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Podcast Host
Wildfires are getting worse. Even Americans who don't live in fire prone areas have felt the impact in recent years after devastating fires in Hawaii, California and Canada. So what should we do about them? What can we do? Dr. Kyra Hoffman is a fire ecologist at the University of British Columbia. She's an expert in why these fires are getting worse and the solutions that can mitigate their damage. And she was a firefighter herself. I hope you Enjoy our conversation. Dr. Kyra Hoffman, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. I will start with a quote of yours, which is first fire is coming. It's going to get worse. Why is it going to get worse?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
We are in kind of a tricky situation right now where we have a hundred years of vegetation buildup across North America because we've become so good at putting fires out that we've created kind of dead, dense trees and shrubbery across our landscapes. And we've got climate change as a background. We've got warmer, drier, windier conditions. We have more people who are lighting fires. We have more lightning than we've had before. And all of this is coming together to create the conditions for having these catastrophic wildfires that are impacting our everyday lives. They are causing direct fatalities and we are losing cities and communities every single year to wildfire now.
Podcast Host
And certainly from the perspective of like a New Yorker or city dweller, I mean, even we felt it a few years ago when smoke from the Canadian wildfires was over New York and Philadelphia and some of the eastern cities Catastrophic fires in Los Angeles a couple of years ago and catastrophic fires in Canada. So are those just mainly big shocking media events or these actually, is this problem getting bigger and how big is it? I mean, let us know from a country perspective, like, what are we looking at?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
This is a really big and complex problem. And In Canada in 2023, we had wildfires on every single coast. Every single kind of resources that we had were all being used to fight fires. We brought in resources from the States, from many different. We are fighting fire in every single month of the year now in North America. It is not just a summer problem, it is a year round problem. And it is becoming worse. There's no doubt about it. The science is supportive that it's becoming worse. We can see that we're using a lot of dollars to fight fires now and again. Those resources are being all used up every single summer in a time where we're actually employing less people and there's greater vacanc in wildland firefighting positions.
Podcast Host
There was a big controversy or at least a spat after the Los Angeles fires about, hey, it's that we're not managing our forests. And I think President Trump was saying, oh, we just have to rake the forest floor. Is there truth to that? Did Los Angeles or whatever counties it was where the fire started and got really going, Were they not doing what they should have been doing?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
There's definitely been reductions in how we manage forests proactively with fire or with other tools like forestry. But geography is just really important here. And so Los Angeles built on the hills. It's got a lot of winding roads. It's very difficult to get equipment in to fight a fire. So sometimes it's just the physical geography of a place that makes it incredibly vulnerable to fire. Other times it's, yeah, we didn't do enough. We didn't thin our trees or we didn't use enough prescribed or cultural fire in our forest to prepare for the inevitable wildfire event that was coming.
Podcast Host
And. All right, so let's talk about that. Some of the solutions, you've written a lot about that, and one of them is prescribed burning and I think you call it defueling, which I think is what President Trump was talking about. Take us through that. Like, what could we be doing?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Well, we are using prescribed fire quite a lot, both in Canada and the U.S. we use it as a mitigation tool. So we're going out and we are intentionally setting fires, whether it's in grassland or forested ecosystems. And we are doing it under very Controlled conditions. So that's my job. I'm a fire practitioner. I go out and I write a prescription just like a medical doctor saying, okay, what kind of fire does this forest need? How often should it burn? What kind of tools do we need? Or what kind of intensity, what kind of seasonality do we need? And then once that prescription's accepted, it then moves into permitting and it's approved and we go out and we burn usually in the spring and in the fall when it's, you know, easier to contain, the conditions are right, and we clean up the forest with fire. It's an incredible tool and it's, it's very affordable. Um, and if you're using it routinely, it can really reduce wildfire risk because again, it's removing that fuel load, it's defueling. So you don't have as much of an ignition source or a fuel source when wildfire enters into communities.
