New documentary looks at alternative approaches to wildfires

What if we learned to co-exist with wildfires rather than constantly fighting them? Portland filmmaker Trip Jennings’s new documentary “Elemental” includes the voices of climate experts, Indigenous people and fire survivors, and asks us to reimagine our relationship with wildfire. We hear from Jennings about what he hopes audiences will take away from his film.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Massive forest fires are going to keep coming and simply doing more of the same. More suppression, more logging, more controlled burns will not prevent homes or entire communities from burning up. So it is time for a different approach. That is the central message of the new Documentary, Elemental. It was made by the Portland filmmaker Trip Jennings. The film includes the voices of ecologists, Indigenous People, climate experts and fire survivors. And it asks us to reimagine our relationship with wildfire. It’s having its world premiere tonight at 7:30 at the Hollywood Theater in Portland. Trip Jennings, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Trip Jennings: Thanks so much for having me. I love your show. Can’t wait to chat.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. What did you originally set out to do when you started working on this film?

Jennings: That’s a great question. Honestly, right after the Eagle Creek fire in 2017, I started seeing reactions that I didn’t think totally lined up with the best available science, from the public and from politicians. I wasn’t a fire expert, I made a student film, in the early aughts about fire, and from that little bit I said, ‘Okay, I don’t think, I don’t think we’re quite getting it yet.’ So I actually got an exemption to fly over the Eagle Creek Fire and take pictures of it and show that a lot of it was green trees that had just barely been licked by flames. And I thought that was a really inspiring message, that this landscape has burned before, and it isn’t completely black charred, after the fire.

Miller: So that was the beginning, but I’m curious about… it seems like you said your motivation was that you were hearing from the public and from politicians, things that you didn’t think were accurate. What kinds of things were you hearing?

Jennings: I was hearing a lot then and throughout the whole process of this film, that the problem is in the forest. And throughout the film, I think one of the most important things that I learned throughout the production was that a definition of the wildfire problem as being ‘in the forest’ is holding us back from keeping our community safe from fire. Because in my opinion, and I think in many peoples’ opinions that we talked to, the fire problem is in communities where homes are burning. And as soon as we shift our mindset from trying to go out into the backcountry and deal with a problem that exists in more ex-urban sort of housing areas is when we’ll start to, I think, turn the corner.

Miller: You include early on in the film, a detail that really stood out to me, it’s about climate conditions in the 1950s, especially 50s and 60′s and the way that they contributed to a broad societal understanding of fire behavior and the appropriate human response? What was particular about the climate In the middle of the 20th century and what effect did it have on us?

Jennings: Well, if you think about what was happening before that, we can all remember reports of the dust bowl, right? This was a particularly hot, dry time in the United States, there was a lot of fire, and then we moved into what happens in many earth systems, which is a long term ‘decadal oscillation’ and what that did in the Northwest is it brought us incremental rainfall and it helped to tamp down fire behavior and assist with a lot of the fire suppression activities. So it made us look extremely good at putting out fires and we were, and at the same time there was a lot of mechanization of the fire suppression effort. So we were really successful in that combination in the Northwest, especially. In other places, that effect of the rain was less, but other factors across the country helped us sort of come up as you know, Boomers learned what fire meant and living on the land of fire meant that someone could come in and put it out.

Miller: Not only that, but that someone should come in and put it out?

Jennings: I think there should be emergency services for anything, but absolutely, we should be kept safe by that suppression effort.

Miller: At this point, how is climate change affecting wildfire behavior today?

Jennings: It’s clear I think, to most people, that we are moving into a hotter, drier climate regime, right? There’s more drought, there’s more hot days. And so when we have strong winds like we did in 2020 or like we didn’t even, 2017 during the Eagle Creek fire, it’s more likely that it’s a hot dry day with fuels that are ready to catch fire. So any spark that ignites in wildlands is highly likely to be more destructive to human communities.

