We sat down recently with Wolfgang (Wolfy) Rougle to talk about prescribed fire, and efforts she is helping lead to increase local capacity for citizen-led prescribed burning in Butte County, Califorina. The Butte County Prescribed Burn Association has been running for several years, and has helped landowners to safely burn on private property around Forest Ranch and Cohasset, California. We have been covering these burns, and I (Zeke) have had a contract with the Butte County Resource Conservation District (RCD) to help provide training and technical expertise on some of the PBA’s inital burns. You can see a video about this work on our YouTube channel.
Zeke Lunder
All right. So I’m here with Wolfgang Rougle, aka Wolfy. Wolfy was kind of the pioneer of the Butte County Prescribed Burn Association in the best possible sense of the term, establishing the first funding to develop a landowner prescribed burning association in Butte County and I wanted to talk to her about how she came up with the idea for a PBA, and also to hear how she arrived in her position leading fire resilience and land restoration projects for the Butte County Resource Conservation District.
Wolfy Rougle
Hello, my name is Wolfy Rougle. I’m a Tehama County landowner, and now a Butte County resident and employee of the Butte County Resource Conservation District. About 5 years ago, I thought it might be a good idea to go back to school and try to understand policy around how we care for the lands and try to figure some things out about why the land isn’t getting all the care that it needs. And I became interested in learning more about why we’re not putting all the prescribed fire on the ground that we know we need. We’re constantly hearing about how much we need it, and a lot of people focus on the Forest Service and how they need to put more prescribed fire on the ground. I remember learning about it(prescribed fire) in college, like, oh, we figured out that fire actually isn’t all bad. And using fire in the right way is so important. And the Indians knew how to manage fire and everything. So now we’re gonna put all this fire in the Sierras. And I thought, Oh, great people are handling it, that’s cool. I just won’t worry about it at all for the next 15 or 20 years.
You know, the large federal agencies have a lot of responsibility to care for the forests, too. But there’s enough private forest land in California for another 12 or 13 national forests. And two thirds of that private forest land is owned by individuals or families, I’m one of them. And none of us, really, very few of us have the family history or the neighborhood culture of using fire in a positive way. And it’s not really possible to find that instruction. It’s not like Cal Fire can come out and give you a masterclass. It’s not like there’s a public education campaign to teach you how to do that. So I just really wanted for local landowners to have some place they could turn if they were interested in learning about using fire on their land. So when I heard about the concept of PBAs, that was in maybe 2017 or 2018, shortly after the first PBA in California was established, which is the Humboldt PBA. I just really felt like it would be great if we had one in Butte County where I already happened to have an agency job and the standing to try and make one happen. Since then, a bunch of other ones have gotten established.
Zeke Lunder
So Butte was actually one of the first PBAs in the northstate after Humboldt County, right?
Wolfy Rougle
Yes, along with the Plumas Underburn Cooperative.
Zeke Lunder
So you and I started working together on some planning projects in the foothills here, and once you had a grant to fund the PBA, you’re able to bring me in and some other folks to help teach landowners how to manage a burn, and we’ve done mainly 5-10 acre burns in black oak and ponderosa pine forests. I’m curious how you think the PBA concept of landowner-led burning really scales? Will it be a solution for getting larger projects done on private lands? Or do you think it’s just kind of be kind of a neighborhood effort where people kind of can maybe make a difference in in small areas? Do you see the PBA model scaling up to be effective on 1000s or 10s of 1000s of acres?
Wolfy Rougle
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I can see it being effective on much larger burns, but I also think small burns are themselves effective and are big successes. They can help save people’s houses from burning, and as people build their fire management skills, they get us ready for whatever the next step for making our communities more resilient is. As for scaling up, I think that as we build this increasingly skilled core of rural and foothill (and city too) residents who are able to use fire effectively and have basic fire management skills and have that sort of savvy, there’s no reason why those people can’t also become a supplementary prescribed fire workforce on federal lands on industrial timberlands, on larger private lands and ranches in state, or on refuges and other wildlands, for example lands owned by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Zeke Lunder
So is that one of your intentions with the PBA is to move beyond local landowner barns and to build the overall capacity within the state for using prescribed fire?