Podcast Host
Take us through what a burn looks like, how big is it and. And what's it like to, to actually do it?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Sure. Uh, so this, this coming week, I'm actually doing a lot of burns. Uh, so I go out with different nations. So in this case the gitn in northern British Columbia, we are going out usually as a five pack, and we're meeting BC Wildfire, which is the fire agency, and we have a burn that's approved. In this neck of the woods here, we actually have some stand replacing objectives. So we actually do want to remove some of the trees from around the community because this is a community with one road in and one road out. So we have to think about wildfire risk and getting people in and out of the community safely. And, you know, in the morning we're going out and we're checking the temperature, we're checking the humidity, we're making sure the smoke's gonna go up and venting is good, that we know that we can control the fire, that we can keep it in the box. And so we have a. Usually it's about 40 hectares that we are trying to burn, and we are using fire with drip torches. So we have fuel and we are walking in lines. We're strip burning. So we have people hand ignitions. Sometimes we're gonna be using drone ignitions, sometimes heli ignitions. So we have a lot of tools in order to get this area burned. And again, we have kind of a mix of conifers, so evergreen trees, grasses and shrubs. And they all have different ways of burning and we are really paying attention. So that again, my job as a Fire behavior analyst as a fire effects monitor. I am making sure that the burn is happening in the way it's intended to. So keeping it in with within that prescription bounds, making sure that it's the right kind of fire, right place, right time, that everyone's safe, and that we're meeting our objectives, which aren't just wildfire risk reduction. We're also burning to increase the abundance of food and medicinal plants for the community. I mean, the nearest grocery store is about two hours away. Having food staples that can go be picked after a fire are really critical. Having open meadows where moose can go and forage after is really, really critical because these are important components of cultural burning that we're doing in that community. So every fire has many different objectives and we're hoping to meet all of those by burning. It's an incredible tool to meet several simultaneous objectives at the same time.
Podcast Host
And what does it look like after you finish? Is it a complete moonscape or does it still look like a forest?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
It looks so beautiful, it's hard to describe. It's charred, it's black, it's this mosaic. There's some live trees, there's some dead ones kind of open, I guess, like black at first. But you go back a week later after the rains and you just start to see these green shoots coming up and then it becomes fluorescent green three weeks later. Because fire is this incredible fertilizer and it's been used for millennia to provide nutrients into the soil so that these incredible food plants can grow. These really diverse and fire adapted plants that are really good at withstand fire. So they're highly adapted to fire.
Podcast Host
And could we do this in the United States, in places like Los Angeles or nearby or the Bay Area? Is that reasonable in those communities?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
It sure is, and it's actually happening now. So California is really leading the way in prescribed fire. They're creating new policy to support prescribed fire. There's also a huge cultural fire movement in Northern California, in Central California and in Southern California actually. So California is doing a really, really good job of putting fire back into the land and back into the hand of practitioners. Right now. We have actually been watching from Canada how the U.S. has really evolved its fire systems and how they've really translated a lot of their fire knowledge into practice, but then also into communities so that they're increasing public awareness of fire. So the cities are a place where we can actually really focus on some of the fire education more. Because people are detached from nature, they're detached from forested ecosystems. They're often not even seeing a lot of green spaces in parks. So it's really hard to kind of have that connection with fire. And in rural places like where I live, every single spring, farmers are out burning their fields. That's, you know, for me, I grew up as a kid burning our fields. I started when I was seven years old. Fire, for me, it wasn't something that was bad. I mean, my parents were like, no, fire is a tool and we need to use it and we're going to teach you how to use it. So engaging in fire at a young age really helped me respect fire. And I also learned that fire is really critical for humans in general to feel a sense of kind of belonging, connection to place. Fire in humans is really like, in a big way. Fire is actually what makes us human. It's one of our greatest achievements.
