Wolfy Rougle is Conservation Project Manager with the Butte County Resource Conservation District. She is a botanist, farmer, land tender, and illustrator. Among other things, she has written books about edible plants, and started the Butte Prescribed Burn Association (PBA).
We met up with Wolfy to talk about her vision for citizen-led burning in Butte County.
Watch a video of our interview here, or read it, below.
Zeke Lunder
All right now I’m out here with Wolfy Rougle. Whe works for the Butte County Resource Conservation District, and we met through prescribed fire and land management. Over the past couple years, Wolfy and I have been able to burned together a lot, thanks in large part to funding that she secured to help establish a prescribed burn association here in Butte County. Welcome to The Lookout, Wolfy!
Can you talk a bit about what drove you to start the PBA in Butte County and what you hope to achieve with it?
Wolfy Rougle
Thanks, I’m glad to be here. I started the Butte PBA because I wanted there to be a way for ordinary people, landowners or people who live in town to learn how to put good fire on the ground and care for the land. And there’s no real way for landowners to acquire that information if they don’t have a family tradition or a neighborhood tradition of burning which these days almost no one does. I don’t have ancestors who manage the land with fire. I don’t know many people who do have that. You can’t call Cal Fire and say, “Hey, come give me some instruction, give me a masterclass”. Even a lot of consulting foresters don’t have a drip torch in their toolbox. Apparently, you can get all the way through your registered professional foresters licensing program without having much understanding of how to apply fire. I wanted there to be a way for just ordinary people to acquire fire knowledge and the Resource Conservation District was the perfect organization to take on the Butte PBA and continue its mission of helping landowners and conserving resources. Because what RCDs do is we write grant applications and bring money into the county that wouldn’t be there otherwise to be able to help landowners or public land managers as well to take care of the land.
Zeke Lunder
What’s your five year vision for the PBA? What would you like to see happen with that energy and with this kind of community approach to getting burning done?
Wolfy Rougle
On a day like today, it’s a pretty good burn day, somewhere in the county. People are just out burning. They’re out burning everyday that’s a good burn day. They’re giving the land the fire it needs, whether it’s a broadcast burn, or an old fashioned pile burn. People are cutting firewood, people are just getting together with their neighbors. And fire is just something that’s not unusual anymore. It’s not such a big adventure. It’s something that people are able to do just all the time. It’s a part of ordinary life.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, I like that. I think one of the things I appreciate the most about the PBA is being able to bring my kids and eat some pizza, and then have my kids be part of something that’s exciting and kind of technical. And at the same time kind of casual and neighborly?
Wolfy Rougle
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, because prescribed fire is so rare. We think of it as something like “Oh, well, you might, you might be likely to injure yourself today. This seems risky”. I mean, I hear people express that. But then you get out there and it’s pretty chill. It’s pretty mellow. And then the next day the same people will go mountain biking, plunging down 50% slopes and doing something that’s actually dangerous, for fun.
Zeke Lunder
So I’ve come here a couple of times now (Bidwell Park) to interview students and staff from the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserves (BCCER). And when I ask them what they think of when they look at this landscape here, pretty much everyone says ‘I want to burn it’! Since you started working with fire is it hard for you to walk around now and look at things without thinking about what you would do if you had a lighter your hand and permission to use it?
Wolfy Rougle
{Laughs} Absolutely. Since I started learning about fire, I see potential fire everywhere or past fire, as well as the past lack of fire. Everything is just frozen at a particular moment in its fire return interval, including us.
Zeke Lunder
So when you look at this landscape here in Bidwell Park, we’ve got some burn units identified here. What do you think? What would you like to see in this particular landscape improved? Like what would we be trying to accomplish if we burned here right now?
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, well here in this landscape I see a lot of young Live Oak, which is often associated with fire suppression. But what really jumps out at me is the level of invasive weeds. There’s a lot of star thistle here, and a lot of annual European grasses. I feel like the way that this land really wants to express its grassland nature is through probably more of a bunchgrass prairie. You can see that a little further out towards the road where I think there’s been a lot of good replanting. A bunchgrass prairie is really discontinuous. It’s not just like a continuous fur of grass, like we see here. There’s a lot of spaces in between the bunches of grass. Those little clumps of grass make these shaded little microclimates for acorns to land and germinate. And they break up the continuity of fire as it moves across the prairie too. So I think if we had more of a bunchgrass prairie out here, it might even make Chico a little safer (by slowing down fire spread). And it would be botanically very interesting!
