Day 2: TALK STORY: From Past Lessons to Future Innovations— Climate Resilience and Land Management in the Age of Megafires
“The solutions are creating those resilient landscapes.” —Marco Bey
“It’s going to come back to you. Is going to come back to how prepared you are? —how prepared can we all be to face these events? We need to center ourselves in that Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge so that we can make good choices.” —Belinda Brown
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Fire is not the enemy— it’s a vital part of healthy, fire-adapted ecosystems. When applied thoughtfully, fire can restore balance, promote biodiversity, and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Indigenous communities have long understood fire’s role as a land management tool, but this knowledge has been lost over centuries of misguided policies.
Marco Bey and Belinda Brown are working to revive this traditional ecological wisdom through their organization, the Lomakatsi Restoration Project. As leaders in the movement to reintegrate good fire into Western land management practices, they partner with tribes, agencies, and communities to build resilience across millions of acres.
This powerful discussion unpacks the critical importance of centering indigenous knowledge, the challenges of accessing resources for tribal lands, and innovative solutions for creating fire-adapted, climate-resilient landscapes. Listen now to learn how you can support this vital work in your community.
Highlights:
- 03:32 The Severity of Wildfires
- 07:16 Bringing Aboriginal Knowledge Back Into the Land
- 11:41 Forest Resiliency
- 14:40 Know Your Community
- 16:47 The Question of Federal Access
Twitter:
Imagine what’s possible when we center indigenous leadership. Listen in as Lomakatsi’s Marco Bey and Belinda Brown talk on the critical role of Indigenous fire stewardship in building resilient landscapes. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine#podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #Lomakatsi #EcosystemRestoration #IndigenousKnowledge #WildfireResilience #CommunityPartnerships #TribalSovereignty #ClimateAdaptation #LandManagement #FireStewardship #ResilienceBuildingTools
Quotes:
01:41 “The main cause of the decline of the ecosystem health of our area was the interruption of Indigenous stewardship.” —Lisa Micheli
06:07 “The solutions are creating those resilient landscapes.” —Marco Bey
08:23 “The landscape was our pharmacy, our grocery store, our church, our Home Depot, very well taken care of the landscape.” —Belinda Brown
14:33 “It’s going to come back to you. Is going to come back to how prepared you are? —how prepared can we all be to face these events? We need to center ourselves in that Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge so that we can make good choices.” —Belinda Brown
16:07 “The word unity is in community. Know your community, because that is the most important thing when this crisis is hit.” —Belinda Brown
17:30 “The key to our success has been understanding the instruments.” —Marco Bey
Meet the Moderator
Lisa Micheli, Executive Board Member, After the Fire USA
Dr. Micheli joined Sonoma County’s Pepperwood Foundation in October of 2009 as its inaugural Executive Director and now serves as the organization’s President and CEO. She brings more than 30 years of experience applying her technical, policy, and fundraising expertise to the design and implementation of ecological restoration, research, and education programs. She started her career at the US Environmental Protection Agency and then completed her graduate studies at UC Berkeley as a NASA Earth Systems Research Fellow in 2000. She now focuses her research on relationships between climate, watershed health, and biodiversity and has published numerous peer-reviewed studies on river restoration, climate adaptation, and community-based approaches to biodiversity conservation.
Dr. Micheli specializes in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations focused on using relevant research to craft collective solutions to today’s most pressing landscape conservation challenges. She serves as the co-chair of Pepperwood’s Terrestrial Biodiversity Climate Change Collaborative (TBC3), a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Bay Area climate adaptation research initiative, with Dr. David Ackerly, Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. She also chairs the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve team of the international Large Landscape Conservation Peer Network facilitated by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She has been recognized as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, a Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation Environmental Leader, a Bay Nature Institute Local Hero for Environmental Education, and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the Society for Conservation Biology. Dr. Micheli serves as a director on After The Fire board and as a science advisor to the Sempervirens Fund, the Chile-California Conservation Network, the Bay Area Open Space Council, and the Water Research Foundation
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisamicheli/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.micheli1
Meet the Panel:
Marko Bey, Executive Director and Founder, Lomakatsi Forest Restoration Project
Executive Director and Lomakatsi’s Co-Founder, Marko oversees all aspects of the organization’s efforts, working in close coordination with the Board of Directors. Marko’s central focus is on program and organizational development, project procurement, planning, and operations. His other responsibilities include grant writing and fundraising, technical planning, and the management of cooperative agreements, stewardship agreements, and contracts.
