was too big. And my modeling partners were at the US Geological Survey. They did not have a server big enough for us to…run our models and store our models, did not have partners in the state of California who could house the data. So coming up against that is like the ultimate limit of the usability of the data. That’s what’s exciting me about partnerships with like big tech partners who for them it’s like snap, but what do want? Right? What’s the relevancy?
Michael Gold (38:13)
Can you talk about any specific partnerships that you’ve worked on or that you’re spearheading?
Lisa Micheli (38:17)
Well, I’ll say for a large tech company that everyone knows in the Bay Area, I’m working on an AI wildfire model. And the model basically proposes to ingest all the relevant data today. So everything’s updated. Now, I mean, CAL FIRE updates their hazard models about every five to 10 years, right? Like we’re lucky to get new forest maps every 10 years. That’s been sort of the cycle. They’re ingesting all the data about the forest and the weather and the soils daily and be able to project the next 12 months. The models I worked on had 30-year time stamps out for—
Michael Gold (38:52)
How are they getting this data? Like, where is this coming from?
Lisa Micheli (38:55)
I know things like
Michael Gold (38:58)
I mean, is it sensors? It?
Lisa Micheli (38:59)
They’re using…is it can you broad brush it? I mean, so there’s sensor networks that provide a certain amount of data, but a lot of this data is from remote sensing, which is actually one of my big interests and passions. So satellites, but also airborne flights. So for high resolution data, it’s more sensors on airplanes that give us sample sets that we then train the satellite data. And then a lot of it’s models when it comes to weather, they’re modeling something.
And that’s why the sensors are so important because they’re getting this sort of higher view. All these different, and imagery, right? So planet, you might know Planet Labs here in San Francisco. They now have daily imagery that’s getting calibrated. So a place like Pepperwood where we had, I don’t know, we had 26 multi-depth soil moisture probes and weather stations. So we had really good data about the whole landscape. NASA uses that as a calibration validation site for their new sensors that are trying to detect wildfire hazard. So, you know, they’re sucking up all this data, a lot of its public data, some of its proprietary data, which is new for me. I worked totally in open source historically, and I have partners who are in open source. But then some of these companies that are big value adds some of their data is proprietary. And the other big switch to make as someone who learned physical, what we call physics based modeling, is that those are very deterministic models. There’s causality in it. And the AI models are mainly pattern recognition. However, I would argue there’s still an assumption about causality because they’re collecting the data that are the fire drivers, right? The vegetation, the moisture, the weather. So it’s fascinating. for me, there’s a cross-generational conversation to have too about how do I even explain this to someone? And they’re like, well, you we’re, we, you know, everyone knows us, we do great stuff. I’m like, yeah, well, I’m gonna go into Cal Fire and they’re gonna wanna know every single parameter, where it came from, what it means and how you’re calculating it. So it’s a very fun conversation, sort of old school and new school.
Michael Gold (41:08)
Yeah, and for the private sector, is there a business model behind it? Is it just a philanthropic project? What is their interest in that?
Lisa Micheli (41:16)
Well, so that’s the other big change coming out of my gopher hole at Pepperwood is, know, financial companies are all over getting this climate risk data. I mean, if you’re an insurance company, if you’re a reinsurance company, if you’re Bloomberg, I mean, one of the companies I’m on the advisory board of is funded by Bloomberg to have on their portal, every company in the world and their likelihood of being impacted by a climate disaster and what fraction of their assets will be impacted.
So that actually in this climate, social, cultural, I mean, it kind of gives me hope because they’re taking it seriously. And not only are they looking to experts or services to provide that data through AI, but they have their own climate risk shops in-house. And I’ve met absolutely brilliant young climate scientists who work inside the banking industry, inside real estate, et cetera, to bring that to bear. You know, them plus the military, they’re taking it very seriously, so I don’t see it going away. I don’t see it becoming less important.
Michael Gold (42:19)
Yeah, yeah. mean, even as we are facing challenges from a messaging perspective, right, and kind of an optics perspective with the change in administration, of course, like this is a real problem.
Lisa Micheli (42:32)
There are market forces at work. I think there’s the urge to also benefit humanity and have some philanthropic benefits, but I think the leadership is coming from these companies that see a real market opportunity. And it’s an interesting landscape.