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, just to transform us rural people. And I put myself at the forefront of this from, you know, people who may have a scattering of skills of living out here, but wouldn’t really know what to do when a wildfire or prescribed fire comes to their neighborhood. With all of the fires we have been having, prescribed burning and firefighting skills are just a core competency of rural living now. If you live in a fire adapted landscape, I think everybody who lives out on the land should just have those basic skills and should be able to step up when needed or when the opportunities are there to burn on larger acreage. Of course, a lot of other things need to happen besides us being skilled before some of those larger acreages can be burned. And no one knows that better than you. Right? But we want to be ready when opportunities to use good fire come to our neighborhoods.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah. I appreciate there’s this wide range of skill sets needed to make this happen. When I first saw that you were starting the PBA and getting ready to do burns, I was like ‘she’s never burned before, how’s this gonna work’? I now I realize it was so important for you to take that administrative step for all of us – you don’t have to be someone who’s super experienced with prescribed fire or firefighting to start building a program or securing funding. Now that you’ve gotten some startup funding, you’ve been able to recruit qualified help.
Wolfy Rougle
That was the idea. I did not know if it would work. That seems to be working out. I think what draws me to the PBA model or philosophy is just it’s so everyone has something to contribute. Everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn. Some people who come along to burns really just observe, that’s okay. They’re members of our communities. And by being present, they’re carrying the message of good fire and that fire doesn’t have to be a traumatizing evil force back to their communities. Some people are are elderly, or maybe not all that able, or are very young, and they’re just out on the fireline kind of scratching in this one place. But that’s okay. They’re safe. They’re there. They’re they’re contributing; maybe those people don’t go on and become part of a prescribed fire workforce that scales across the Sierras. And that’s okay. Everybody, everybody belongs in fire.
Zeke Lunder
What’s your hope for what things will look like five years from now with landowner-led burning? What’s your hope?
Wolfy Rougle
I would like every rural community throughout the fire adapted west to have its own little PBA. It can be very informal. But I’d like every community to have a shed with fire tools that people can borrow. I’d like there to be enough fire skills in the community and people to know each other well enough that they can call each other up. And it’s just like a normal thing to do on a fall afternoon. Instead of going inside and watching TV, go outside and burn a couple of acres with your neighbors. I’d like that to be a normal part of rural life. At the same time, of course, I’d also like to see much bigger burns across larger acreage on big ownerships up and down the Sierra, I’d like to see more managed wildfire. I’d like to see all of that. But I guess what I really focus on is the experience of what it’s like to live in a rural community. I would like good fire to be a really vibrant part of that.
Zeke Lunder
I think that’s been the fun thing about doing some of the burning in the foothills here – seeing these neighborhood dynamics where the old loggers, construction workers, and pot-grower neighbors get together to burn, coming together around the common cause of having a safer neighborhood.
Wolfy Rougle
Yes, wildfire is sort of the last apolitical issue.
Zeke Lunder
Right. I think that’s one thing I really liked about fire is that like, you don’t have to talk politics. everyone’s interested in finding ways we can deal with it. Do you have anything else you want to say about the PBAs or prescribed burning?
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, I do. I think part of what’s really broken with our relationship with fire is that we’ve professionalized it so much. And I think de-professionalization is something I’ve always been looking for, in any interest that I have, whether that was growing food, or making medicine at home for my family. And now with the use of fire. There are some things that only highly trained elite professionals are going to be able to do for us, and that’s okay. But then there’s this whole other set of tasks just in daily life we really have to take responsibility for ourselves. We can’t wait for professionals to come and do everything that we need done, because there just aren’t enough professionals. So we have these elite teams of firefighters and fire lighters. And that’s great that they can go and do really complex burns, that’s where they really shine, but we can’t expect them to come into our neighborhoods, and just do all the work to make our neighborhoods safer. We should be doing this ourselves – it’s something that should just be part of everybody’s sort of day-to-day job description. And I like seeing that culture change, I like seeing people kind of stretch and understand, Oh, I am capable of this. Yeah, if you’re waiting for help to come and no help is coming, you might need to be the help
Zeke Lunder
I like that we can take the parts of wildland fire culture that we want, and we can leave behind the stuff that we don’t want. When I have been working as a burn boss with you, it’s really nice to have the structure and the chain of command, and the radios and the terminology and to be able to adapt wildfire tactics to burning someone’s yard, but it’s great to have the freedom to leave behind parts of fire culture that we don’t like, like the huge amount of bureaucracy, the insane schedules and being gone all summer, or throttling of public information. We can create our own narrative. And to me, that’s one of the great things about these kinds of citizen organizations we’re building is that we can tell our own story. You don’t have to wait for someone to spin it. We don’t have to ask permission to talk to the camera.
