Day 2: TALK STORY: Revolutionizing Wildland Management—Integrating Technology and Wisdom for Better Mitigation
“We’re going to have to come together in order to be climate resilient.” —Elizabeth Christy
“The earth knows how to respond.” —Caitlin Cornwall
“There’s this window of opportunity after a catastrophe.” —Joe Nordlinger
“We learned some lessons the hard way, but other communities don’t have to. We continue to pay it forward. We continue to help others. That is our mission, that is our goal.” —Scott Westrope
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Disasters are complex challenges that require integrated solutions. While technology can provide powerful tools, traditional wisdom, and community-based approaches are equally vital. Effective disaster resilience must harness both cutting-edge innovations and time-tested local knowledge.
In this episode, we hear from a diverse panel of experts working to make communities more resilient to wildfires. Elizabeth Christy from the US Green Building Council, Caitlin Cornwall from the Sonoma Ecology Center, and Joe Nordlinger of the Napa Firewise Foundation share their unique perspectives and strategies.
The discussion covers key insights on the importance of long-term landscape management, the role of indigenous practices, the need for collaboration and funding, and ways to maintain momentum between disasters. Don’t miss this insightful conversation on building truly resilient communities. Tune in now!
Highlights:
- 04:38 Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Practice
- 09:24 Thinking About the Land Differently
- 13:31 Pre-Wildfire Resilience
- 19:56 Keeping the Momentum
Twitter:
Wildfires are devastating, but communities can take proactive steps to protect themselves. Hear practical tips for long-term fire preparedness from USGBC’s Elizabeth Christy, Sonoma Ecology Center’s Caitlin Cornwall, and Napa Communities Foundation CEO, Joe Nordlinger. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #FireRecovery #LandManagement #HomeHardening #DefensibleSpace #CommunityEngagement #FundingStrategies #PreFirePlanning #ClimateResilience
Quotes:
01:08 “Changing the likelihood of fire over the long term has to do with our landscape and our land use.” —Lisa Micheli
09:17 “We’re going to have to come together in order to be climate resilient.” —Elizabeth Christy
10:36 “The earth knows how to respond.” —Caitlin Cornwall
16:18 “There’s this window of opportunity after a catastrophe.” —Joe Nordlinger
17:20 “This work is very expensive. It costs a lot of money, so you have to be pretty focused on finding the money.” —Joe Nordlinger
20:14 “Pay attention to the condition of the land.” —Catlin Cornwall
20:20 “Make sure that we promote the work that’s happening, and not just our work, because if you’re not making progress or you don’t see progress, it’s hard to keep focused on it.” —Joe Nordlinger
20:54 “If you’re watching the news, there’s fires all the time, you do get desensitized. So pulling in that human element— the storytelling, the experience of it, and the community building of it— that’s how we’re going to create climate resilient communities.” —Elizabeth Christy
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:
Elizabeth Christy, Education Programs Manager, US Green Building Council California
Elizabeth graduated in Environmental Studies from Temple University. Elizabeth worked under Joanne Donahue, the Manager of Land Restoration at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education cultivating native plants and removing invasive species from the Penn’s Native Acre. Elizabeth also designed and installed an educational sensory garden for students. Elizabeth also worked in the West End of Outdoor Horticulture at Longwood Gardens, where she oversaw the orchard, Migratory Bird Sanctuary, vegetable garden, idea garden, trial garden, and children’s garden.
Since moving to California, Elizabeth has been the Program Manager for Eco Urban Gardens. She developed and implemented the Farm to Table and Farm to School programs. Elizabeth combines her passion for regenerative landscape and urban design with the impact on community health and environmental justice. She has a Docent Naturalist certification from Eaton Canyon Nature Center and has volunteered for the LA County Arboretum and California Native Plant Society.
Connect with USGBA:
- Website: https://usgbc-ca.org/
Caitlin Cornwall, Senior Project Manager, Sonoma Ecology Center
Caitlin is a biologist who leads planning and partnerships and advises on technical projects. She’s worked since 1998 as a leader at Sonoma Ecology Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, and a master’s in botany, and is an expert on land use ecology, watershed health indicators, and communicating with non-technical audiences, as well as building diverse partnerships. She’s a native of Sonoma, and she’s been a lead author of the Biodiversity Action Plan, the roadmap for climate resilience and homes for sustainable Sonoma Valley.