Lomakatsi’s ten regional ecosystem restoration programs and associated workforce initiatives are a primary result of his work. Most essential has been his leadership in the orchestration and formation of collaborative partnerships — partnerships that are strengthened by a wide variety of stakeholders, including federal and state agencies, Indian tribes, organizations, private landowners, and community members.
Belinda Brown, Tribal Partnerships Director, Lomakatsi Forest Restoration Project
Belinda serves as Lomakatsi’s Tribal Partnership Director and operates within the framework of Lomakatsi’s Tribal Partnership Program and associated initiatives. Belinda works closely with Lomakatsi’s Executive Director and staff leadership to serve tribal communities in their efforts to restore forests and watersheds on tribal trust and ancestral lands. She serves as a community liaison, engaging with tribal elders, tribal councils, cultural resource monitors, and tribal department staff. Belinda also works to establish and promote effective working relationships among the tribal community, Lomakatsi, and federal agency and non-profit partners.
Connect with Lomakatsi Restoration Project:
- Website: https://lomakatsi.org/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lomakatsi/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lomakatsi_restoration_project/
Transcription:
Lisa Micheli: We’re continuing on this thread, and what I realized is I spent five minutes just reading everyone’s bios, so I’m going to do shorter versions of the BIOS to get you to learn more about people.
I’m really happy to introduce Marko Bey, who is also on the Board of Directors of After The Fire and has kept this going. Marko is the Executive Director and Founder of the Lomakatsi Restoration Project. He oversees all of the organization’s efforts. His central focus is on program and organizational development, project procurement, planning and operations. And we’re going to learn more about Lomakatsi.
And with him is the amazing Belinda Brown, who provides leadership for the Lomakatsi Tribal Partnerships Program, and Chairs the Inter-Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Partnership. She works closely with Lomakatsi and staff leadership to serve tribal communities in their efforts to restore forests and watersheds on tribal trust and ancestral lands. She’s also co-leading the development of the Indian Youth Service Corps Designation and federal agreement process for Lomakatsi. I’m really happy to share the stage with Marko and Belinda.
I asked to have a little bit of time because I have been thinking about this a lot. As I mentioned, we have a 3,200 acre property I used to steward. The best scientists that we could bring to bear on the problem said, what’s the thing that we need to restore in terms of ecosystem function? And the main cause of decline of the ecosystem health of our area was the interruption of indigenous stewardship. This was before we had fires, and before fire even became part of the conversation. And so I’ve really been thinking about the fact that you love and want to protect what you grew up with. And if you grew up in this region, you grew up with these big forests covered with Douglas fir, and you think, we have to protect these forests. But I learned from indigenous leadership that those forests were very out of balance. It was hard for me to see. But when I had local indigenous leaders leading us through, they’d say, no, this doesn’t look good. This looks kind of congested. And so I just wanted to highlight a study that was recently done.
I don’t know many studies like this that took a snapshot of what this landscape looked like in 1850. I’m not gonna be able to walk you through all of it. But if you look at these pie charts, the yellow is shrubs and grasslands. And what has happened is that this green slice, which is the Douglas fir, has been expanding and invading those areas. So it’s a native invasive plant that spreads without indigenous fire on the landscape. I just think it’s a big deal, especially if you are coming from the environmental perspective to wrap your head around how different the landscape looked under indigenous stewardship, and that we need to be managing to get back to that. So Arthur Dawson is the lead author of this study, and it’s a Cal Fire report that’s very long. But you can access it here, this is just an example of a tour that he took with an indigenous leader showing where these Douglas fir coming up. The historic Manzanita and other native plants are lying dead under those invasions.
So with that, I’m going to hand it over to Marko.
Marko Bey: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you Jennifer and After The Fire for organizing such a great gathering, year three, and all the first responders in the room, and everybody who’s working for Resilient Landscapes, resilient communities. So Belinda Brown and I, we’re gonna pass the mic back and forth. We’re gonna share some conversation. This slide here, we had a fire in 2009 called the Siskiyou fire in Southern Oregon. Just over the border of Siskiyou County into Jackson County, Oregon. And that fire began in September. It was a weed eater event, and it burned across the slopes of private lands. We lost about five homes, relatively small. They put a lot of air resources on it. But then the fire went into the edge of our municipal watershed in Ashland, Oregon, and it was an eye opener. 200 foot flame lamps, a wind driven event kind of an anomaly day in September. We’re seeing more of as just kind of a reminder of the direction things have moved over the last 15, 10, into 20 years. And that watch duty was a clip just from the middle of July, just a couple months ago at how much fire we have across the west. These mega fires like we’ve never seen, we’re all aware of this is why we’re gathered here today. So in thinking about wildfire severity, we live in a fire adapted ecosystem influenced by lightning.