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, hearing that that is sort of from a city perspective is, wow, okay. That's very different. Almost inconceivable. And it sounds like one of the reasons, and you alluded to this earlier, that fire is becoming such a big is. We had decades where the idea was, let's suppress all fire and there should be no fires. They destroy timber, they create smoke, even if they don't consume houses. And so that what happened that suddenly California started to handle things better?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
I think there was a big wake up call, you know, like Smokey the Bear was a very effective public advertising campaign, one of the longest running and most widely accepted from the public. And it was there for good reason. I mean, it started in the war when firefighters were scarce. They were all deployed. They didn't have the resources to protect communities from fires at home. And so it had really good messaging. But then I think they saw, oh my gosh, we're getting this wrong. Like, we are putting out fires to our own detriment. And they saw the writing on the wall, they saw the interface fires, the fatalities that were beginning to happen, and they changed course. And the messaging now is very different. And it's the same in Canada. It's, you know, we need to be proactive. We can't just be reactive. And there is this, I think, kind of groundswell is this realization that, yeah, fire's here, fire's not going away. In fact, it's probably going to get worse. But our solutions can get so much better.
Podcast Host
And what is the common resistance to, say, a prescribed burn in a place like Los Angeles? I know there are lots of different places there, but I've heard about people don't like the smoke. They don't like the cost. Apparently it's very labor intensive. Certainly what you described is labor intensive. You're going out with a lot of equipment and people and you gotta do it right. And there is presumably some risk that it could escape or what have you. So what is the, what's the pushback and the resistance?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah, I think the smoke is a, is a big resistant and for like, for good reason. Smoke is pretty bad. We don't want people breathing it in especially vulnerable populations. One way that we've gotten around this is we actually, actually can move people. So in the community that I work in, we can bring a bus out. Say anyone who has problems with smoke, hop on the bus, we're going to take you shopping for the day, we're going to just remove you from the smoke. The other thing is we actually need to get people out into the workforce of burning. It's a really great way to keep people physically moving. It's a good job. It allows people to kind of connect with different aspects of their community. In Canada we have, I guess a changing forestry sector where we have a lot of out of work forest practitioners. It makes a lot of sense to move into becoming fire practitioners, to put those people to work in mitigation. Whether that's just removing fuel from communities or burning, there's a lot of proactive employment for people in creating safer communities for wildfire.
Podcast Host
And who pays for it?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Well, that's a really good question because right now we're thinking a lot about the risk of burning and proactive fires. So prescribed burning, we're really not thinking about the risk of not doing it. And the risk of not doing it is so much more expensive. When you think about how much money we spend responding to wildfires every year, how much money it costs to rebuild a city, especially if critical infrastructure like water, hospitals have been damaged, sewage has been damaged. Those are very, very expensive. So if we think about putting money more on the other side of it, less into the reactive and more into the proactive, we'll be saving ourselves in the long term about how we kind of deal with these disasters. So I think that we can have a better conversation with the public and we can have more buy in from society about using fire and also about wildfire response too.
Podcast Host
And in the US in particular, maybe in Canada. But I can say with experience and confidence in the U.S. it's incredibly difficult to do preventative spending and it's much, much easier to suddenly send in FEMA after a disastrous fire because everyone is used to the federal Government coming in. What are some examples of where you have had communities come together either in Canada or the United States and say, okay, yeah, this is something we want to get behind.
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah. So I, I like to think about the example of Jasper. So in 2024, Jasper was a city in Canada that was highly impacted by wildfire. So it was an interface fire. About 35% of the city was burned. They had spent 25 years preparing for that wildfire, doing fuel mitigation, doing prescribed burns, preparing for an evacuation. When that fire came in to the city, you know, they did lose 30 to 35%. But the great success of that fire was that they were able to evacuate 60,000 people in two hours from that city. And so it's a great example of. You could look at it and say, you know, that was just a terrible disaster. And yes, it was, but the fact that they didn't lose the whole city is such a success. And they had a really strong unified command system. They had the things in place. They prepared for that day. And more cities need to be preparing for that day, making sure that everything is ready to go. I don't think many people wake up in the morning and think, I'm going to have to evacuate a fire today. But it would be really great if people were more aware of kind of the risks around them, more prepared, caring for neighbors. Most of the people who have really sadly died in wildfires are elderly people, people with disabilities, people who couldn't get out in time. Yeah. And it's just, it's really, really hard. Fire is just this traumatic thing.