Miller: Another of the sections that surprised me has to do with carbon emissions. What I have heard in the past and even recently, is that forest fires put unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. What have scientists been learning recently about the reality of carbon emissions and burned or unburned forests?

Jennings: It’s fascinating and this is a really good news part of the film and seldom that we get good news about climate change when we’re talking about disasters, but scientists are finding over and over in, you know more and more studies that fires just don’t release the amount of carbon that we once thought – they’re not the carbon bomb that we once thought. I want you and the audience to sort of imagine this, like what do you see when you walk through burned forest, you see these big black standing trees and if there’s ever any question of like is that really, how can there not be this big carbon bomb? Well those trees are the stores of carbon. That’s the big long term storage that’s still there standing and will be standing for decades and in many cases centuries. So what’s burning is the leaves and the needles and the branches and the dust that’s already fallen on the floor and the shrubs and that’s mostly and that’s stuff that’s sort of already part of the yearly carbon cycle.

Miller: But the lion’s share of the carbon sink is in the big trunks and those, you’re saying, last for decades or more, as snags?

Jennings: Yeah, and I think what’s really important when it comes to climate change, is to remember that we have only a small number of years before we start pushing past climate tipping points, right? So those stores of carbon are going to hold us over as the young forest regenerates and begins storing carbon again while we have time to figure out what our reaction to climate change is, in hopes to avert some of these tipping points.

Miller: I want to play folks a clip from the movie, we’re going to hear the OSU Fire Ecologist, Chris Dunn – he has been studying various ways that different forest management techniques lead to different outcomes when fire hits those different forests. Here he is explaining why the so-called O&C [Land Management] Oregon and California lands in Southwest Oregon made such a great natural experiment.

Chris Dunn: This historical land allocation and management regime where every other square mile, alternates between private industrial land management strategies and public lands. It is very strange because nature doesn’t operate on square lines where you have- right next to each other, conservation-type management versus timber production-type management. In 2013, a fire burned through this checkerboard landscape and that  afforded us this opportunity to really ask this question: how do different forest management regimes influence the outcome of these fires?

Miller: Trip Jennings? What was the answer?

Jennings: It turned out in that study, and in other studies subsequently, that the private industrial forest burned hotter than the public forest, and that is really the opposite of what the narrative that’s common in our discussions says, right? So I think we need to learn from that as we move forward. What’s the riskiest type of land management when it comes to wildfire?

Miller: It seems to me that one of the reasons, that narrative – that cutting down more trees, perhaps many more trees, will reduce the severity or likelihood of extreme fires. It seems to me that one reason it has been such a successful idea is that it makes a kind of intuitive sense, to those of us who aren’t actually doing science and doing studies. So what are we getting wrong?

Jennings: Let’s take a little bit broader look at it. Most homes are destroyed in high wind conditions and I’m taking this out of the forest a bit. But most homes are destroyed in high wind conditions, and those conditions, in those conditions, the type of fuel is less important because if you have an extremely hot dry fire weather and you have fires being blown miles in front of the fire front by embers, it’s quite easy, that the fuel becomes less important. I mean think about when you build a campfire and you blow on the logs, large logs catch in that way. All sorts of fuel catches in that way, right? But you also have in these industrial forests, you have the tips, the tops of trees touching. So when one tree catches on fire, the next tree and the next three and the next tree catches on fire…

Miller: Because these are in a sense, tree plantations that they’ve been logged and then replanted with rows of trees that are close together?