Michael Gold (42:48)
So the LA wildfires probably occupied a greater media share than probably any in American history, perhaps. I it was just nonstop. mean, the devastation was really, I mean, I just observing it from here. Seemed terrible. Are there lessons to be learned from that experience that you think can apply here, can apply globally? Is it kind of too soon to tell because things, you know, the situation is still fairly volatile.
Lisa Micheli (43:19)
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I have to say is just the visibility of Los Angeles, right? We’re talking about a global metropolis that seems, I mean, that’s what I always strike me as like, we think we’re so immune from risks because of our technology. And the more deep you get into a city, the more that’s the case. And I also remember in 2015, Lake County got hit almost as hard as LA. They’re just not as famous and they don’t have as valuable properties. But of course, LA is in the spotlight.
And this idea that these cities are invincible. And one of the foundational things I would say is like, let’s take infrastructure seriously. This is what shocks me about public policy and even voters like these cities were all built out right after World War II and this stuff hasn’t been replaced. So I know there’s a lot of finger pointing about leadership failures. That to me is the worst case scenario that you get to that level. You got to say what.
What was the problem we really had with our water system? What was the problem we really had in setting code, have fire safe structures? Like this will be the big wake up call. But like I said, it’s so interesting when it doesn’t happen to you, it’s very far out of sight and mind. I think that like the community of San Rosa actually has a lot to share with the communities in Los Angeles. It will be a grassroots rebuild.
Political people are gonna come and go, but how do you start getting people really thinking about long-term resilience and investments when we’re such a short-term rewards kind of culture at this point?
Michael Gold (44:55)
Do think the climate mitigation question is that threaded through these discussions now or like is it too sensitive? What do you think about that?
Lisa Micheli (45:04)
I think it’s threaded through. mean, most of the mainstream coverage I’m seeing has been really focusing on the climate dimensions of that particular crisis and why it caught everyone off guard.
Michael Gold (45:14)
Well, I do remember watching the Live Aid concert and people were expressing solidarity, celebrities, right? But I didn’t hear really much of anything about it, right? It’s sort of this mass audience question. still pretty sensitive in a lot of ways.
Lisa Micheli (45:28)
It’s still pretty complicated. I mean, I gave you guys a talk about the connections, right? But that’s a hard thing to explain at a Live Aid concert. Yeah. Right? Yeah, definitely. And who’s going to have the bandwidth to really work on this? And it’s going to be the community leaders working in their neighborhoods advocating for a higher standard. It’s got to come from the grassroots.
Michael Gold (45:49)
Yeah, so I’ll open it up to the audience in just a minute, but I have a couple of just sort of questions about you and your climate motivations, I guess, for lack of better term. Do you consider yourself a climate practitioner? And what do you think of that idea of being a climate practitioner? Did you realize one day, I’m actually like, you know, working in climate?
Lisa Micheli (46:12)
Yeah, definitely. think when I got that charge of doing climate projections, again, in grad school, was like, get back to me when that’s happening. And then it really hit me, like, 08, 09, like, it’s happening. It’s really happening. Now I can’t ignore that. And it’s got to become central to my work. And that’s why it was so central to the mission of Pepperwood. It is funny because as I joked at the beginning, I I tell people I’m a climate scientist.
But I also meet other climate scientists who are like, well, really I’m a hydrologist. really? I’m a hydrologist too. So there’s a lot of pieces of being climate scientist besides just modeling climatologies. now that there’s sort of, know, Tom Steyer was here releasing his book talking about climate people, you know, and I guess this is an organization of climate people. And I think that’s great. And I think we are in danger of isolating ourselves as well. So I, you know, it’s sort of like when I’m with climate people, I’m a climate person.
But if I’m going to a rural community for the first time, that’s where the resilience term really helps. Like I’m here to think about your long-term resilience as a community, as people, your resilience as people, not just the nature’s
Michael Gold (47:22)
How do you think the people here working on, you know, varied solutions can sort of adopt those lessons to not be so in the bubble?