Wolfy Rougle
I think how will really know when we succeeded is when there’s just sort of a new colloquial jargon of fire that didn’t exist before. I understand it’s important that we use all this jargon from wildland firefighting, and it’s useful, but you don’t actually need to learn all of that jargon to fire or light fire effectively. And so it’s really fun to me when people are out there just working together and they create their own terminology for things because they don’t know that the agency jargon word for it, so they just come up with a word that works for them in their neighborhood. And when we see that, you know, linguistic diversity spreading back out across California, that’s when we’ll know we’ve built something new.
Zeke Lunder
So do you have any prescribed fire terminology invented locally you can share?
Wolfy Rougle
I’ll think of some as soon as I leave here, I’m sure.
Something that I did that I do really think about a lot. And I have thought about from the first time I announced there was a PBA in Butte County is I don’t want the existence of PBAs to become a barrier for people who don’t want to participate in one. Everyone has the right use fire on their land, it doesn’t matter whether you are a misanthrope, or you’re somebody who’s involved in every civic organization under the sun, or somebody in between. Having a PBA in the County doesn’t necessarily make somebody’s burn more legitimate, or make their needs more important. It doesn’t make their knowledge more valid. I was thinking about this the other day, because we have like a standard burn plan template, you don’t have to use it, but we have it on our website. It’s just, it’s something that kind of helps you organize your thoughts. And if you’re a landowner planning your first spring, it’s kind of an outline of things you probably want to cover in your burn plan – but you don’t have to fill out every part of it word for word. But you know, it has all these kinds of blanks for you to fill out and stuff. And that’s all great. And then I was thinking of adding a slot at the bottom, where it says, you know, signed off by by a CARX (California certified burn boss), because we’re going to have those pretty soon. And if your burn plan is approved by a Carex, so you get a few special privileges, but it’s not required that you have your burn plan signed off on by actually anyone really. So how – this is just such a classic administrative arts problem – how do you put in a blank on a form without sort of taking away liberty from the person who is going to fill out that form? How do you make it clear that this blank is optional? I just I don’t want anything that we do to take away the rights or the the validity of the knowledge of people who are already doing this work.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah. That’s a great point. We don’t need to create more hoops for people to jump through before they can burn their pine needles.
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah. Or to create a just a new, somewhat more accessible professionalism. I mean, that’s, that can happen. That’s okay. But that shouldn’t. That shouldn’t be the only path to fire. The point is to create multiple paths to fire not to narrow the ones which already exist.
What do you want to see in the next five years in the local good fire world?
Zeke Lunder
I’d like to see us get better at seizing opportunities for burning presented after we have wildfires. Every time we have a fire (especially in brush and timber), we’ve end up with a big chunk of black on the landscape that isn’t going be a real fire hazard for a period of time. We know we’re going to continue to have wildfires around our communities. And we know that we’re going to fight aggressively to keep them out of our towns. Every time we have a fire that burns up to the community, and we have dozer line and control lines and everything right up against homes, we create tactical opportunities to burn the area between the homes and the wildfire scar in the following fall or the next year. So I’d like to see us get to a point where we anticipate fires and we can pull the trigger on projects that would be impossible to do now. So if we have a fire that burns, right up to Cohasset, that we’re kind of primed to come in, and take advantage of that and do some big projects in the community while there is a greatly diminished chance to the prescribed burn escaping to the adjacent wildlands.