Podcast Host
I can only imagine. And so in Jasper, that does sound like an extraordinary success story. Evacuate the city or town in two hours. On the other hand, losing 35% of the town after preparing for it for 25 years seems to also fuel one of the comments that I think was in an article where you were advocating for fire for prescribed burning and somebody else came back and I think his quote was, unless you treat 40% of the landscape, it's not going to work because the fire will just jump or go around or what have you. I mean, does that feel, in the case of Jasper and others, is that right, that there's just only so much you can do, even if you are incredibly proactive about it?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, there is only so much we can do. Jasper's very similar fire behavior that we saw in Los Angeles, that we saw in paradise, is one of those fires that was just impossible to fight. And it wasn't, you know, direct flames that came in to the city that were the big problem. It's embers that were cast from kilometers away that landed on houses. And so embers, ember shedding is a really, really big problem. Most people, when they think about fires coming into the community, they actually picture the fire front moving in. It's. Yeah, again, embers come in and they hit the cedar deck or the cedar shakes or the like front doormat. Even so, we do know what flammable structures are really susceptible to fire and we know a lot about how fires impact communities once they're there.
Podcast Host
And you mentioned that. Just the difficulty of having building codes that are so strict that they're incredibly hard to afford and what have you. Are there sensible things that we could be doing that we should be doing to prevent things like that?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah, definitely. The roof is the big one. Metal roofs are really expensive. Sprinklers are really expensive to put and especially if you're paying for water, really, really expensive. The biggest thing I think most people can do is actually just remove flammable things from around their house. That's pretty straightforward. Don't stack your firewood against your house. Don't have your cedar overhanging your gutters. We can just kind of give. We have to. Again, it's always like a give and take. You might have to give up a bit of privacy, but you might win your house in the end.
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Dr. Kyra Hoffman
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Podcast Host
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Podcast Host
So what's the outlook this summer?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
So the outlook in the western US Is looking a little dire. What we've had is persistent low snowpack, no snowpack at all in some places. In places where there was snowpack, it's had a very high meltwater runoff already combined with heat wave after heat wave. And what we see is a very drought ridden, very persistent fire severity, fire weather conducive event kind of forming in the western US where we could see the conditions very suitable for having ignitions, so having human and lightning ignitions in that area right now.
Podcast Host
And so what should we be doing now and how long do we have to do it?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
This is really hard because we can't be preparing for fire when fires might happen the next day. We really need to be thinking every single year, whether it's a rainy year or we've had a ton of snowpack. Well, we still need to do fire mitigation. We still need to go out and clean up the forest. We still need to have healthy forests. We have so many dead trees in the western US and so many disease ridden trees that we have a pretty serious situation unfolding there right now. Again, it just, just can't be an afterthought. It can't be when the problem's at our doorstep. It needs to be every single year.
Podcast Host
And do people in communities that are threatened by exactly what you've just described, which sounds like an enormous fully western problem, do they have an appreciation for the risk of it and what they could be doing if anything? If we are not doing the whole
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
scale mitigation, it's unclear whether people are really aware of the problem. I don't think that we have often really good information that's getting out to communities. Florida as a state, I would say is one of the most prepared for fire. I've seen the map. They are actually looking like they're in persistent drought as well. They are looking like very conducive to having fire events this summer. But they also burn more than any single state in the US So Florida is one of the most prepared states to deal with fire. And but the public is also really on board with burning there.
Podcast Host
And it's not the case in some of the western states that you were talking about.
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Some of the western states are a little less prepared, but I would say the west is fairly prepared. The east coast saw a huge amount of fires last year. And I would say that many people think, well, we live in the east, there shouldn't really be fires here. We don't have those kinds of trees. We don't have fires. That's just not the case anymore. As we've seen Hawaii, a great example of a place where people thought there couldn't be fire. We're seeing fire everywhere.
Podcast Host
And so talk about the east, because I have to say, I live in the east and I have that attitude, which is, yeah, this is a western problem, not an eastern problem.
