Zeke Lunder on the latest episode of The Lookout
Here in Northern California, the devil’s own tinderbox, you can’t know too much about the threat wildfire poses to our way of life. That’s why The Lookout, a website and YouTube channel dedicated to providing near-real-time analysis of ongoing wildfires, produced by Chico-based wildfire analyst and mapping expert Zeke Lunder, comes highly recommended.
Lunder culls publicly available data from government agencies such as the California Office of Emergency Services and the USDA Forest Service National Infrared Operations Unit, GIS mapping, and Google Earth to create layered visual narratives that illustrate what’s happening on the ground of any given wildfire.
On his first live broadcast on Aug. 1, Lunder visited the McKinney Fire in the Klamath National Forest in western Siskiyou County via Google Earth. Four people were killed by the still burning fire.
On-screen, the alternating squares of US Forest Service land and private property form a checkerboard mosaic on the topographical map. Burned areas are greenish blobs and blotches with yellow outlines saddled over the ridges of the Sierra Cascade. Roads are bright blue lines. Fire lines dug by hand are brown squiggles, dozer lines are black slashes. Backfires are rendered in orange. Purple lines show the next area of planned attack. White outlines show the fire’s 24-hour progress; red outlines from NIO show the fire’s progress overnight.
The Lookout’s map of the McKinney Fire on Aug. 1, the day it started.
This multi-dimensional visual narrative is accompanied by Lunder’s expert analysis, honed by more than two decades in the field that is now called pyrogeography. He grew up in Lassen County in Westwood and worked on youth crews for the Forest Service in high school. In college he studied graphic design and worked for the Forest Service during the summers, marking trees for thinning around Eagle Lake.
An interest in geography steered him toward mapmaking, in which he majored. It wasn’t long after he graduated before he found himself in fire camps, using emerging digital technologies to provide fire managers and firefighters near real-time data.
“I kind of fell into mapping fires right when it started being a thing, when you took computers and plotters and stuff,” he told me over the phone from Chico. “I kind of fell into it and now I have a career in fire geography. Now there’s a field called pyrogeography that didn’t exist when I went to school, so I guess that makes me an OG pyrogeographer.”
Lunder ultimately founded a company that provides wildfire data to fire camps and sold it to another company, Chico-based Firestorm, where he still works as a director and a consultant. That’s his day job.
The Lookout is his side-gig. Lunder founded it as a website and blog last year after realizing Facebook wasn’t the best conduit for the information he wanted to publicly convey about the Dixie and Caldor Fires.
He enjoyed blogging, but getting up at 6 a.m. to download the overnight information, write a blog and choose graphics before he had to feed the kids at 7:30 became problematic. So, he started to do YouTube videos, which were easier to produce, and gained tens of thousands of views while the fires were burning.
“I started the website during the Dixie and Caldor Fires and there’s still interest, so we’re still doing it,” he said.
The Lookout’s map of Willow Creek fire, one of several started by lightning in the Six Rivers National Forest earlier this month.
At the start of each episode, Lunder is careful to state The Lookout isn’t an official government agency to be relied upon in an emergency situation. That’s the USFS, CAL FIRE, and the local authorities jurisdiction. Freed from official government constraints, Lunder is able to speculate on what the fire and the humans fighting it might do next.
Lunder is a proponent of using prescribed burning to help reduce the built-up fuel in California’s overgrown forests and brushlands. He also advocates allowing some wildfires to burn under certain circumstances to achieve the same results.
It’s estimated by Stanford researchers that one-fifth of California’s 105 million acres, 20 million acres, could benefit from prescribed burning. State and federal land managers want to ramp up prescription burning to 400,000 acres per year by 2025, but currently, CAL FIRE and the US Forest Service combined burn an average of just 80,000 acres annually.
“The problem with prescribed fire compared to wildfire is it’s discretionary,” Lunder said.
As the Stanford researchers discovered, the risk of prescribed fires escaping and sparking a larger conflagration, the lack of resources to do the work, and environmental regulations that limit putting smoke in the air all combine to limit the amount of prescribed burning that can be done annually.