And as Lisa mentioned, aboriginal carefully stewarded an engineered fire by tribal people that continues to be engineered, and put on the ground by tribal people. And you could see these quantitative risk assessments and fire hazard severity maps. We live in the era of mega fires. It’s going to continue. How do we build that community model? We’re hearing about different models and opportunities, and developing that fire steward, community stewards of fire, and changing our thinking and relationship with fire. So this is the quantitative risk assessment in Oregon. It maps out risk to communities, departure of ecosystems like Lisa mentioned, And that highly departed landscape from previous land management practices that have set the stage with tree plantations and lots of logging slash and lots of non active management on the ground has created that situation we’re in. So this gives us a roadmap. What can we do? How do we address that? And then the next slide is the FEMA fire risk map. Just look at the West. We’re going to be living with a lot of fire. They’re only going to get larger. So what’s the solution next? So solutions are creating those Resilient Landscapes.
We’ve heard about mitigation. We’ve heard about community wildfire protection around home site defensible space. There’s different values for different communities, but we’re thinking on a landscape scale, like in the Rogue River Siskiyou where we do a lot of our work. Lomakatsi Restoration Project, our organization, has a 4.6 million acre watershed that is in need of restoration. At least 1.2 million acres need active management. Highly departed forests. We’re seeing that landscape continue to burn. In Oregon, 1.5 million acres. Record breaking fires like we’ve never seen this year, and we’re not even through fire season yet. We have fire crews out on the ground right now up in the north Umpqua in Oregon. Fire crews in the Rogue River Siskiyou. In addition to being fire stewards, we know we have to suppress fire in the right places at the right time to protect communities. But ultimately, we want to set the stage for mild fire, good burning on the ground to be stewards of that ecosystem to protect more than just communities, but water ecosystem services, and all the values and benefits that we care about on the ground.
Belinda Brown: So from a tribal perspective, I haven’t seen these slides, so forgive me. I always want to be able to share, make sure that we get a pulse on the room, and just honor the people that were here before us. The ancestral people that were on this land right here, the Wappo, the Coast Miwok, the Pomo. And the fact that they put fire on the land that fires medicine for the land, and there’s good fire. So 150 years of mismanagement, or non management, or people not being on this land, and these tribes were terminated in 1959. So that was one year before I was born. This is recent trauma informed care, even for our people. So bringing it back to that indigenous centered knowledge, that core of where we come from as people, these people here were renowned for their basket making, and they needed fire on the ground. Women put fire on the ground for their baskets, for their food, for everything that we needed. This land was our home. The landscape was our pharmacy, our grocery store, our church, our Home Depot. Very well taken care of the landscape. So many times, we’re debunking the John Muir myth, this wasn’t just a wilderness landscape. This was a very well tended place. We’re all place based people who need to take care of the land, and to take care of each other during times of crisis. We’re all indigenous to someplace. You have a home, you have a Heartland on this earth, and you all come from a singing, a drumming and a dancing society. We’re aboriginal. This is our heartland.
My Heartland is a little to the north in Modoc, Shasta, Lassen and Siskiyou counties. The Pit River Tribe, the Ajumawi-Atsugewi Nation. I’m part of the (inaudible) band, the people from the Juniper Hill side. We also put fire on the land. I grew up putting fire on the ground with my grandfather, with my father. We had a ranch in Modoc County. We had a ranch in Chico, California. We raised cattle, but we burned every fall, every summer. So we actually had a ranch down Cohasset road. Anybody heard of that place recently? So we grazed our cattle up in Butte Creek. All the areas that have been burning up recently, when we took our cattle off in the fall, we burned it. Every farmer, rancher, Native American, Aboriginal person used fire as a land management tool. And now, we continue as Lomakatsi as a nonprofit for 30 years, everything that we do is really setting the stage for good fire to come back on the land. We do ecological thinning. You’re going to see a slide here shortly that we’re active management works. So the separation from the people in the land is what is off right now. We are supposed to be on this land. We’re supposed to be working, surviving, sustaining ourselves from this land and this earth. We’re supposed to be taking care of mother earth, as Margo Robbins, Elizabeth Azzuz from Culture Fire Management Council were here a few years ago said, this is fire medicine for the land. We need more of it, so we shouldn’t be afraid of it. I know for our partners here, our fellow people from Hawaii, the indigenous people, Aboriginal people from Hawaii.
