Ep. 28.5: The Future of Wildfires (w John Miri)

Show Transcript

Seyi (00:10)
Hello, hello, hello Reza. How are you today? I am good, I am good. We are recording a special episode today.

Reza (00:12)
I'm good, Shae, how are you?

Yeah, this is timely. You know, we try to have future forward episodes that are timeless, but this one, I believe will be timeless in the long term, but it is timely for what's going on in the world today with the wildfires that are going on in California. So, you know, we recorded an episode on wildfires. So Seyi, right before I let you sort of talk about it, I want to first introduce our listeners to future forward.

Thank you for hopping on this show and listening to us, watching us. Future Forward is a conversation that Shae and I have been having for many years about cities and really with a focus on how do we make cities sustainable and the communities that live within them thrive. And we typically approach this from some historical perspective, think about what's happening in the present, provide some strategic foresight and

all of it from a place of curiosity and trying to learn because we're not experts. And to do that, one of the things that we've been doing is bringing on experts to talk about these topics that we don't know enough about so that we can all learn together. And so this episode is about wildfire. So Seyi, tell us more about it.

Seyi (01:28)
Yeah, so as at the time of this recording, we're going through, or people in LA and environs are experiencing wildfires and the news is all about this. And I read a post by a gentleman, John Meary, who you will hear his voice shortly, who was highlighting that.

Austin, is actually the most at risk for wildfires of all the US cities outside of the cities in California. This was information I'd never heard or thought of before. And so I reached out to him as a connection from a few years ago and got him to jump on later that same day.

and recorded a quick, but what we believe is insightful episode of Future Forward, both for its timeliness and its timelessness, because this problem, we were talking a few days ago Reza, and almost every year we talk about fires and wildfires in LA. So as much as it's relevant,

episode for today whenever you're listening. We hope the lessons from the episode serve in the future as well and ideally we hope we take the preventative measures that are necessary for Austin not to experience the depth of damage, breath of damage that seems to be going on in LA right now.

Reza (03:03)
Yeah, well Seyi, I'm glad you talked to John. Let's jump to it.

Seyi (03:14)
Thanks so much for doing this John. Excited about having you on, not so excited about the topic we're going to discuss, but for the listeners out there, I read a post John put on LinkedIn and I had to have him on because he was talking about wildfires. We talk about this every year around...

around this time every year and he shared some information that I did not know was relevant to us here in Central Texas, Austin specifically and so thanks again for coming on.

John Miri (03:50)
My pleasure. I'm glad to be here and I'm glad that the post reached you and it's been pretty popular and it has been surprising, I think, to a lot of folks. It's new information, I think, for a lot of people. So I'm glad we have another venue to talk about it.

Seyi (04:05)
Absolutely. So I'll start with reading the post, if you don't mind. And then we'll go into how you got into the post, your background. You have a great background and experience that is interesting in the sense that it's not in this space, but you've become really passionate about this space. So you can share that as well. And so your post goes...

John Miri (04:10)
Sure. Yeah.

Seyi (04:30)
For the past 10 years, I've worked behind the scenes to raise awareness of the risk that wildfires posed to central Texas, particularly in West Travis County. Did you know that the Austin metro area was ranked fifth highest in the nation for wildfire risk in 2024? I'll put the image of the rest of what you wrote on the episode, but that question blew me away because I didn't, I did not know. And I shared with a few friends and

John Miri (04:50)
Gotcha.

Seyi (04:58)
who live in Austin and they're like, you're lying. Exactly, exactly. So please.

John Miri (05:00)
Yeah, they're like, right. Yeah, they're like, that's not possible. Like how could we, best place to live

that, yeah, you would be number one. like, but yeah, when I first saw it, was like, that's not, that can't be possible. Like, but there's all the cities in the world, but all the cities in the country.

Seyi (05:18)
Yeah, so please share more. How did you get to start digging about this? What even brought that to your attention?

John Miri (05:26)
Sure.

Yeah, so it's, and I started getting awareness of this, as I mentioned in the post about 10 years ago, and this wasn't my field. So I think for folks who are like, I've never heard of this or I'm starting from zero, that's where I was. I was a mostly technology person. I'd worked in government and some, like some of your listeners did a lot of things in smart cities or applying technology to government.

And about 10 years ago, I moved into working with electric and water utilities and they own a lot of land. And so I didn't know much about it, but I needed to learn about land and land management and best, you know, the sort of best practices of how you take care of it. And I was very fortunate that someone, you know, a good friend of mine, Tom Martin reaches out and says, okay, if you're, you know, if you're accountable for this, you know, large amount of land,

you should know about wildfire risk and particularly in central Texas and what the factors are that lead to it, why it's an issue and so on. And I had the same reaction as we were talking, I had the same reaction that you did where my first thought as he's laying this out to me and it sounds like a really stark, big problem and a really big risk.