Connect with Sonoma Ecology Center:
- Website: https://sonomaecologycenter.org/
Joe Nordlinger, CEO, Napa Communities Firewise Foundation
Joe Nordlinger is the CEO of the Napa community’s Firewise Foundation and brings a unique blend of wildfire preparedness and business expertise to this challenge. He has over two decades of experience in professional services, management, and corporate leadership, and chairs the Mount Veter Fire Safe Council and volunteers as a firefighter in Napa. He has helped the Fire Safe Council grow and secure over $100 million in grant funding, and he merges private sector strategies with fire safety.
- Webiste: https://napafirewise.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-nordlinger-2aa871/
Transcription:
Lisa Micheli: Well, I just wanted to acknowledge, as supervisor Gore daylighted this morning, that almost all of us here have been personally touched by fire. In my case, when the Tubbs fire came through, I was managing a 3,200 acre research station that was at Ground Zero for the most damaging part of the fire. And we actually had the distinction of being one of the only sites that burnt twice. We burnt again in 2019, and so all of us felt really strongly that we wanted to just acknowledge right now that we’re sort of shifting gears, and we’re taking a look at the longer game. So not to minimize this immediate emergency response. And some of the things we may share may seem overwhelming when you’re in the midst of your immediate cleanup. But as the Maui delegation mentioned today, changing the likelihood of fire over the long term has to do with our landscape and our land use.
I’m technically a water scientist. I like to joke that I chose water as my field of study, but fire kind of chose me. I really feel like land use is the elephant in the room. When people want solutions, they want fast and easy solutions. And land use is sort of anything. So just acknowledging that, and I’m very excited today because we have three experts who are working at different scales on this problem of how to make our homes, and the net land use of our homes combined with the natural areas around them, how can they become more resilient? So we’re going to focus on the session today. Well, this session includes focusing on the home and the landscape. And the next session that I’ll be honored to moderate will also bring in indigenous perspectives and the indigenous leadership that’s making headway on that. So with that, I’d like to introduce our panelists. And I think that’s why I have that thingy.
Actually, we’re really happy to welcome Elizabeth Christy, who is from the US Green Building Council California Office. She’s worked at the Green Center for Environmental Education, working with native plants and invasive species control. She has designed and installed educational sensory gardens for students. And she served as the program manager for eco urban gardens, where she developed a Farm to Table, and Farm to School programs. And she is a graduate in Environmental Studies from Temple University, and has a docent natural naturalist certification. She’ll be our first speaker, but I’m going to introduce everyone first.
And then Caitlin Cornwall, who’s been a long time colleague of mine from the Sonoma Ecology Center. Caitlin’s a biologist who leads planning and partnerships, and advises on technical projects where she’s worked since 1998 as a leader at Sonoma Ecology Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, a master’s in botany, and lives here in Sonoma. She is an expert on land use, ecology, watershed health indicators, and communicating with non technical audiences, as well as building diverse partnerships. She’s a native of Sonoma, and she’s been a lead author of the Biodiversity Action Plan: The Roadmap for Climate Resilience, and Homes for Sustainable Sonoma Valley. I think that’s a weird typo, but Sustainable Sonoma Valley is looking at all aspects of how to make the valley resilient. She has a new website called Tending the Land for Fire Resilience in Sonoma County. She’s been a leader on fire recovery walks that she’ll be talking about.
And then next, Joe Nordlinger. He’s the CEO of the Napa Community’s Firewise Foundation, and brings a unique blend of wildfire preparedness and business expertise to this challenge. He has over two decades of experience in professional services management and corporate leadership, and chairs the Mount Veeder Fire Safe Council, and volunteers as a firefighter in Napa. He has helped the Fire Safe Council grow and secure over $100 million in grant funding. And he merges private sector strategies with fire safety in order to pioneer scalable solutions for wildfire resilience.