Zeke Lunder
So that brings up an interesting point – using fire for land management has to be kind of part of a more integrated ecological plan, where we’re working towards a given outcome. I went looked at some potential burns in Paradise. And people were interested in burning the scotch broom to reduce fuel loading. And I asked them, well, what do you want this to look like in 5-10 years? And they couldn’t tell me. I think that people need to know that – unless you can kind of work with people to articulate the future vegetation or forest condition you want to achieve, we can’t really do a prescribed burn. It’s kind of like going to the doctor and asking them to make you well without them having an idea what a healthy person looks like, right?
Wolfy Rougle
Right! I think that’s why coming from a resource conservation district (RCD) perspective, it’s such a natural fit with the Butte PBA, because whatever you’re helping a landowner with, when you come from the RCD, your first question is, well, what are your goals for your land? Some people have very specific wildlife outcomes that they want. Some people have very specific cultural plants or edible plants that they want to promote. Other people have a vision that’s passed down from their forebearers that they want to reenact on their family’s land, something like that. There’s a lot of different reasons that people might want to use fire. And there’s just a lot of different paths to fire, I guess. But I think you’re right, there are some things that fire can’t do. And the reason I was shaking my head, when you were talking about the broom eradication is that I haven’t seen anyone be successful using fire to eradicate broom. So, you know, you can only ask a fire so much.
You can choose the time in the season of applying fire to achieve different goals. There are a lot of species in California where if you apply fire at a certain time, you actually stimulate them to re sprout and become denser. And if you apply it at a different time, you’re more likely to reduce their numbers kill a lot of that population, which may be your goal. So there’s just so much to learn.
Zeke Lunder
So you’re getting a bit into the prescription part of prescribed burning – by choosing when and where and how much fire to put on the ground, you can kind of create an outcome in the kind of treatment that you’re giving the land.
Wolfy Rougle
Right! A prescription is something that you take to achieve an outcome.
Zeke Lunder
So I guess we talked about prescribed burning. So what is pile burning? Kind of like the over the counter version?
Wolfy Rougle
{Laughs} Yeah, I guess so. I could see that. Some of those piles are pretty big. But then some people take the whole bottle of Advil, don’t they? I guess. Yeah, I mean, pile burning is a great tool. Most people consider it prescribed burning.
Zeke Lunder
It’s always rankled me a little bit when when people say there’s a prescribed burn, but they’re burning piles and there’s 3 feet of snow. It kind of rubs me the wrong way. Because that’s just pile burning – anyone can burn piles in the snow!
Wolfy Rougle
Yes, anyone can burn piles in the snow. But does that make it less worth doing?
Zeke Lunder
When you include pile burning in prescribed fire, then you take on the liability of all those escaped piles. And almost all the prescribed fires that escape are actually just burn piles. So I feel like by not just calling it pile burning, we kind of do ourselves a disservice.
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, yeah. No, I think you’re right. And I really love your over-the-counter metaphor, the more that I think about it, it is something can that be risky when used incorrectly – you just expressed that – but it’s also a path to fire that is open to all of us.
Zeke Lunder
What’s the relationship between Chico State Reserves, the PBA, and the Butte County RCD?
Wolfy Rougle
Well, the view PBA is a program of the Resource Conservation District. The RCD gets the grants that fund the PBA. The equipment that the PBA loans out to landowners is technically owned by the RCD. We work with a lot of partners, including the big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, which is part of the CSU Reserves System. The Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve has an incredible Workforce Development and Training Program, training folks up in fire in natural resources management, forestry, fisheries, biology, all kinds of the Natural Resources trades. And so it’s also a great place to hold trainings and to do prescribed fires. A lot of Butte PBA members have the will have the opportunity to go to the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, and participate in Burns if they have the qualifications needed, or just walk units that have been burned and learn about fire ecology, investigate the effects of a particular fire versus a particular other fire. Just you know, tune up their fire eyes and learn how fire wants to move in this landscape. It’s awesome.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been really excited about working with those guys and gals. They’re doing great. Great stuff there. Well, okay. Thanks for coming out to The Lookout’s oak office. Nice to have you out here, and to be out in the open air with you.
Wolfy Rougle
It’s great. Thanks.