00:00People have a hard time with some logging practices and things like that, and yet when
00:07it's done right and done for fuels and forest health, and they see the results, they're
00:12much more supportive.
00:13We actually had a project where we built a fire break around a community and sure enough
00:18a fire started.
00:20Had it not been for that fire break, a half a billion dollars worth of property was likely
00:25burned.
00:27When people saw the success, like, oh that's what you're talking about, that's exactly
00:32why we did that project was to protect your property, we're getting more and more buy-in.
00:44This was burned in a 2017 wildfire that originated from Marble Mountain Ranch.
00:50Burned up the hill and they stopped it on this road system.
00:53Hey, we're heading down the hill now, down this little skid road.
00:59In Klamath, California, the team at Soames Bar Integrated Fire Management Project are
01:04making the transition to prescribed burning.
01:11The whole project was 5,500 acres, you know, that's the biggest project that's been planned
01:16here in my lifetime.
01:18I'm a tribal member and I grew up in my ancestral village of Woonkaruk on the lower Salmon River.
01:25You know, I started learning how to burn when I was four years old.
01:30So fire does a lot of things, you know.
01:32There was a time when we were trying to convince a wildlife biologist that we needed to do
01:37this type of work back in the mid-90s and he said, no, we can't do any burning because
01:42it's going to kill this endangered snail.
01:45It took some convincing, but we finally convinced him to let us go out there and burn some piles.
01:51And you know, he came back and he said, you know what, you just changed my mind.
01:57And I said, well, why was that?
01:59He said, because I went out and looked at that burn and every pile where there was still
02:04a chunk of charred wood, there was a snail.
02:09You know, there's benefits that people don't know, but what we do know is that we've been
02:15doing this in this place for thousands of years.
02:18That's the type of scale of evolutionary significance.
02:22Overall, what we've agreed to do is to work towards revitalizing those relationships with
02:30fire that we need to have in this place.
02:32Part of that being revitalizing our indigenous knowledge, practice and belief to get us there.
Comments