Burning Bright-ELEMENTAL: REIMAGINE WILDFIRE
By Maribeth Thueson
The past few years have seen unprecedented damage from wildfires in the American West. Extended drought and increased temperatures caused by climate change have extended the wildfire season and caused more fires, and those fires are more destructive.
Most of us remember the Camp fire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise in California. It might therefore come as a shock to hear a fire researcher say that the destruction of Paradise didn’t have to happen, but that’s just what retired U.S. Forest Service scientist Jack Cohen says at the beginning of the documentary film Elemental.
“There are reasons how it is that something ignites and how it doesn’t,” he says. “If it meets the requirements for combustion, then it ignites and burns, and if it doesn’t, that’s because it didn’t meet those requirements for combustion, and that makes it a physics problem. I have a high level of confidence that we can prevent community destruction during extreme wildfires . . . but if we continue our current emergency response approach, wildfire urban disasters will be inevitable.”
In Elemental, director Trip Jennings uses animations, gorgeous aerial shots, and the opinions of experts to lay out the case against current fire prevention methods such as clear-cutting and forest thinning, showing how they don’t work. And although the Forest Service has come around to the thinking that stopping all fires is a bad idea because it promotes undergrowth that can fuel larger fires, the majority of its budget still goes to emergency response, rather than to prescribed burns that decrease undergrowth and promote meadows.
The people taking the lead on planned fires are often Native Americans, and the film spends time with Yurok tribal members who use fire to manage the forests on their land and train others to do so as well. “That is freakin’ amazing! I’m so happy!” one of them exclaims as the fire she has set burns up the undergrowth.
But the film points out that timber fires are only a small percentage of all wildfires, and any kind of vegetation can produce a fire that will damage buildings. The main reason houses catch fire is because the wind blows embers onto them. So how can buildings be protected?
Elemental says it’s actually pretty simple: have a fire-resistant roof, cover vents with metal mesh, clean the roof and gutters of leaves and debris, maintain a vegetation and mulch-free zone around the house for five feet, and have a 70-foot zone around the house with minimal and widely-spaced vegetation. The experiment they show with embers blowing on two houses — one with combustible materials and another that has been “hardened” — is pretty convincing. The first house is soon ablaze, while the other house is untouched.
Then there’s Mary Bradshaw. She and her husband built a home in Elkhorn, Oregon, with a metal roof, no gutters, cement fiberboard siding, a cement porch, closed soffits, and no vegetation against the house. In 2020 a fire devastated the town and destroyed her neighborhood, but Mary’s house survived. The camera pans over the ruined landscape and then reveals Mary’s house down below, in a small island of green, nestled in among the burned trees. “We wanted to live in the forest, but we didn’t expect the forest to adapt to us,” she says. “We built with the forest in mind, and I think it saved us.”
Jennings says that he made Elemental to help change the conversation around wildfire. While the information he presents is available in other places, the film brings it all together in an easy-to-understand style, and the result is a film that everyone who lives in a fire-prone area should see.
Elemental, which is narrated by David Oyelowo, has been making the rounds of film festivals, winning the Jury Award — Documentary, Best Director, and Best Film Editing at the Golden Gate International Film Festival. It can be seen in a series of screenings across the country starting April 6th.
Originally published at https://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on April 5, 2023.