Meanwhile, wildfires have burned an average 1.3 million acres per year in California during the past five years. Many of these fires have been deadly, such as the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people and totally incinerated the small northern Sierra town of Paradise. With horrendous incidents such as the Camp Fire, it’s easy to ignore that some wildfires have beneficial effects, namely, they can clear out forest fuels at a far faster rate than prescription burns if they’re managed correctly.
“There’s a lot of places on the landscape—we report on this on The Lookout—where you could let fires burn because of recent other fires,” Lunder said. “It’s not simple, you can’t just say you’re going to let a fire burn in Nevada City or Redding in September. But we do have places on the landscape where we have this patchwork of recent burns and natural barriers, like what they’re doing in Yosemite right now, using fire, even in the summer.”
Previous fires are revealed on The Lookout map when Lunder turns on the fire history layer. Many of today’s wildfires are surrounded by a patchwork quilt of burn scars from previous fires going back decades. Depending on how recent they are, these burn scars can serve the same purpose as hand or dozer lines or a granite monolith, providing fire managers with an optional barrier that in the right circumstances permits “good fire” to take its “natural place on the landscape” in order to clear out overgrown understory.
Last December, Zeke Lunder hung out with Kamau Bell from United Shades of America, who was in Butte County filming an episode on western wildfires.
Lunder points to Yosemite National Park, where park managers are currently permitting a wildfire to burn built-up vegetation, as one of the few places prescription burning is regularly practiced in the United States.
“Yosemite is one of the few places in the country where we’ve been really good at using fire, even during drought, even during high levels of fire alert,” he said on a recent episode of The Lookout. In Yosemite, fire managers have used the granite landscape, rivers, streams, trails, roads, and previous burn scars to confine fires within fixed areas of the park for decades.
“If you hike around Yosemite, the story is laid out right in front of you, it’s a great place to go learn what a forest should look like when you have frequent fire on a natural return interval,” Lunder said. “It’s a great place for a young forester to go to understand how fire regulates forests.”
Lunder knows that permitting some wildfires to burn remains a hard sell with the public and some legislators. Earlier this year, conservative Republican Reps. Doug LaMalfa (CA-01) and Tom McClintock (CA-04) introduced legislation “directing the U.S. Forest Service to immediately suppress wildfires on National Forest System lands and put an end to the policy of letting fires burn.”
In order to combat a problem caused by suppressing fires and allowing forests to become overgrown, the two representatives propose, like a dog chasing its own tail, yet more fire suppression.
“It’s the law of the land,” Lunder said. “The directive from the chief of the Forest Service is to keep putting out all the fires by 10 a.m. The problem is that’s an imaginary kind of reality that doesn’t work. I mean, we didn’t keep the McKinney Fire from burning 100 square miles in a couple of days. We can’t put out all the fires. We’re stuck with the fires we can’t put out.”
For the most part, Lunder says fire managers aren’t letting wildfires burn longer for beneficial purposes; they simply lack the resources to stop wildfires once they reach a certain size. The Carr Fire — that raged through Redding on a scorching hot afternoon in late July 2018, ultimately killing eight people, destroying 1604 structures, and burning more than 230,000 acres — is a case in point.
The Carr Fire continued burning north of Redding for more than a month, not for beneficial reasons, but because fire managers lacked the resources to put it out.
“It’s the terrain; they didn’t have good options in that box north of Whiskeytown,” Lunder said. “Once these fires get established at a certain size, we don’t have the resources to fight them. The terrain dictates where you can go in and put that fire out.”
US Forest Service and private timber ownership forms checkerboard pattern in northern California.
Lunder’s “map rants,” published three to four times per week around 7 a.m., are a mesmerizing blend of technology and firefighting knowledge. The viewer “flies” with Lunder via Google Earth as he explores the contours of the major wildfires burning in California and Oregon on any given morning.
Rather than criticize fire managers directly, he offers up options to use beneficial fire, if such options exist. He’ll question the use of aerial fire retardant, which can harm aquatic wildlife, on a ridge directly above a world-class salmon fishery. For the viewer, it’s like you’re in fire camp receiving the morning briefing.