Lisa Micheli (47:31)
You know, I think it’s good to have your bubble because that’s where you recharge. But I think these conversations about how we can mainstream these products or these tools or these practices, that’s what excites me. listening to your podcast, too, I think that comes up again and again. Like, I don’t really think there should be a separate climate department. I think planning and operations people should be just building what we know about the future. And it’s just good planning to be taking climate into account.
And it’s good planning to try to keep from exacerbating the situations we’re facing. I mean, I definitely, you know, am motivated by a hope for humanity. I actually feel like the planet will be just fine. I mean, I’m sorry we’re taking down so many species with us, but it’s our choice. This is the fork in the road where we have a choice as a species about how we want to be on this planet and whether we’re just going to be so stubbornly in our minds thinking that we’re immune, you know, from the laws of nature.
Michael Gold (48:32)
Yeah, I mean, you said you just said you have a sense of optimism, but how do you maintain that when you’re seeing the direct line of work that you’re in seems to just be kind of like greater destruction, worse impacts, and this cycle just seems to keep repeating?
Lisa Micheli (48:49)
Really, it’s young people, like young people today. At Pepperwood, we had really comprehensive education programs from little kids coming in the door to summer camp for teens to junior college students who were transferring to Berkeley. And they inspire me because they come in with so much awareness. Coming here to 9Zero inspires me because there’s so much enthusiasm, optimism. It’s a very positive community. And that’s why I think it is great to claim that we’re climate people.
But just realize that we’ll recognize that and when you go out into the world, you may need to translate a little bit.
Michael Gold (49:26)
So the idea of working with young people directly relates to the idea of mentoring and helping raise up the next generation. What was your experience with that, with mentoring? Well, I guess being mentored, right? And then how have you paid that forward to?
Lisa Micheli (49:38)
Being a, being a mentor. Well, really at the Environmental Protection Agency, came in, I wasn’t even from California, I’m from Boston. So I come there and next thing you know, I’ve got all this work to do. it really was very senior people who wanted to see me succeed. And they wanted to pass on what they knew about how to do the work and the reality and helping me figure out how to get this stuff done when it’s like raining on you. So I’m really, really grateful to the senior scientists that worked with the EPA. I mentioned an oceanography research vessel.
Susan Humphries who was the captain of that vessel was just a huge role model to me. She turned me on to earth science. She made it so exciting She was like out there on the deck in the rain helping us collect our samples. I mean just her enthusiasm is Endless and she’s the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She now runs the Alvin program So and oceanography has a lot of powerful women in it like Sylvia Earl and others who kept me going.
And now I love passing that along. I mean, just spent yesterday morning on the phone with a gal who, you know, it’s the classic situation where I meet the parents and the parents are like, my daughter majored in wildlife biology and I think she’s never gonna get a job or she wants to be a climate person, but it doesn’t seem, you know, so I love talking to younger people about what are you interested in? What’s your skillset? What can you really do that someone would pay you for? And then where are there opportunities for you to make a decent living doing this work? Because there are those opportunities. There’s a lot of them that your parents didn’t know about yet.
Michael Gold (51:12)
Yeah.
And obviously your space and the broader climate space has changed so much over the course of your career with new science and just all different kinds of facets. What are a couple of things that maybe looking back you would have wanted to know or maybe would tell yourself the younger you working in the space?
Lisa Micheli (51:32)
I don’t really have regrets like that. I mean, can tell you things I regretted. When I went to graduate school, I wanted to learn all this new software, and I actually developed a repetitive strain injury, so I couldn’t do it myself. And I was trying to get away from becoming a manager in the government. Next thing I knew, was managing this team. But part of what I’ve learned is we have to work as a team. So it’s OK that I don’t know how to do the programming, because I know some other stuff.
And we’re only going to solve these problems by bringing our skill sets together. And we shouldn’t all try to do everything. And that’s where I love encouraging young people, follow your passion. You’re going to be successful if you love what you do. And you’re not going to know what you love until you try some things out. And it’s OK if it doesn’t work out. Because I feel like young people have this pressure. They’ve to figure it out, chart this path, make sure their tuition is going to be paid off.
Much more stressful, that passion piece is what really carries you through.