There’s often this hesitancy to do prescribed fire right after a fire, the agencies think it’s going to re-traumatize the community to burn, but I think it does the opposite. (Wolfy: I think so too). So I think using fire to heal trauma is important and we really could be burning weeds, pine needles, and oak leaves all over around Paradise, Berry Creek, and other recently burned areas. I think it could really help the people who are returning to these places to heal their fire trauma.
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, you know, when I started the PBA, a lot of experts told me that it was the wrong time – I shouldn’t even talk about a PBA in Butte County because people were so traumatized. I surveyed landowners and found that they were really, really interested (landowners who just been through the Camp Fire) they were really interested in prescribed fire, education, and in getting help to burn. We know that people deal with with trauma in all kinds of ways. But we definitely know that one of the ways people deal with trauma is by deliberately recreating the traumatizing situation but with themselves in control this time.
What you described before about being nimble, and utilizing recently burned wildfire footprints to get work done that we couldn’t otherwise do is, you know, from an administrative standpoint, from a state agency standpoint; it’s totally feasible to have a big rotating fund that just like there’s funds for disaster recovery, after every disaster, there could be funds that become available six months or nine months or a year after a severe wildfires for recovery resilience projects anchor into the burn footprint to reduce fuels within the surrounding communities. So that’s not exactly disaster recovery, that’s disaster use. Those funds could just be available for a limited time. If you don’t use them, they just go back to the state or whoever the funder is, and they can sign on to the next. Well, it’s good stuff.
Zeke Lunder
What are you excited about? Like, are we going to be able to scale? What kind of prescribed fire is proposed for the RCD’s new forest health project up around Jonesville and Butte Meadows?
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, so the Upper Butte Creek Forest Health Initiative is a 20,000 acre project on federal lands around Jonesville and Bute Meadows and every acre is proposed for prescribed fire. Obviously, some acres aren’t burnable, but it was the direction from the District Ranger, Russell Nickerson, from the very beginning that he wanted to lay the groundwork for getting prescribed fire back into the area, if nothing else. And I’m really grateful for that leadership.
There’s plenty of other treatments in there too, as well, of course, forest treatments, meadow health, reshaping some roads so they put less sediment into the creeks. But going north from the northern boundary of the upper Butte Creek project is another proposed 160,000 acre project – the West Lassen Headwaters Project, which spans Deer Creek, Battle Creek, Mill Creek, Antelope Creek. Both of these projects are being planned using ‘conditions-based NEPA’, which means that the precise location of every project every treatment, every potential prescribed fire isn’t something that we tried to pin down before we sign a decision and say, ‘okay, let’s start work on this project’. Those precise locations are things that we determine later, based on the conditions at the time, and based on a long list of what we’re looking for.
Zeke Lunder
How far out are you guys from being able to actually do work up there?
Wolfy Rougle
Well, we are in the late stages of developing the Proposed Action, Purpose and Need [PAPN]. So that will be available for the public to read over this fall. And folks can propose all kinds of modifications, and we’ll modify that and develop alternatives over the winter in the spring. The earliest we could begin implementation would be like January 2024, if everything goes perfectly.
Okay. You know, another thing that the fuels officer on the Lassen National Forest was just telling me about this morning is that there are, as you know, there were 1,000s of miles of dozer line created during the Dixie Fire, right. And he’s creating a map of selected lines that he’d really liked to maintain as permanent fire lines. Those could be useful for suppression, but he’s also selecting them to be useful for prescribed fire, so that the landscape just has more holding features. Under the natural range of variation, which is the Forest Service term for what the land rightfully should look like, about 5% of the land base would burn in a given year. That means the whole thing would burn over 20 years. And, of course, it’s a dynamic mosaic, so some acres are burning a lot more frequently, and some are hardly ever burning because they’re, you know, high elevation fir. But we want to create a landscape where we can facilitate 5% of the landscape burning every year and it’s no problem.