And my first thought is I'm like, you know, there's, there's a lot of smart people involved in the city here. And there's personally, this can't be right. Like there, there can't be, you know, there really can't be this large of a risk. If it was this large of a risk, somebody would have been doing something about it. and what I found through digging into it, and I think this is, you know, this is really on the top of our minds now, especially with the fires in Southern California is that.

Seyi (06:42)
Thank you.

John Miri (07:00)
You know, I initially started digging into it almost just to disprove my friend, right? To say this can't possibly be right, but I'll read the books, I'll read the articles that you're asking me to read so that I can explain to you how this isn't an issue. And the reality is the deeper I got into it, the more I was like, this really is a major issue. And there's a lot of data, much of which that is being shared online by

Seyi (07:05)
Mm-hmm.

John Miri (07:24)
by cities, by fire districts, by universities. So within Texas, Texas A &M, the city of Austin, the Texas A &M Fire Forest Service, like a lot of folks have shared data and are trying to raise awareness of the problem, but it just hasn't connected with people. And so the more I got into it, I just said, okay, we've got this land. And I was in a place where I needed to be.

you know, among the other things I was doing needed to be responsible for it. And, and, and that just sort of started me down this rabbit hole of understanding what, the factors are and what the risk is.

Seyi (08:02)
thank you. And I'll read another part of this and we can dive a little bit deep into it as well. And so you go, I'll skip some parts and you go, when I first heard about this, I knew less than nothing about wildfires, like just like us, brush management, ash juniper monocultures or the vegetation management plan for the balconies, canyon lands, national wildlife refuge.

covers 72 square miles of the Texas Hill Country. When I drove along the capital of Texas highway, I marveled at the lush verdant green belt. It looked so beautiful to me back then. Now it just makes me nervous." End quote. You put me in a position where now it just makes me nervous too, sadly. So please dive into that. What makes you nervous about?

John Miri (08:47)
Yeah.

Seyi (08:52)
this vegetation green land there.

John Miri (08:55)
Yeah, so I'll share what I learned and why I became nervous about this. And I will caveat this by saying, you know, I'm not a biologist or a wildlife management professional. And so, you know, I may get a couple of the details wrong here and would definitely encourage people to say, hey, go find, just as I did, go find your own sources for this and so on, you know, which is the point, right? But I think, you know, it is an issue. think, again, thinking about, you know,

Seyi (09:15)
Which is the point. Yeah.

John Miri (09:22)
your listeners and stuff, if we think about public policy and the life of cities and even just being an active citizen watching the news and seeing what's going on here, this is an issue that everyday people should understand. And so I'm not, like I said, I'm not department of wildlife management head or something like that of an expert, but I think I've tried to educate myself and I'll share what I've learned. So what I learned, and this is, I'll give you kind of

particularly how it affects central Texas, but I think this is relevant for everywhere. So one of the things I didn't understand initially was that when, in central Texas, before the 1800s, before it was very well, you know, heavily populated with a lot of buildings and so on, the sort of,

structure of the ecology was different. before all of the building up and farming and so on, what was more common in Austin was what they call savanna grasslands or sort of more of these kind of large prairie-like kind of open areas that were primarily grasslands and had periodically little groups of trees, oak trees and so on, but it wasn't heavily wooded.

There were these ash juniper trees that in central Texas we call cedars, but are technically called ash junipers. They were a native plant, but they were not very common. They were typically in areas that were very steep, like a river bank or a cliff or along the side of a hill or something like that. And in central Texas, there's a very thin layer of

topsoil, there was initially a very thin layer of topsoil over limestone. And so people came in the early 1800s and started to settle. And when they saw these grasslands, they thought this is a fantastic place to plant wheat because they're walking out and they're just seeing these tall grasses swaying in the wind and this just looks fantastic. And, you know, not a bad idea. That sounded good.

So they tried it. Well, what they didn't know was that the soil layer was very thin, sometimes four or five, six inches. And the grasses that had built up, these native grasses had built up these strong root systems over, you know, hundreds of years and were making use of that very thin topsoil that was there. So when folks came in with 1800s farming equipment and started plowing the fields, they got one

fantastic crop out of it. When that crop finished, the rains came and erosion took away a lot of that topsoil. And so what they found was the soil then underneath a lot of this rock got exposed and so on. The soil very quickly after one or two seasons of farming was no longer suitable for farming. And so those farmers, a lot of them lost their

lost their life savings, a lot of them went bankrupt and so on. Some of them switched over to ranching and that just was a short-term fix. You could do that for a little while, but then that damaged the land even more. So what ended up happening was thousands and thousands of acres in central Texas were now denuded of their topsoil. And the farmers that had come in and done this work, they meant well, but they did this enormous amount of damage.