Jennings: Close together, but also the same age. So they all grew up at the same time, all the tops of the trees are around the same height, their branches are intermingling because they’re close together and that wind that’s blowing those embers is just blowing flames and embers from treetop to treetop. And so you get this very homogenous bed of fuels that just burns up. And the difference in a natural forest is that you will have pockets, you’ll have big old growth trees that are tall and you’ll have a gap and you’ll have smaller trees that don’t necessarily have intermingled crowns, tops of the trees, and you’ll have more often more water and more humidity near ground level. So all sorts of factors go into it.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now about the new documentary, Elemental, reimagining our relationship with wildfire. The world premiere is going to be tonight at 7:30 at Portland’s Hollywood theater. We are talking with it’s director, Trip Jennings. He also talked to a forest ecologist from Colorado who has been studying the effects of fuel reduction, meaning thinning or logging. And she found that over the last 15 years, less than 1% of the areas that were treated this way – that were logged with this in mind – less than 1% of them encountered a wildfire. She also found that in the places that had been thinned that did get hit by a fire, fire often swept right through them and it didn’t work as intended. What are we supposed to do with these findings?

Jennings: I think that one of the most important things that I learned from this film is that as we think about community and home safety, we need to separate that idea from the forest. Most homes don’t burn in the forest that burn in wildfires. I think we stayed a little bit out of the debate about ‘Can thinning ever be useful,’ because what we’re finding is that if your home is more than a 100 ft from a thin, or any other forest management activity, then it doesn’t really matter in terms of its survival in a wildfire. And another quote in the film, that- excuse me, that did not make the film- Jack Cohen told me after we filmed and turned the camera off and he said, ‘Look, a thin only modifies fire behavior inside the thin.’ So if you’ve built your house inside of a thin, then it could potentially modify the behavior of fire around your house, but we don’t build houses, we don’t build communities in national forests. We don’t build communities where we thin, and so they have little to no effect on the survivability of our communities and homes. And I think that’s maybe the most important thing to take away from that section. Also, specifically the 1% idea is that how can we possibly scale a thinning regime across millions of acres in the west, and keep up with it before the vegetation grows back – that’s even, you know, if it were to meet our goals of keeping communities and homes safe.

Miller: So let’s turn to the goals of keeping communities and homes safe – because as you’ve been saying over and over. I mean, it’s maybe the central thesis here is, we have to worry less about forests burning because to some extent, they’re going to burn. So let’s control what we can control, which is whether or not those forest fires are going to lead to human communities also burning up. Can you describe the airplane hangar-sized test chamber where folks are testing right now, various kinds of home designs that they subject to burning embers in gale force winds?

Jennings:  So we went to the Institute for Business and Home Safety in South Carolina. They have this, as you said, giant research facility where they can create not only hurricane force winds and tornado force winds, but also embers, realistic embers that the wildfire would throw at homes, and so they do that, they turn on the wind and they turn on the ember generator and they burn down homes and it’s pretty fun to watch. I’ve got to admit being there was very exciting. This sort of research has been going on for a long time now, actually decades, and we have a really good idea of what we need to do to keep homes safe from fires and not just in the lab. We also worked with Dr. Alexandra Syphard [Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety], who has gone out and looked at the factors that protected homes, or not protected homes when they came into contact with wildfire. So I think that’s really important. You have the theoretical lab studies and then you have the actual observations, and it turns out that it’s the little things, it’s the little things that keep your home standing that prevent those embers from getting inside the home and burning it from the home out.

Miller: I should say, speaking of little things, it seems like something is rubbing against the microphone on your connections. If you can watch that, it’ll be easier for us to hear you. But what are those little things?

Jennings: The most important things that you know anyone can do to their home to protect it from wildfire. The first and cheapest thing is just to cover up the vents in our attics with eighth inch mesh or smaller. Those vents are very important. They keep the temperature down in our attics, but they’re made to suck air in. And if you don’t prevent embers from going in, what can often happen in a fire is an ember goes inside of your attic, ignites something and burns your home from the inside out. So next is enclosing the eaves, and this is a sort of strange one, but instead of being able to see the rafters instead of being able to see the supports of your roof on the edges outside of your walls, is closing those eaves and that’s in the film, then the next thing that’s really important is multi-pane windows, especially if it’s tempered glass, because as I said earlier, most homes burn in extreme wind conditions and so what happens is something can hit a small pane window, a single pane window, break the window And allow sparks to get inside and again, burn the home from the inside out. Then the last thing is flipping the relationship between your garden beds and your pathways so that the first five feet away from your house is non-combustible material on the ground.