Zeke Lunder
So the idea is you are doing big-picture planning work now to pre-identify the kinds of specific rare plant or wildlife surveys you’ll need to do if you want to do a project somewhere in the future?
NEPA planning seems like such a bottleneck to getting work done on the Federal lands. It seems like one problem is the Forest Service likes to do 5,000-6,000 acre NEPA projects, when we’ve got a million acre forest that needs fire every five to 10 years.
Wolfy Rougle
It’s really good to see a lot of National Forests try and find creative solutions to overcome that problem. The Mendocino National Forest is developing a whole-forest prescribed fire EA (planning document), and to authorize prescribed fire on every acre of that forest to do exactly what you were just talking about, which is trying to take advantage of the existing fire footprints from the 2020 fires that they just had and build off of those. I wish them luck.
Zeke Lunder
I’m pretty jaded on environmental planning. We’ve been planning what to do with our forests from the past 100 years, and we’re still watching the Dixie Fires and August Complexes take them all out. I mean, we know what we need to do, right?
Wolfy Rougle
I think I got interested in planning after hearing you and people like you talk about how exhausted they were with it and what a problem that was. And I thought, Oh, something that’s really intractable and a huge problem that everyone hates doing. I want to see what
Zeke Lunder
{Interupring} Is it because you’re masochistic or just curious?
Wolfy Rougle
If it’s something a lot of people have found something difficult, at least, it’s probably worth trying. Maybe that’s not the right way to look at it. Maybe it’s not worth trying at all, because so many smart people have already thrown up their hands and said this is not worth doing. I guess everybody talks about it as a bottleneck. So if that’s the barrier, let’s let us figure out why it’s the barrier. I don’t know. It’s not going anywhere. It is really, it is an exciting time to work in someplace like an RCD or a fire safe council or someplace like that, because these agencies that for a long time have been kind of their own closed ships are really deliberately and dynamically opening up, and you can have a really big impact on what happens on forest service land without actually working for the Forest Service. And as a cooperator or a partner, agency person. I don’t know, maybe there’s a way for us who are just outside the Forest Service, looking in, to help solve the problem, I would like for that to happen.
Zeke Lunder
So what do you think we need organizationally to scale up the PBA? In your five year plan for the PBA, what kind of extra human power do we need? What kind of other resources do we need? What’s the bottleneck right now to burning more with the PBA?
Wolfy Rougle
You mean on Federal land specifically? Okay. It would be nice to be able to pay people for their time – sometimes we’ve had a ton of people more than willing to volunteer, but I mean, I guess if you’re going to scale things up dramatically, you’re going to run out of what can be accomplished only with volunteers. Just just growing it steadily, just more landowners seeing the benefits and wanting it on their own land. More neighbors getting together and wanting cross boundary burns and stuff. I think that each person who comes to a PBA burn is like a seed that goes back to their neighborhood and their community and hopefully tell somebody how fun and actually kind of easy it was and how it’s something they could replicate. I mean, in 20 years, I would like for there not to be necessarily a Butte PBA. I would like for each neighborhood to be just self-sufficiently burning on its own. And for that to be very normal, then for air quality and CalFire and all the other agencies to just have accepted and normalized it.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, there is huge interest. When we were reporting on the Mosquito Fire, I was talking about PBAs and it was a huge interest in citizen-led burning.
I do feel like we’re leaning heavily on a few core people right now, and it’d be nice to really broaden it out. And I also feel like we really need to get retired fire people on board – there’s so many people that have the skills to safely burn.