Michael Gold (52:34)
Yeah. And just kind of finally, if you could just think about your individual contribution toward fighting climate change, toward the causes you care about, toward resilience, what would you say if you could just sum up your of, know, putative epitaph in a sentence or two?
Lisa Micheli (52:52)
I’m going to crib it from my advisor, but it is that mother nature will bat last. That’s it. we’re all living, nature is our home. These rules apply to all of us. We think we can get around it. We think we can skirt it, but she’s going to bat last. So what team, whose team do you want to be on?
Michael Gold (53:14)
Great, well I think that’s a wonderful place to wrap this part of the discussion. Lisa Micheli, thank you so much. Can everybody thank Lisa?
All right, so let’s open it up to questions. I’ll call on people. I’ll repeat it so it’s picked up by our mics here. Yes,
Lisa Micheli (53:33)
So I’ve got two different.
Michael Gold (53:36)
Let’s do one at a time so I can repeat it.
Guest (53:39)
One is the video I saw from Altadena showed a huge, I guess, southern Edison relay tower explode. And probably, I mean, I don’t know if it amplified the destruction, but it stands to reason that it probably did.
What can we locally do to our utility companies, with our utility companies, to encourage them to protect themselves and protect us?
Michael Gold (54:17)
So the question is, what can we do with, or how can we urge or convince, et cetera, local utilities to be better actors and protect them and protect us when it comes to wildfire.
Lisa Micheli (54:31)
I mean, that’s a great question. It kind of comes back to that theme I had about infrastructure, that it’s a very boring topic, but it’s really important. And you do have a say. All of those facilities go through public review, public process, et cetera. It can be very frustrating. mean, they still replaced all of our poles with wooden poles, right? Because that is actually the most cost effective, right?
But they also had a program, I’ll say PG&E, where they reached out to Pepperwood and they said, we’re looking for opportunities where creating a microgrid is cheaper than undergrounding the wires. Because that’s always one of the first questions everyone has, why aren’t the wires underground? That is really expensive, and they break in a place that’s tectonically active. So.
And I had hoped, this is classic, I had hoped that we could get our whole campus on a microgrid after the fire. And it looked like we could, except for that, that branch of PG &E didn’t talk to the other branch of PG &E. So they had put some of the wires underground because we were a priority, but there still was enough of a cost benefit ratio that the end of our wired system, the Pepperwood, we were able to take down the wires and build a microgrid. But then I couldn’t believe it, they came at this is a long. this took two years, but they showed up and they said, well, here it is. It’s a propane tank surrounded by razor wire connected to a generator. And I was like, are you guys kidding me? Now, of course these people, there’s many people who work there and they’re like the most senior people. So I said, well, don’t you think we should try to make it renewable? Like, and they were like, renewable, renewable. And I was like, yeah, solar panels on a battery. And they’re like, oh, okay. And the big issue with the utility was—they said, well, then you’re going to have to sign, our legal department says you’re going to have to sign a release that it’s okay if your service is interrupted because we can’t guarantee this is going to work during cloudy weather. And I was like, our service is already interrupted. We’re like in the middle of nowhere and this is a cabin. So anyway, we ended up doing a demonstration project of retrofitting. This is a bunk house where our researchers stay and where we house a lot of our data capture equipment for our remote sensing stuff.
So, you know, we negotiated it, I got Sonoma Clean Power involved, because I called my friend there who’s a clean power energy guy and I said, I need someone who speaks engineer to talk to these engineers. Like, can you just walk them through how to make this a renewable project? So then when we opened it, had a big PG &E, had a big party. Apparently, it’s the first utility owned renewable microgrid in California, at least. We finished it like two years ago. wow. Yeah.
Michael Gold (57:11)
What’s this again?
Lisa Micheli (57:16)
You know, so that’s the asking questions part, right? Like that’s like push back on your utility, try to be creative. Believe it or not, they might be open to solutions. Like there is invested in, mean, seriously with a liability that PG &E experienced, like there is invested in coming up with solutions as you are. And so that’s just an example. But you you have to find out what the projects are. There are hearings you can go. And I, you know, I don’t know what they’re gonna do.