They packed up and said, can't do anything with this. As the land tried to recover from that, the only thing that could really grow well were these ash juniper trees. So they took over. They're hardy. mean, if there was enough atmosphere, I think these things would grow on Mars. they grow fast. They can live in really tough soils. And so they started to take over to the point where they

Seyi (12:55)
Thank

John Miri (13:03)
they really kind of dominated. Now, once they got to that point, the whole cycle that had happened before was in these grasslands, you'd have a large number, you'd have frequent small fires. So lightning or a campfire or a Native American settlement, someone would do something that would start a fire and you'd have a grass fire. But it was, know, prairies of

know, prairies of grass, they would happen frequently, but they weren't that serious because they didn't burn that hot and this is just grass and a few trees and then they'd close out. As central Texas starts to become more and more of a dense cedar forest, what happens is now when there's a fire, it's not a small one. So that fuel load starts to build up, there's more wood.

burns hotter, it goes longer. Now, this is a long answer, but this is kind of the sort of the backstory, right? So as the area became more more populated, and this is, I think, similar in California, as the area became, and very common in a lot of other areas, as the area became more populated, we did

Seyi (13:59)
Please, no, this is totally fine.

Yeah.

John Miri (14:18)
what we thought was smart, is let's, when the fire would start, we'd put it out really quickly and that's good. So you'd have fire departments and people that, know, and so now fires in central Texas are rare, right? It doesn't happen very often. That's good for now. But then what happens is since that natural cycle, so since first of all, we've, our first human intervention changed the things we saw in the landscape. So we went from these grasslands to a denser cedar forest.

And then we used to have frequent fires that would clear out underbrush and kind of keep the fuel load small. Well, now, since the fires are very infrequent, that fuel just builds up and builds up and builds up. So over the years, cedar trees will drop limbs, they'll die, a new one will take its place, and that underbrush just gets packed and packed and packed with very dry wood and lots of it.

And so that kind of that and it's I'm piecing together, you know, a bunch of different articles and books and stuff. but what's happened now is that we we had a we're trying to do very reasonable things as as human beings to to to be stewards of the environment around us yet to have to solve problems and to try to make it good for everyone. But we've we've sort of created this problem now where

Seyi (15:32)
Make it habitable for us. Yeah, yeah.

John Miri (15:42)
You've got this large amounts of fuel that are building up around, that would have never built up to this level had we not intervened and that are building up around our own settlements. So they're around houses, they're around schools and so on. so the National Forest Service and then Texas A and others have done really good scientific studies of

Seyi (15:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Miri (16:04)
the whole United States looking at, you know, where, so what they'll do is they go through and they do satellite imagery and sometimes they're even using AI to go, you know, to process the images, but they're going through and saying, okay, where do we have doing a risk calculation basically of mapping that out, but then saying, where do we have, they almost calculate kind of like you'd have a credit rating and say, well, there's, these factors are bad.

So they'd go through and do a weighted average of saying, all right, where do we see high fuel loads, low rainfall, close proximity to places that could cause loss of human life or places density, closest close to the population centers and so on. And then they'll color code these different regions based on a high risk medium, low and minimal. so

Seyi (16:40)
density.

John Miri (16:52)
you know, all of that work happens. And Austin, unfortunately, I Austin's a leader in so many ways, but this is not one that we want to be a leader in. Austin is, last year in 2024, KVU News in Austin reported that it was the fifth most dangerous wildfire risk for any major metropolitan area in the United States. And I'll add the

top one outside of California. So other than California, which is currently, you know, in terrible shape, Austin is literally the worst in the country. And so it's really, and I think, you know, one of the challenges with this is we're

Seyi (17:22)
Yeah.

John Miri (17:38)
And this is a challenge, think, in general of risk management, right? I think all the people that are trying to deal with this at the city and other places are, good people. But as human beings, I think one of our blind spots is new risks that we don't have experience with just don't, they don't bubble to the top, right? It's, you know, and a lot of the, a lot of the work I do is, is consulting with

Seyi (17:56)
to the top. They don't go to the top for us.