Lunder has enormous respect for old-time firefighters and occasionally features them as guests on The Lookout. Nevertheless, he regularly gets on the soapbox to remind people we’re not dealing with the forests from 40 years ago. Today, we’re dealing with anthropogenic climate change’s accelerating warming effects and the very real possibility we may lose much of our forestland, if not to bark beetles then to wildfires, by the end of the century.
Somewhat ironically, Lunder, who has mastered the new mapping technology, doesn’t necessarily think it’s going to save us from ecological disaster.
“There’s lots of new technology, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re closer to solving the problem,” he said. “If anything, we’re probably farther away from it.”
“We have better tools for identifying and describing forest conditions,” he continued. “We’ve got planes that scan the forest space with lasers, and you can see every tree, you can see where the brush is thick under the trees. Research-wise, that’s great. But I think one of the problems is planning doesn’t equal reality. We can write up all these big-picture plans and say hey we just need to thin 10 million acres, but the problem is we don’t have the institutional capacity to actually do the work.”
Lunder avoids the conservative trope of blaming all of our wildfire woes on the federal government per se, but acknowledges the US Forest Service has structural issues that prevent it from fully addressing the wildfire crisis.
“The Forest Service has lost most of its capacity to do anything on the ground,” Lunder said. “Most of their energy is spent fighting fires and cleaning up after fires. So, we can have all the technical know-how and tools we want, but that doesn’t change the reality of the organization and the institutional problems.”
Without massive additional resources, the Forest Service isn’t likely to switch philosophies from fire suppression to fire prescription any time soon.
“They’re screwed either way,” Lunder said. “They can’t just stop putting fires out and burning towns down. But the more they put the fires out, the worse the problem is, and in the long term the more likely the towns are going to burn down.”
“I think we need a new agency, an agency that all they do is put fire on the ground,” he continued. “The existing fire agencies are overworked. By the time burning season comes, they’ve got no mojo. In fall and winter, we need a whole new workforce and a whole new agency to be out burning.
“Think about what we could do if took our existing fire suppression machine and turned it into a prescribed fire machine with air tankers and helicopters and thousands of firefighters. We’d get an amazing amount of work done, but there’s no incentive for any agency to make that happen.”
Pyrocumulus cloud over Dixie Fire as seen from Millville, August 2021.
In the meantime, Lunder occasionally works as a consultant promoting prescription burning to grassroots organizations such as the Butte County Prescribed Burn Association and local Fire Safe committees.
From November to February, after the rains come and the temperatures drop, burning brush and forest refuse in place can be a more economic option for communities and homeowners than physically removing the fuel, if it’s done safely.
“The whole idea of the PBA is you can go to it and see your neighbors burning and see it first-hand,” Lunder said. “A lot of people, they only thing they see about wildfires is big smoke clouds in the summer and big scary flames on TV. When you see your neighbors burning pine needles and letting the fire go across the forest and the flames are only about a foot tall, you realize what’s possible. The PBA is a way for people to get out and understand a different side of fire.”
Lunder takes his post at The Lookout seriously, which is to say he doesn’t varnish the truth. In his somewhat pessimistic view, technology isn’t going to save us from the Anthropocene because what we’re facing isn’t a technical problem, it’s a social problem, a resource-management problem.
No one can agree on what needs to be done. There’s no market for the small trees and forest refuse that are the core of the problem. There’s not enough sawmill or biomass energy capacity to address the massive scale of the problem.
“There’s a lot of smart people working on this and the fact that we’re not making progress is testament to the intractability of the problem,” Lunder said. “The Forest Service isn’t failing for lack of smart people in the agency. They’re set up to fail by the circumstances.
“They’re supposed to try and fix 150 years of bad decisions when it comes to land and fire management with a broken-down workforce, a changing climate, a public that doesn’t really understand the problem, a lack of political will, and an administration that changes every four years. It’s not set up for success.”
Ensuring the public at least gets the chance to understand the scale of the problem, one wildfire at a time, is The Lookout’s primary mission. In these troubling times, that knowledge might not solve our long-term problems, but it may at least ease our concerns about being burned alive in the short run.