But definitely a lot of the infrastructure is not great for fires and may even be a source of ignitions, right, when those wires snap. The second question is a different subject, but is the Arctic tundra always burning? Is that a perpetual fire near the Arctic Circle in northern Canada?
Michael Gold (57:54)
Yeah, go ahead.
So the question is, is the Arctic tundra always burnt?
Lisa Micheli (58:12)
Always burning, you mean now. My understanding, this is not my area of expertise, I will just say my understanding is they are burning very slowly, pretty much continuously, but I’m not sure. But I can tell you our property, just our property, the underground fires lasted six weeks. So in the wake of the fire, we were on fire, really with flames for about two weeks, because the big fire comes through the wind driven fire. And then there was this ground driven fire, which was much more like a cultural fire, lower flames. They’re not gonna stop that fire. It’s not hurting our property. was open woodland, so they just let it burn through. But then the stumps burned. And if you wanna see, it’s one of those oddly gorgeous things is that the stumps of the trees burn out and leave this like bas-relief sculpture in the soil where the tree once was. And those burned for months. And we had dangerous tree situations for probably until this last winter storm. So for about five years you have to secure access to those areas because there are still trees coming down in the wake of the fires. And isn’t there methane being released from the From the tundra the fires, anything that removes the ice from the tundra is going to release methane that’s stored below ground in the organic rich soils.
Michael Gold (59:38)
Any other questions? Give people a chance. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you very much for your time. You talk a lot about the mapping, about imaging, about censoring, you know, all these fires. But at the same time, I didn’t hear about the kind of measures. How do people…
Lisa Micheli (59:45)
Thank you.
Michael Gold (1:00:05)
Prevent or fight the fire, the wildfires. So it looks like, you know, how much the humanity remembers itself. And up to now, we still have the same method of fighting the fire, the wildfire, just to grab something to see the source of water and just put the water on the fire. And it continues up to now. So do think is there is a room for new technologies to fight the fires efficiently or prevented or it’s all about the regulations that doesn’t allow the new technologies to be, you know. So the question is, is there innovation in firefighting specifically or are we still just stuck with just grab water and pour it on the fire? And what’s the, is there a role of regulation in that?
Lisa Micheli (1:00:56)
I want to go a little bigger with your question because you when it comes to fire prevention there’s a lot of non-sexy things like clearing vegetation, hardening your home, preventing holes that embers can fly in, really low tech stuff that works great that we don’t do. That’s not even that expensive and I thought that’s where your question was going in terms of the acres of forest that we need to meet like we’re still only doing that kind of prevention work on a fraction of the landscape that needs to be done. But there is a whole fire tech community and sometimes this is a little frustrating for those of us who are thinking about really effective prevention measures because shiny new toys are much sexier to invest in. But there is a whole fire tech community and there definitely are even products on the market right now like there these foams. So when Coppola’s house started burning down in Napa, he flew in a SWAT team from Colorado and they had this foam that encased his whole house in foam and apparently was an effective strategy. Yeah, there’s drone technology now being looked at. So having drones serve as firefighters and be able to go in there.
Michael Gold (1:02:03)
It’s fire retardant foam. Yeah.
Can they fly with tanks of water?
Lisa Micheli (1:02:17)
I don’t even know how it all works, but there are these sort of fire attack methods. But in a hundred mile per hour wind, you’re not stopping the fire. You’re just not stopping the fire. You might be able to protect objects in its way with some of these crazy methods. I’m not gonna say crazy because they may be really valuable and they’re super expensive. And that’s where this equity factor comes in.
Coppola could afford to fly in his own crew with the latest and greatest, not everybody can afford that. So there’s a policy issue there. mean, Cal Fire is fighting, they only have 13 trucks in my district, right? That’s up from like five. They are now paid to be ready to fight fires nine months a year. That just changed. It used to be six. So just very basic challenges of having firefighting personnel.