With that, I think we’re going to hand it to Elizabeth to give the first presentation. Feel free to stand up if you’re more comfortable that way, whichever way you want to go.
Elizabeth Christy: I think I’ll prefer to sit. Thank you, though. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. That was really nice. A little wind blew, but it was really enjoyable. So thank you all for being here this week. It’s been really incredible hearing all your stories about all the technologies in this space. So if you’re not familiar with the US Green Building Council, we are a national organization. The California Chapter is our largest branch. And we mostly do decarbonization in the built environment. So how can we get to net zero in all of our physical structures and urban environments? In 2018, we developed these wildfire classes, particularly for the audience of construction and landscaping professionals. This was developed in 2018 after the Campfire. So when we first decided to develop this content, we pulled together a wildfire advisory group. So right now, most of our classes are in Southern California. So if you’re familiar with LA County and surrounding counties, there’s three fires going down there right now. I was just looking at the maps this morning. So everybody in the SGV, San Gabriel Valley is struggling with air quality right now. So it’s pertinent no matter where you are throughout the state. So when we developed these classes, the idea was that it would be supportive for folks in California homes and California communities. But after listening to all of your stories today and yesterday, we really focus on the home hardening element that is really universal. So you can take the ideas of how to retrofit your home, or how to retrofit a building whether it’s new construction or existing construction, and use that anywhere in the world. But when it comes to defensible space talking about your landscape and your landscape ecology, that’s going to vary quite greatly depending on where you are.
So if you’re familiar with California Ecology, particularly in these higher elevation areas like Sonoma and Napa, we know that these areas are used to seasonal burns. The history of California is that the First Nations have been managing land and being stewards of the land in managing wildfires for thousands of years. So none in California. This isn’t a new technology. This is an ITEK, or Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge that we’re now trying to put back into practice. So depending on where you’re at, you really have to research what are the ecological practices in your community. What are your native plants? Do you have fire resilient plants? How does all of that interact? So that’s something we really focus on when we’re delivering our classes for landscape professionals to encourage them to learn about their local ecology. I encourage all of you to do that as well in your own communities. We are also looking right now for trading delivery partners. So if you think your community could benefit from this, whether it’s HOAs or construction professionals, please connect with me after this talk, and we will figure out a way to deliver courses for free in your community. All the funding right now comes from Cal Fire. We’re funded through 2027.
If you are interested in that, we could provide training for free in your community, or we’ll partner with you to deliver that training. So these are the four areas that the training focuses on. And as I mentioned earlier, depending on where you’re at, the content might be different. The home hardening will stay mostly the same. But if you want to develop with us something more localized for your community for defensible space, I’m definitely interested in that. We’re also trying to create a directory of wildfire certified professionals. This was part of the grant deliverable that you could go to the USGBC California website and find certified professionals, both for construction and for landscape. So I encourage all of you to put yourselves in the directory, because there are many, many certified professionals here. We could help you get access to the communities that need you the most. If you know of anyone who should be in this directory, please spread the word. Let’s try and get as many people into this as possible. Our goal here is to break down silos, and really build community because we’re going to have to come together in order to be climate resilient. Thank you very much, and I’m going to pass the mic to you.
Caitlin Cornwall: Hi everyone. I’m Caitlin. I live right here, and have evacuated twice in the last five years or so. In 2017, fires came within about a mile of my house. So like everyone around here, I know lots and lots of people who had their houses burned down. Then just a lot more people, of course, who were just deeply hit emotionally and mentally by the wildfires. So let’s go to the next slide. One of the first things that we did at the Sonoma Ecology Center, being a really local watershed based organization, was to first ourselves, personally, go out onto burnland and feel what that felt like, see what there was to see, and then organized a lot of fire recovery walks over the years since the fires. I just think it’s a great thing to do. People found it very healing to see how the plants and the land have responses built into them to fires. And granted in some places, the fire severity was so high that it’s really daunting. But largely what you see is that the earth knows how to respond, and that really helps people. We had a lot of repeats on these fire recovery walks. They were good for us personally. I think that’s a very good thing to do. Elizabeth was just talking about localized guidance and training on what people should do with their land and with their houses after fires, and so this website that’s up on the screen, Resilient Landscapes, was one of our responses. It’s a really in-depth website. It was built over many years by a wide collaboration of people.