Lahaina was the only place in Hawaii I ever visited. That really hurt me. I was like, oh, it’s the only beautiful place I’ve been in Hawaii. That language that Jennifer was talking about yesterday, that language of love, those core values that really keep you as a person is what we need to share now. So our language of love is our Aboriginal knowledge. It is the indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge of the people that were here. And no matter whose name is on the land base right now, our people are still commissioned to take care of this land so we have to have the awkward conversations with all of you, with the agencies, with our partners, with our nonprofit partners, with homeowners, everybody of how we need to impart our Aboriginal knowledge back into this ecosystem.
Marko Bey: So what embodies that is this image of the Bootleg fire. The area that our tribal crews and the Klamath tribes, in partnership with Lomakatsi, The Nature Conservancy and the Forest Service. This is the form of Klamath tribes reservation. Now, the National Forest. We went in, we ecologically thinned. We marked this stand, we carefully applied fire. We removed 40 million board feet in an ecological way of smaller diameter trees. And when the Bootleg fire came, that’s the green island that survived. Belinda and I actually walked through there during the fire, and it was burning at six foot flame lanes. Beautiful right through the understory. So we think of the landscape, the towns and communities around these places. We think about forest resiliency. And we looked at this slide, we’re changing the paradigm. Eco stewards, fire lighters, land tenders, firefighters. There’s time and a place that we need to get after those fires. We had a fire right in our office last week. Helicopter resources, they got that fire out really quick. Our friends and relatives from the fire service next so the community of Jacksonville kind of reminds me of Sonoma a little bit. There’s some money there.
And this is our team of tribal crew members putting fire on the ground, protecting the community. Thinking about Resilient Landscapes working under the National cohesive wildfire strategy. If you haven’t looked that up, that’s a key component. The missing element to that of resilient communities protecting the landscape. Emergency Response was what Belinda just spoke about incorporating indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge into the mix. But Jacksonville gets a lot of resources. We apply for grants. We build this community resilience movement. State, private and tribal forestry funds from the forest service are paying for this work. And then we have the community of Fort Bidwell. Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation, the Northern Paiute could get banned where Belinda and I live in that community. You could see that it’s surrounded by forest service. The reservation is 3,500 acres. And that’s the fire that came over the hill, the Barnes fire two summers ago. And then the resources to try to access federal resources for these tribal lands is a lot more challenging. We’re doing that day in and day out, and you could see bringing state money from Oregon, Oregon Conservation Corps and tribal crews to protect tribal housing to thin the brush and vegetation around. It takes innovation, philanthropy, creative thinking, and corporate investment. Hewlett Packard or HP donated money for this program next. And that resilience is not just for, once again, for homes, but for the landscape. Restoring sage steppe habitat for wildlife. That’s a before and after. Over to Belinda, this is mild fire (inaudible).
Belinda Brown: So again, our people burn for the roots for the plants. 85% of our food was gathered. So it was very important that we get fire out there. Again, it’s going to come back to you. It is going to come back to how prepared you are. How prepared can we all be to face these events? And when we go out there, gather routes together, do gatherings like this, have summits like this, and come together as a community. That’s what it’s going to take. And so we all have built these walls around us in this colonial world that we live in. We all live in these separate, nuclear, little families, and that wasn’t the way that we were supposed to live. And if I could ask you to settle down in that part of you that is indigenous, that is tribal, that is community. That’s the heart that we need to have to face and to walk through these crises that come.
So we’re all having to get out of our comfort zone. We’re all having to come into places that we haven’t been before. Maybe make friends with people that we wouldn’t necessarily make friends with. Agencies working together, communities, working together. We have a similar problem. We have a similar crisis, and it’s going to take the human heart. And what Jennifer talked about yesterday when I first showed up, that language of love that we have been separated from as a people, we need to come back together, and we need to center ourselves in that indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge so that we can make good choices. That we are prepared for these crises, and that we are building our community strong where we live. We know our neighbor, we know their name, and that we have that community when we need that community. And the word unity is in community. I’ve always stressed that throughout everything that I share. Let’s have that unity of the people here in this room. There’s a lot of love in this room. There’s a lot of knowledge in this room. There’s a lot of understanding in this room. And there’s some wisdom in this room. And one of our elders has told us that the hardest and bumpiest road to travel is from your head to your heart. So from knowledge to understanding. So drop down into what you understand and know your neighbor, know your community, because that is the most important thing when this crisis is hit.