Then plus the technology question and then how expensive that gets. So I do think there’ll be advances. They’re also using drones for veg treatment, by the way. They have a new technology. It’s called BurnBot and these bots do the burning. And then there’s a very sexy interest around fire satellites in terms of detection and that’s a new technology that a lot of the big philanthropies are going behind. But I mean, I was in a room of experts saying, we detect the fires really fast, really fast. In fact, half the fires that get detected aren’t fires. And that’s where some of the remote sensing technology is helping because now we have oblique cameras that zero in on the fire call and figure out whether it’s really burning. So here what you’re saying, but I think the new technologies tend to be expensive and hard to scale right now, but not to say that they won’t be effective. And they use retardants and they use different water carrying mechanisms, but, you know, what would be much better is hardening that home so it wouldn’t catch on fire.
Guest (1:04:16)
You mentioned that all the technologies are related to some limited amount of the transportation, limited amount of let’s say fire extinguishing fluids or whatever. What if we are completely changed the strategy of fighting the wildfires? Do you think it’s doable and do you think that we won’t be—we don’t talk about impossibility to stop the wildfires when it’s, you know, running. So I guess the question is, there like a whole new paradigm or thinking around?
Lisa Micheli (1:04:56)
I think it’s worth looking into. I just don’t think you can throw out the old system entirely because it actually is pretty effective. I mean, if you look at some of the attacks and the water attacks that CAL FIRE was doing during LA, I just want to say let’s respect our first responders. Like these guys who run the air fleets are really good and really tactical and really saved a lot of homes. I guess the question is what’s broke before we start fixing it and when it’s hard to just even get the resources to have the personnel, you know.
What’s your investment in technology and your payback. But that’s where I think that the tech and VC angel kind of thing to test these out. And that’s what being in the nonprofit world, kind of know, governments won’t adopt something until someone else shows that it works. They’re not going to be the first ones. So private sector partners need to incubate, innovate, show that it works, and then get their confidence that they can take it to scale.
Michael Gold (1:05:53)
Okay, there’s a question back there. Yeah, go ahead.
Guest (1:05:56)
I’m also from Santa Rosa, I live there. I love Pepperwood and I survived the fires. I know the trauma that our community has, it’s a lot of PTSD and now dealing with everybody in LA. just wanted to get your take on, there are so many challenges and LA is a global metropolis. What do you think in terms of opportunities that the big metropolis of LA has when it comes to building and creating resilience and you know being a world town, Olympics coming up and everything. What do you see compared to other world synagogues?
Michael Gold (1:06:39)
So looking at opportunities, especially for Los Angeles with Olympics coming up and rebuilding better, I guess, essentially is kind of the question.
Lisa Micheli (1:06:49)
When I also hear you ask you sort of around with a community that’s gone through the trauma, right? And so I want to start with our experience first because boy, did I feel out of my depth to have to have a team doing trauma informed care at Pepperwood as you’re probably not surprised, but we have a children’s program that serves the elementary school science programs from first to fifth grade. And more than half of our kids lost their schools and more than half of them lost their homes.
And we were having them come to the center of the inferno for their field trip, right? So just even, and I knew when people came to visit us, whether it was their first time coming in the burn zone or not, even for a year or two after, because of the look of grownups faces. So, but I think integrating environmental education into our schools so that kids understand that fire is part of the ecosystem and it is scary if we don’t manage it, we have to live with it.
It needs to start happening in Los Angeles right now. And I bet you it is because environmental educators are well-networked and tenacious. In terms of getting ready for the Olympics, I think there’s gonna be all kinds of conflicts between getting ready in the short term and thinking about the long term. And that’s where there are gonna be so many members of the community who will probably step up to be part of those conversations. So I think that’s gonna be very interesting to watch. And I heard, you know, my, I was a friend of mine, one of my best friends lived really close to the fires and she’s been at my house for last three weeks. And she said, they’re not replacing the palm trees. I mean, just questions like that. Like, do we have palm trees back in Los Angeles or is it going to be forever changed where that’s not there? So I don’t know the answers. I can imagine like all these questions that are going to come up, but I do feel like California is going to be leading the way again.
We are one of the most affluent—LA is one the most affluent places and their money did not insulate them from this. So hopefully we’ll be able to spin that story and talk about what do our cities look like. It’s really hard. I have friends who are green builders who would love, well, now we have a chance to rebuild LA like a dream city, which is kind of true, except everyone who lost their house is still paying their mortgage and their property taxes on that piece of land.
