Fighting Fire with Fire- Prescribed Burns & Protecting your Home with Bodie Shaw

Can we fight fire with fire? The American Lung Association has released a report suggesting that this is a healthy way forward, and our Native communities have used ceremonial burns on our lands for generations. I wanted to talk to someone who lives at the intersection of all of this. 

For this episode, I was honored to be joined by Bodie Shaw. He is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and previously served as the national wildland fire director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and has worked as the acting Chief of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, ID. He is a veteran of the US Air Force, and previously taught at Oregon State University. He has lectured widely on tribal interests as they pertain to natural resource management. In 2008, Shaw was the first to participate in an international exchange program between the U.S. and Australian governments and lived Down Under with his family from August 2008 to March 2009 while developing a new trilateral wildland fire/bushfire agreement between the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. He currently serves as the Bureau of Indian Affairs deputy regional director of Trust Services for the Northwest Region.

Today, we talk about balancing the perils and the promise of prescribed burns in wildfire-prone areas.

To Do

• Got to Firewise.org to learn how to protect your home and family.
• Learn more about health impacts from prescribed burns from the ALA report “Can Prescribed Fires Mitigate Health Harm.”
• Tell your representatives how important it is to ensure a professional and well-funded, year round proactive approach to decreasing the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
• Learn more about the health of our wildland firefighters and outdoor workers by listening to “The Health of Our Heroes” episode from Season One.
• Learn more about the impact of wildfire smoke and how to keep you and your family safe during smoke events by listening to the “Our Health in Wildfire Season” episode from Season Two.
• Donate to the American Lung Association who works hard to help navigate challenging health concerns such as their evaluation of health effects of prescribed burns.

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