Miller: Your film is premiering tonight, as I mentioned, in Portland. It’s coming out at an interesting time because right now Oregon agencies are in the middle of rulemaking that’s going to govern both the amount of defensible space Oregonians need to have, but also the way home hardening code is going to be written for new construction, for people who are building in places the state has identified as ‘at risk,’ at various levels of risk for wildfires. How much attention are you paying to this Rulemaking?

Jennings: Well, I think this is fascinating. I think Oregon really has the potential to be a national leader in the way we do fire policy and I was on the ground outside of Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, places that are in the extreme risk part of this map, a couple of weeks ago talking to people who are in those designations and I think that where we need to go is not only identifying where the risk is, but also helping residents who need that to address the equity issue of just how much it could cost. And that’s in the bill. That’s really exciting to have new homes that are being built, especially replacing old homes that were built, burned in wildfires, to be up to a higher degree of fire risk. I also think we need to move into retrofitting homes, and hopefully providing resources for homeowners to do that.

Miller: Unless I missed them, you don’t feature interviews with politicians directly talking about learning to coexist with wildfires and you don’t really delve too deeply into the politics of these policies. Why not?

Jennings:  I think the film was long enough as it is[Both, laughing]

Miller: Was it not a conscious choice to focus on the science as opposed to the politics?

Jennings: I think the politics and the science should, to some degree… what we wanted to do, is say, ‘Look, here’s a path forward. And I think the politics are gonna change in each location.’ I also think that the narratives that push politicians are going to change as we see more and more of these 2020-like wildfires. Right? So, I hope that this film lasts until we have really good codes and really good assistance for people who live in dangerous places. We didn’t want to  get too mired in one particular debate over another. What I really want is to hopefully change the narrative, to update it with the best available science of how we can move forward in a hotter, drier world.

Miller: I want to play one more clip from the movie. This is a Biologist and Writer named Maya Khosla who has been studying life, coming back to places that have been the sites of intense burns. Here she is:

Maya Khosla: So it’s like waves upon waves of new life coming in. I probably have about 12 cameras all in all, all over the Sierra Nevada. I’ve been focusing on mammals for the remote cameras; I’ve seen foxes, bear, deer, mountain lions, bobcat – amazing shots of bobcat. And very recently in two locations, the Dixie Fire being one of them, Pacific fishers, right in the heart of a post fire forest, right in the heart of the high intensity areas. When you see so much life in unexpected places, it makes you be so respectful of something so much larger than you, that’s happening and has happened for millions of years and it’s got a machinery that is mysterious and beautiful. It may not look that way, to most eyes initially, but it just is this mysterious unfolding of life.

Miller: If we as a society do start to do a better job in terms of hardening our homes. How do you want us to think about fire in the coming decades?

Jennings: That’s a great question. I think part of it is what Maya’s saying. We did a bunch of camera trapping in Oregon as well, documenting these wildlife species using all of these burned landscapes. So I hope that we can think of fire as this beautiful natural process and at this point I don’t think that we are in this terrible apocalyptic fire regime for all forests. Now, that’s not true for every landscape, right? So I think we need to think about the things that influence too much fire, like climate change, like fossil fuel emissions. But I think that we do have a real window in which we’re not about to fully lose forests, we’re not about to fully lose the species that live there. They are coming back. And I’ve seen that with my own eyes. So I think if we can protect ourselves, I think if we can remember that climate change is the central issue of our time and work on that, I think we do have some time before we’re in that sort of I think that the idea that many of us have, currently, about fires destroying those landscapes.

Miller: Trip Jennings. Thanks very much.

Jennings:  Thanks for having me.

Miller: Trip Jennings is a Portland based filmmaker, director of the new movie, Elemental, reimagining our relationship with wildfire. The world premiere is going to be tonight at 7:30 at Portland’s Hollywood Theater.

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