While we've had a few episodes here and there go into the policy side of the wildfire conversation, we've never had a full episode dedicated to it. And Tyson Bertone-Riggs—co-founder of the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience, and former executive director and policy manager for the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition—was a perfect guide for our first legislative foray.
While we've had a few episodes here and there go into the policy side of the wildfire conversation, we've never had a full episode dedicated to it. And Tyson Bertone-Riggs—co-founder of the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience, and former executive director and policy manager for the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition—was a perfect guide for our first legislative foray.
Tyson and his fellow AWR co-founder Annie Schmidt also served as staff co-leads/coordinators for the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, which established by congress in 2021 and which had developed 164 recommendations for a road map to improved wildfire resilience by 2023.
In this episode, we talk about the value of wildfire being a bipartisan issue in congress, how Tyson and countless others are contributing to greater political momentum around the wildfire problem (including through the Fix Our Forests Act), and what the future of wildfire policy (and operations) might look like, particularly as the systems become increasingly destabilized through consolidation, staff reductions and threatened (but as of lass week, blocked by a federal judge) reorganization of the Forest Service.
We ended on talking about how everyone in the wildfire space should be imagining a different future with fire—and how this imagining, this shared vision, will be essential to being more proactive about what creative solutions and actions—including those in the policy realm—we're prepared to take.
A few great quotes from Tyson towards the end of the episode:
"We have an opportunity to rethink what we need the system to be. As a community of people who care about wildfire, we should be spending time looking forward and thinking about what elements we need for a system that actually delivers in a way that we need it to—to articulate a shared vision."
"[It's about] moving away from reactivity, taking a step back and pointing the way towards something that's not just an argument about what we're doing right now, but stepping out of the immediacy of it and painting a bigger picture vision of what we want."
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