We put together ecology people with fire people, with landscape design people because we needed to satisfy all of those interests. I would encourage you to think about when people take actions after a disaster, they should not just be blindly reacting to the one disaster they’re actually, people are complicated. Land is complicated. We have a lot of different values and goals, and so people should be given tools to know how to take actions that can satisfy their values at the same time, instead of trading off one against the other. And that’s really what this website tries to do. Meet your defensible space codes, but also provide beauty and habitat, and water conservation, and reduce your maintenance requirements over time. Use plants that are from here, from this special place. Let’s celebrate this place. So we get very detailed information on this website, and we do a bunch of training and workshops related to this content. And then after we did this website, people kept asking us, what about beyond the defensible space?
The press releases actually just went out today, finally, on this website, which is called tendingtheland.org. It also is extremely in depth, and more than 50 experts contributed content and reviews to this website. These disasters make people think about the land in a different way. They motivate people to interact more actively with land that they either own or that they work with in some way. It’s overwhelming how you take actions that are expensive, complicated and multi-year, and make things better, and not accidentally make things worse in some way that you didn’t imagine. This iterative cycle graphic that we use throughout this website is really trying to get people to understand its long term relationship with your land. It’s not going away. You’re going to keep learning. You’re going to keep doing it. What we’re really trying to push is take multi benefit actions, collaborate, collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. And the work goes on for us too. I’m going to stop talking and hand it over to Joe.
Joe Nordlinger: Thanks for the opportunity to speak. I do want to recognize the long line of what Lisa mentioned, which is that there’s folks in the room who have maybe recently had a fire years ago. It’s pretty brutal. It’s a real gut punch, and it takes some time to respond to that. The organization that I’m involved with, Napa Firewise, is really a pre-fire wildfire resilience mitigation arm within Napa County. And so we are not so much focused on response. We’re focused on thinking about preparing for a wildfire. So like Caitlin, I was a volunteer firefighter. I had to evacuate my family, and then went and responded to the fire in 17. And frankly, my house was saved due to a ridge top fire break that had been put in before I actually ever got involved with this space. I don’t have a forestry background. I don’t have an ecology background. I don’t have a fire background. I’m a private sector individual who built a pretty large technology in a life sciences consulting company. I tend to look at things from the standpoint of, how do you build a scalable services platform? What do you think about an addressable market? What do you think about customers, and what’s their experience like?
And so I got involved in this firespace prior to 17 because I purchased some land in the WUI, and then saw a very large wildfire erupt on the other side of the valley in Napa. And that just got me thinking about the fact that I had done a lot of due diligence on this property, but had not really thought about fire. So I became a volunteer firefighter, got involved with the mount veterinary fire Safe Council. Really started to think about things to do with my property, which was totally vulnerable. If you ever come to my house, you’ll realize why I’m concerned about fire at a personal level. And so over the course of the next, really 10 years, I started to think about the fact that there’s a lot of work to do. So what I thought I would just cover briefly are some kind of philosophical elements, things that we think about that may be helpful. And of course, not a lot of time to speak. So if anybody wants to follow up, I welcome that. If we can hit the next one. So again, my private sector brain thinks we have a big, challenging problem. It’s expensive. What are we going to do here as it relates to thinking about funds? Because it takes a lot of money to address this. And then what are we going to do about services?
So as I worked with Napa Firewise, at the time, we were a very small organization. Had a budget of $100,000 a year, and we really were just in charge of establishing the Fire Safe Council. What I tried to do with my board, and part of why we’ve been successful in Napa, there’s a lot of structural reasons for that, but we benefit from the fact that we have a very active board. We’re very connected with the county. We’ve been successful at scaling. Part of that is when we think about funds, this work is incredibly expensive so you really have to think about, there’s this window of opportunity. I’m not sure where that wind is coming from. There’s this window of opportunity after a catastrophe. And if you’re unfortunate enough to then experience a subsequent catastrophe, again, the window gets extended, but we really tried to think about the availability of funds, making sure that we were getting our fair market share, so to speak, of those funds. And that takes some investment. If you’re thinking about grant work, we really focus on the fact to pursue and get your fair share of all those funds. FEMA, county, state, whatever, you really have to invest in grant writing.