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Well, the east is dealing with a lot of drought. There's also a lot of invasive grasses, highly flammable grasses. They also have aging infrastructure. And, you know, a lot of fire's not our problems, kind of a psyche. So maybe they haven't done the mitigation or they haven't done the preparedness like other places that have had to deal with it year after year. That's definitely the case in Canada, where we didn't have a lot of wildfire support in some of our cities, like Halifax, when it experienced fire.
Podcast Host
And so as a homeowner, if my state is not doing what it should be doing and that there is in fact a real risk of forest fire, what can I do around my house? What are the very basic things that any homeowner can do?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
I think like really just assessing, you know, what is my house? What is it made of? Is it made of wood? Is it made of?
Podcast Host
Yes, unfortunately.
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
So what's my doormat made of? Do I have a deck? Is it made of wood? Do I have a bunch of grass under my deck? And there is so many places you can go and get helpful information on how to fire smart your home. There's a lot of great resources in Canada. You can be pulled. There's tons of great resources for from the west where you can do a check mark. Okay, how do I fire smart my home? How do I make it more fireproof? And then also I would encourage you to talk to your neighbors, because sometimes you can fire smart your home very well. But if your neighbor doesn't, then you're in just as much of a bad state, because often fires burn from house to house to house, especially if you don't have a very big yard. You have these houses that are kind of stuck together really closely and it suburban environment. So it's really important to get your neighbors on board too, because it is a community thing.
Podcast Host
And it seems like sometimes, at least when a fire happens and ravages a community, there's always the story about the one guy who refused to leave, got on the roof with the hose, spraying everything all the time. And sometimes he's no longer with us and sometimes he saves the house. How. How do we think about that?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah, that's a. That's a really tough one. So Stay and Defend is a personal choice for people. And in some places you can, in some places you're not legally able to, but in places where you can, they ask you to be 18 and over, they ask that you be of sound mind and physically able to actually respond to a fire. The big thing that I worry about with Stay and Defend is that you actually, a lot of the time put first responders in harm's way. When you change your mind and then you ask for help or you don't have your own water source and you thought you could get your sprinklers and your hose going all night, but no, they shut off the water mains. So you actually don't have the resources to fight fires or you weren't as prepared as you thought you were going to be.
Podcast Host
And God forbid any of us ever gets in a situation like this. But let's say you get trapped or you are staying and defending and you realize that you have to evacuate at the last moment. Are there areas that you can go that are relatively safe, big open areas or like, what should you be looking for to protect yourself?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Yeah, if you can get to a designated muster station that you know they've declared this is the safe place to go, you should go there. And if you can't, try and get to a Walmart parking lot, a big, big parking lot that hopefully doesn't have cars in it, that's mostly pavement and those can be sanctuaries in a serious wildfire. And that is your very last resort.
Podcast Host
So looking forward, given what you know, and from the sound of it, it sounds like positive things are happening, that we are effectively waking up to techniques to do the kind of burns that you're talking about and managing it and using fire to our advantage and accepting that we can't just eliminate places we don't want it roll forward 10 years. Like what are you, what are you hoping that we will be doing that we're not doing? And what do you think the odds are that we actually can do that?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
I feel so hopeful actually about fire in our communities. I really see indigenous led fire stewardship, so cultural burning happening where agencies are building trust with communities to let communities burn on their own, that there's less involvement, there's more people using fire, there's more connection between fire and forestry and agriculture and water. People are understanding the intricacies of the system. People are working together, they've built relationships. So there's trust there. People are trying things, failing, and then sharing those failures I think is really important. You know, I was talking about going from hero to zero really, really quickly in fire when there is escapes, because there will be, there will be fire escapes from these, these controlled burns. We need to be learning from those, we need to be sharing those lessons and we need to again, have more of an acceptable risk. So really looking at it as, okay, we're all working together here to try and, you know, do X amount of burning on the landscape, across the country, across the state, however you want to look at it, we're not going to get there without taking so many calculated risks. But again, the other factor there is if we don't do anything, what are the other risks that we need to be aware of? And so I think having more people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives coming together to creatively think about fire is really essential to tackling kind of the complexities of the problem.
