Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers
Yesh Pavlik Slenk
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How do we learn to live with wildfire?
US Forest Service research ecologist Frank Kanawha Lake is bringing Indigenous ways of knowing to managing fire into the 21st century. Frank learned from his Yurok and Karuk family the cultural practice of setting fires to prevent blazes. He is at the heart of a conflict that’s raged for more than a century: Is all fire bad? Can we use fire for good? How? Jobs to address wildfires could include lots of career paths. What skills do you need? In the field, they need people who can run bulldozers to suppress fires, or harvest logs with a skid-steer. They also need wildlife biologists and hydrologists to understand how fire impacts whole ecosystems. And there’s a whole new field incorporating new technologies into wildfire -- which can work with Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Frank Kanawha Lank notes, “I see this as an emergent field for a lot of young Native people who have traditional teachings and upbringings like I have, but who are also getting the Western academic training in remote sensing, GIS and modeling. So there's a way of looking at an actual fire event, how it's burning and what's going on for fire behavior. There's also the more remote sensing level of looking at that fire or a complex of fires in an area, that helps you assess the vegetation or to fuel loading and the risks to community or the benefits of where fire could be applied.” He added, “The work I do as a scientist, the work I do as a practitioner in managing or stewarding the environment for foods, for medicines, thinking about the fish and water, going to those high mountain springs to check in on them. Each and every one of us have a form of responsibility that we use today, to start and plant a seed. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to happen in generations. It's going to be what you choose to step up and do and take responsibility for.”
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