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah, and empowering them and creating some space for them to do it in a way that feels not to not like we’re saddling them with all this responsibility – kind of container where they can come and share and not have it all be their problem is if something goes wrong.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah. I think that’s been the hard part for me with the PBA so far. You show up at a volunteer event with a bunch of people who may have never worked with live fire before and if you are the most experienced person you might suddenly find yourself in charge. And then – I mean I kind of like the anarchic part of it, but then there’s also the very real liability. And even if it’s not legal liability, it’s emotional liability for the person that is supervising. Last year, in the course of three days, we had two vehicle mishaps on burns that I was helping with, and one almost crushed a college kid between an oak tree and a vehicle. He came within inches of being killed. And the other mishap was when a PBA volunteer jumped in a fire truck that belonged to a nonprofit and scraped it up on a huge steel fence post. Caused thousands of dollars in damage. To me those events were a wakeup call that there’s a lot of things about jobsite/work safety that people who have been in fire or a construction for a long time just take for granted – for example, using a spotter when you back up a vehicle, or flagging a tripping hazard – that aren’t necessarily common practice in the general public. So when we have all these people working together, it’s very likely it’s NOT going to be the fire that causes the accident or the injury. It’s going to be a vehicle accident or quad rollover; a Pulaski in the knee, or just other things that happen when people work in the woods. I’d like to see the PBAs really thinking about how we can adapt the safety culture from construction and firefighting. There’s plenty of people out in the communities that have decades of experience in working safely, but that we really need to elevate jobsite safety. We get so focused just on containing the fire that we forget vehicles or loose footing are often way more dangerous.
Wolfy Rougle
Yeah. This past summer, the whole RCD decided that we all needed to have wilderness first aid certification. And we were able to open, I think about nine spots in that certification to PBA members in the community. So that was a tiny drop in the bucket. But it was great to be able to provide that training for community members when we had the class. It’s an all day class, and at the beginning, you know, a few people kind of knew each other. And by the end, we were all pretty bonded as a group. And we were already talking about how we were going to use what we just learned. On the next fire line, the next mountain biking trip, the next time we went out to cut firewood, all of these like very dangerous things that we do all the time. That we, you know, they don’t they don’t teach you these things at school.
Zeke Lunder
So you’ll be packing some Quik-Clot with your chainsaw kit?
Wolfy Rougle
Right? Yeah, yeah, and I should know where my femoral artery is, when I ride my mountain bike.
Zeke Lunder
Let’s talk about volunteer fire departments – I noticed, in Butte County, we haven’t really engaged necessarily with the volunteer fire departments, what do you see as opportunities and barriers to engaging the volunteers in more of this work we’re doing?
Wolfy Rougle
Well, in Butte County, the volunteer fire departments, my understanding is that they pretty much work for Cal Fire. And they can’t move an engine to a fire without Cal Fire’s approval, which means that if there’s a fire going on in another part of the county, or even another part of the state that doesn’t have anything to deal with prescribed fire that’s going on CalFire may be unwilling to let them move their engine there. So it’s a pretty different situation than people face in a lot of other counties where the volunteer fire departments are pretty autonomous.
Zeke Lunder
Basically, they’re treated a lot like Cal Fire resources? {Wolfy} Yes. {Zeke} How about the people themselves, not just equipment, are there similar obstacles to getting, or the barriers to volunteers in Butte County, coming out and burning with us?
Wolfy Rougle
I have heard volunteers express uncertainty that it’s appropriate for them to be on a prescribed fire even when they’re not on the clock. Because of that, understanding that Cal Fire really needs to sign off on everything that they do. So, and I’ve heard them, you know, express that uncertainty and then get guidance from the Battalion Chief like, no, well, that’s okay. As long as you’re, you’re not working and you’re not needed. You know, you’re not on a shift. So you could be called off somewhere else. Sometimes on smaller burns, we have had the volunteer fire department, folks roll up on an engine and they just kind of stayed until they got a call about you know, a medical call somewhere else in Forest Ranch and they left and they came back and they left and that was fine. I mean, it was it was great having them there for part of the day and we knew that we could handle the fire when they weren’t there too. And we weren’t counting on them as a holding resource and that was nice.
Zeke Lunder
It can be tough to pull off a burn if you are relying on contingency forces that can be called away. If the volunteer engine was officially on the burn plan as a contingency resource, you might be required to stop burning if they became committed to other incidents – it points out the importance of having local, privately-owned fire equipment like water tenders or slip-in fire pumps for pickup trucks….
Well, Wolfy, I guess that wraps it up. Thanks for coming over today, and thanks for everything you’ve been doing on the behalf of Good Fire here in Butte County!
Wolfy Rougle
Thanks for having me!