And when I raised it even in Sonoma, like could the open space district buy up some of these parcels and just not rebuild on these very fire prone places? It’s not economically viable. The land is worth too much. So there’s a whole economic angle that we have to have compassion. Like you say, why are these people moving back here? Well, it’s their livelihood, you know, or if they sell it, I mean, this is what happened in Santa Rosa in Fountain Grove, right? They sell it. Well, someone’s going to move here from New York and get a great deal.
And then we have to educate them. have to come into the educational process. So it’s not an easy challenge. It’s cultural in the end. That’s why the people part is so important. It’s like we have to have a culture of resilience and we have to have a culture of not forgetting what can happen. And I think that’s road we’re on.
Michael Gold (1:10:04)
Question? Another question in the back? Yeah. Go ahead.
Lisa Micheli (1:10:09)
Yeah.
Michael Gold (1:10:43)
So the question is how can we better reset the landscape?
Lisa Micheli (1:10:47)
Well, I think, I mean, if you’re talking about just natural vegetation management, I think fire is the best tool where it’s appropriate, which is a pretty small footprint. And then there’s all these physical methods we can use. But again, the cultural piece comes back from what I’ve learned from my indigenous friends, which is every family took care of the acres around where they lived. And it was a very small collect. Everyone had a small piece of a big solution.
And I think that’s where we’re gonna land. And this is the difference, right? Like you can talk about policy on a national forest and maybe there’s a decision maker and agency, but when you come to areas where thousands of people live, you’ve got to deal with private property. You’ve got to empower those individuals. it’s, I mean, that’s where a big question mark is for me. I know a researcher at the Brand School, UC Santa Barbara, and she’s studying why or why not people actually change their behavior. We have to get to behavior change and it’s not.
People don’t change their behaviors because you tell them what to do. They change their behaviors because something grabs them and they have an aha moment and they want to take leadership. And I really have to say, I just give so much credit to the leaders of these Firewise, Fire Safe communities. It really is the model for preparing neighborhoods. They can also be all purpose disaster groups that I know some of my friends are involved with.
That really is so important that someone in your neighborhood is willing to step up and have the meeting at their house and get everyone’s phone number on a list and figure out where to put that for the fire department to come. it’s those heroes, those unsung heroes who we need to step up. It’s not going to be easy.
Michael Gold (1:12:29)
Think we had, you have one question here? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, like was previously mentioned, LA, California, these are pretty much rather affluent and well-funded places. I was wondering from your experience, what are some possible solutions for places who are less funded, less less well-funded, but disproportionately impacted? So the question is how, what are some solutions for less affluent places? But that still bear disproportionate impacts.
Lisa Micheli (1:13:00)
So I mean, an example might be the town of Paradise. And you’re hitting on a really tough issue because one of the things we know about disasters is they actually amplify lack of equity generally because you have less of a cushion and you go into a spiral. So Paradise was the first group that started a chapter of our organization after the fire. They created their own organization with local leadership.
They were able to attract, for example, philanthropic investments in replanting their city. And interestingly enough, I think they were more bold and took stronger action, partly because they don’t have as deep an institutional structure and as much jurisdictions. And they are rebuilding paradise to put soccer fields around their whole downtown. They’re actually a pretty great way, know, soccer fields. Actually, turns out vineyards are pretty good fire breaks, you know.
So there are opportunities, Lake County as well, very disadvantaged economically compared to other parts of this area, but they got together, they have indigenous leaders on the board of supervisors who passed a risk reduction authority and it’s one of the most novel ways of generating a fund for risk reduction so the county can help new projects. So there’s a lot of innovation in those rural areas, but definitely it’s very, very challenging.
But I think that’s where the nongovernmental community is really also stepping up to help bring resources there.
Michael Gold (1:14:34)
Okay, all right, well, I think we will wrap it up there for people who want to see this broadcast. I’ll be publishing it a week from Wednesday, so February 19th. Again, Climate Swings on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. I’m sure Lisa can hang out and talk to people one-on-one if you have more questions. But one more time, please join me in thanking Lisa Micheli. you for appearing on Climate Swings.
Lisa Micheli (1:14:57)
Thank you.
Michael Gold (1:15:00)
Thank you so much!