Lisa Micheli: So let’s address the question about federal access. I’m not sure what your question was. Funds or accessing federal funds.
Jennifer Gray Thompson: Hi, I’m Jennifer Gray Thompson at After The Fire. My question is, your organization is particularly adept at working with the federal government, fishing game and getting contracts. You’ve gotten them to see the value of the work that you’re doing that is very hard for a lot of places, and then how to implement it to train your workforce. These are all lessons too, that Maui has a lot of it in place. But like just bringing it all the way home, that’s what I’d love for you. Very successful.
Marko Bey: Thank you. And we touched on a little bit. We showed Fort Bidwell. We showed Jacksonville. Two different communities. We were actually on phone calls today with the National Office Department of Interior accessing Bureau of Indian Affairs funds, funds from the Forest Service, BLM, State Dollars. The key for our success has been understanding the instruments. So we’re shovel ready. We have different authorities, like stewardship authority under the Farm Bill. We have different agreement mechanisms, like 93 638 through Bureau of Indian Affairs, interagency agreements that non government organizations can utilize. But a big part of our success is leaning on tribal sovereignty. Our tribal partners that we have. Memorandums of understanding. And they loan us their sovereignty through tribal resolutions in Belinda’s leadership to access those dollars, to put those into agreements. So we’re not having to chase grant money all the time. And we still do Chase Grant Money all the time. But those agreements are 10 year agreements. And when appropriations come down, we can direct those dollars into those agreements, and we could have shovel ready projects, get projects NEPA ready, National Environmental Policy Act, and ready to put workforces on the ground. Indian Youth Service Corps is another authority.
So knowing those different authorities and then integrating philanthropic dollars. We heard that during the last presentation. And opportunities for corporate investment, because we have to leverage non federal funds. But mapping out, what are those different authorities? What are those agreements? And Jennifer, you do a great job working the hill back in DC, having those relationships with our federal partners back in Washington, and then our regional agencies, and continuing to beat the drum to get their attention.
Belinda Brown: And along with those agreements, private philanthropy and corporate philanthropy is really important too because all those agreements require 20 to 25% match. So we have master stewardship agreements across Oregon and California. Our Indian Youth Service Corps agreement is multi regional with Washington, Oregon and California, and it requires a 25% match. So one of the projects that we did started out with a FEMA grant of $500,000. It was a West Bear Project in the footprint of the Almeda fire in 2020 that took out 2,500 homes. Three of our staff lost their home during that fire. A $500,000 project has turned into a $14 million project, cobbling together all agency, private philanthropy dollars to make this project work, and to protect homes and create resiliency in that community. So again, everybody out there, you’re pitching in is what makes it work.
Lisa Micheli: I have one last question there. With this big infusion now of climate investment money, are you seeing a connection with the new money that’s come out of the Biden administration through the inflation Reduction Act? How is that working for you? Are you able to access climate funds as part of this?
Marko Bey: What’s working for us is called the 7-Day Work Week. We’ve been very, very shovel ready for those climate adaptation funds coming through bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act dollars, but that’s the key to having those agreements. And tracing back where are those climate resiliency funds through different agencies, and being able to see how to train and navigate those dollars. So it’s been a huge benefit for the communities we serve. We have the climate core that we’re a member of, through Indian Youth Service Corps and more Co investment from our partners. And even at the state level, accessing state dollars through different climate investments is a part of the mix of getting this work done, creating hundreds of jobs, and creating Resilient Landscapes.
Belinda Brown: Just to emphasize that too, we’re implementing a partner with the American Climate Corps, along with being a member of the core network and working towards accreditation.
Lisa Micheli: Belinda, I think the last thing I just would like to highlight is your toolkit that you have for communities that want to work with indigenous communities. Could you talk a little bit about that, and how people could access resources from Lomakatsi?
Belinda Brown: For Lomakatsi, we have the inter-tribal ecosystem restoration partnership. We also have the collaborative framework model that’s a best practice of communities coming together and working together. So we can make that available to everybody. Our collaborative framework model, and also our inter-tribal ecosystem restoration partnership model. So we will make that available.
Lisa Micheli: Thank you guys. Thank you for your incredible work. You know you’re gonna have follow up questions.