Podcast Host
And you talk a lot about cultural burning and that is being distinct from what we've been talking about. It's prescribed burning. So what is that and why is it part of the culture?
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
So cultural burning is really community and nation specific. So for millennia, indigenous peoples around the world have been using fire as a tool to manage certain things, be that food or fodder for game, medicines, wildfire, risk reduction, all of these different things. Every nation, because they live in different places and have different cultures, have different fire techniques. And what's really important is that they're leading those initiatives within their territories, that we're supporting them to use that expertise that many of those communities haven't lost or they're trying new things to really lead the way. Because there's so many amazing teachings, there's so many amazing solutions that are within communities that, that many of us, like from settler or colonists have lost. Even though we all once used fire every single day. You know, it was only 2 million years ago that humans first started really controlling fire. But fire really helped develop language, it helped develop culture, it helped develop communities. And without fire, we wouldn't really have any of that.
Podcast Host
Dr. Kira Hoffman, thank you so much for joining us. It's incredibly interesting and important and great to talk to you.
Dr. Kyra Hoffman
Thank you.
Episode: Wildfires Are Only Getting Worse. What Can We Do?
Date: April 20, 2026
Host: Henry Blodget
Guest: Dr. Kyra Hoffman, Fire Ecologist at University of British Columbia
This episode tackles the escalating crisis of wildfires across North America. Host Henry Blodget interviews Dr. Kyra Hoffman, a fire ecologist and experienced firefighter, about why wildfires are intensifying and what both communities and individuals can do to mitigate risks. The conversation spans the science behind worsening fires, the history and importance of "good fire," cultural and prescribed burning, government and community responses, and actionable steps for homeowners.
[01:56] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“We are in kind of a tricky situation right now where we have a hundred years of vegetation buildup across North America because we've become so good at putting fires out... We've got climate change as a background... All of this is coming together to create the conditions for having these catastrophic wildfires that are impacting our everyday lives.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [01:56]
[03:25] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
[04:41] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Sometimes it's just the physical geography of a place that makes it incredibly vulnerable to fire. Other times it's, yeah, we didn't do enough... we didn't use enough prescribed or cultural fire in our forest to prepare for the inevitable wildfire event.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [04:41]
[05:40] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Fire is this incredible fertilizer and it's been used for millennia to provide nutrients into the soil so that these incredible food plants can grow. These really diverse and fire adapted plants... are really good at withstand fire.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [09:39]
[07:01] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Every fire has many different objectives and we're hoping to meet all of those by burning. It's an incredible tool to meet several simultaneous objectives at the same time.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [08:48]
[10:33] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Fire for me, it wasn't something that was bad. I mean, my parents were like, no, fire is a tool and we need to use it and we're going to teach you how to use it... Fire in humans is really like, in a big way, fire is actually what makes us human.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [11:45]
[13:02] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“We need to be proactive. We can't just be reactive. And there is this, I think, kind of groundswell... fire's here, fire's not going away. In fact, it's probably going to get worse. But our solutions can get so much better.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [13:45]
[14:35] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“We're really not thinking about the risk of not doing it. And the risk of not doing it is so much more expensive.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [15:50]
[17:21] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
[21:06] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
[24:53] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“We're seeing fire everywhere.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [25:36]
[27:03] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
[30:30] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Having more people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives coming together to creatively think about fire is really essential to tackling kind of the complexities of the problem.”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [31:55]
[32:22] Dr. Kyra Hoffman:
“Without fire, we wouldn't really have any of that [language, culture, community].”
— Dr. Kyra Hoffman [33:25]
Dr. Kyra Hoffman offers a hopeful yet urgent roadmap for adapting to and mitigating the wildfire crisis: proactive management through prescribed and cultural burning, structural changes at policy and community levels, and a renewed respect for fire as a fundamental ecological and cultural force. The episode blends deep expertise, actionable advice, and optimism for a more resilient future.