I would encourage you to think about grant writing from the standpoint of, my philosophy is that with grant writing, we’re 100% successful eventually. And the reason for that is because you apply for these things and you miss out. It’s a lottery. It’s a little bit of a numbers game, and you kind of have to flood the zone. You have to be specific, but you have to build enough content so that you can just keep applying. And eventually, you’ll repackage that app. You’ll find the source of funds, and you’ll be successful. So you have to think about it multi dimensionally and just be relentless. This work is very expensive. It costs a lot of money, so you have to be pretty focused on finding the money. When you think about grant sources, it’s grants, it’s the county, it’s the state, it’s federal. In some cases, I run a 501 c3. We have to think about how we take our 501 c3, and really optimize the use of it for private funds. So there’s this multi dimensional way about thinking about money. I just encourage folks to not get too hung up on one thing. And if you can try to think about pursuing a variety of different funds, recognize that funders in general. They’re wary of competition amongst entities. So part of what we did in Napa is we really tried to figure out ways to consolidate the various players. And there are some of the structural advantages that helped in Napa. There’s just fewer entities that are competing for the same amount of funds. And so we gain some efficiency around that service.
Again, we sort of think about it from the county standpoint, community, large estates, commercial. And we try to think about things in the context of countywide. Community wildfire protection plans, local community wildfire protection plans, Master Resilience plans for large estates and commercial entities, and all of those things are variations of the same sort of scale. That model is pretty extensible. It allows us to do some reach. One of the things that we’ve tried to do in Napa is to be involved with other counties as well. And we do some cross border work, and we try to make sure that we’re available to help other folks. So again, I talked a little bit about specialization. Specialization can be a little risky. If you can think about services, do more services and consolidate those things. You get some efficiency around that. So the last thing that I’ll just share is an image of a strategy that we have around Master Resilience Planning and Enhanced Resilience Sites. It really attempts to solve the insurance issues in counties where you have large estates, commercial entities, etcetera. I’d be happy to talk about it for folks, but it’s a design that we’ve come up with that thinks about resilience at scale. Including fire response to make sure that you can start to address some of the insurance dynamics that many areas are suffering from. And with that, I’ll turn it back to you.
Lisa Micheli: Great. It’s so hard to cover this in the time that we had. I just want to say, with the couple minutes we have left, does anyone have a burning question for any of the speakers? Because we’re on our last minute. So in 30 seconds, since a lot of this is about working in the wake of the fire, when there’s not a disaster happening, how do you keep the momentum going in your community between the disasters? Everyone can share.
Caitlin Cornwall: Well, it’s hard. One thing we’ve done is just tie the concern about fire to all the other concerns that people also have about land, like climate issues or biodiversity loss, to other reasons that are there everyday for people to pay attention to the condition of the land.
Joe Nordlinger: I think it’s that we also just try to really make sure that we promote the work that’s happening, and not just our work. Because to keep fire top of mind, there’s learned helplessness. You can work on something. But if you’re not making progress, or you don’t see progress, it’s hard to keep focused on it. So there’s a real focus on just getting the information about successes. As we knock down projects, we really try to communicate that broadly and tie in all of our partners as county, CAL FIRE, et cetera.
Elizabeth Christy: I think the theme of this whole summit is a big part of it. The human elements, the storytelling. I think we get desensitized, especially if you’re watching the news, especially in California. There’s fires all the time. You do get desensitized. So really pulling in that human element, the storytelling, the experience of it and the community building of it, that’s really how we’re going to create climate resilient communities. Not just for fires, but for all types of environmental disasters.
Lisa Micheli: Thank you guys very much. We’ll all be available for the rest of the session if you have more questions for Caitlin, Joe or Elizabeth. Thank you.