John Miri (18:03)
know, cities, counties, utilities, and others on resilience, on risk management. And a lot of times, you know, I'll work on things like cybersecurity and areas like this as well. And many times the challenges, you know, the data tells you there's this new risk, but you haven't experienced it. Your neighbor hasn't had that risk manifest. You haven't had that risk manifest. And so there's this tendency for us to say, well, I know that the, I mean, the numbers say this, but

But my experience is telling me that somehow this is all going to be fine. And I think what we're seeing, unfortunately repeatedly, we saw in Northern California and Maui and Southern California, this is not a theoretical risk anymore. And it's a real danger.

Seyi (18:48)
I thank you so much for that explanation and it makes so much sense. This last point you've just made, I'll share a quick anecdote. The last few years I was working on tracking water risk and helping cities build resilience against water risk. So floods, water quality issues, asset damage, using IoT devices. And your point...

was constantly coming up. We would present and we created risk profiles, similar to what you just said the forest department did. We created risk profiles for each city, highlighting which water related risks they should be trying to address now. And so we'd go to some cities and say, based on all this data,

your risk of asset failure is low, but your risk of drought is high. And they're like, we're kind of good on that. We still get our tanks filled. The aquifer is fine or whatever it is they were getting their water from. And we're like, yeah, but. And you couldn't convince people, especially when

John Miri (19:51)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (20:04)
the funds have been allocated to the current risks they are dealing with. You couldn't convince them to divert funds to this risk projection that you're providing to them. And so I shared that story to say we were frustrated. We couldn't really break through in a lot of cases. What do you think? And I asked this knowing that

It's a tough one to answer, but what do you think is the path to both getting the attention of the people that can address this, but also making them take action preemptively to avoid what is going on? And so maybe the better question is, what can we do today to avoid this?

John Miri (20:46)
Yeah.

Sure, yeah,

I've got a few, think, really good practical things that will help with that. I first wanna also just comment on the example that you brought up, because I think that's a perfect example of the same type of situation just in a different domain, right? So, when you go to...

Seyi (21:00)
Please, please share that.

Yes.

John Miri (21:18)
When you look at, as you did, when you look at the data, right, you're saying to yourself, okay, I'm looking at this data, I'm collecting numbers, I'm doing analysis, and it's telling me that there's some real risk here, right? But then everybody goes to the National City Managers Conference or whatever, and they're at the happy hour afterwards, and they say to themselves, well, that was a really interesting presentation, but...

Do you know any city that ever really, really ran out of water? And they're like, no, I don't. mean, does that really happen? mean, maybe Phoenix. Like I don't, heard, I heard Phoenix had some problems and there's some other guys somewhere else that had problems, but that doesn't really happen, it? And then we have a beer and we go on and we don't worry about it. that, I think you, you highlighted it. It's the same problem that the, the, the trucks coming, right? It's, it's, it's, you're standing in the middle of the road that the cars like you're.

Seyi (22:05)
Yeah.

John Miri (22:09)
And someone's advising you saying that vehicle is very heavy and it's moving exactly in your direction. And this is the speed and at this point it's gonna hit you. And people are like, yeah, but I don't know anyone that's been run over. You're like, well, you will soon. So that can be very frustrating. Cause I think the reality is that a lot of these risks that are new. And so what's interesting also, and you touched on this is, so on one hand,

Seyi (22:16)
you

you

Yeah.

John Miri (22:36)
new emerging risks, our data and our head tells us that there's something we should worry about. But our experience and our gut sort of says, I'm sure this won't be the year that this is going to happen. I run into this with cybersecurity too, where people are like, you know, cybersecurity is a big deal. But I I've done this for 30 years. I haven't had a problem. I'm sure 2025 isn't going to be my year. And I'm like, that's not a strategy. Right.

Seyi (23:00)
my goodness.

John Miri (23:02)
But you also touched on something else that I think is a great insight that is not commonly understood. And that is that there are actually times that we're over it, we might be over-investing in the risks that are the usual ones that we're used to dealing with. Because it's the flip side of the same, so the ones we don't think are gonna happen, we don't think about them. But then the flip side, there's cases where we keep doing, I mean, everything has some value, but we,

Seyi (23:16)
Absolutely.

John Miri (23:29)
We keep investing, keep working on reducing these risks that are expected to be common. almost to a point where you say to yourself, do you wanna spend $10 million to be 0.01 % better at that? Or do you wanna spend, if $500,000 could make you the rock star solving this other problem, that would be way better.

Seyi (23:36)
Yeah.

Exactly.

What I was going to...

ask next is more along the lines of as residents in the city, what do we do? Because I, you had some recommendations on your, on your post that were quite practical at both the city level, but also as individuals, as collectives, as community members. So as much as

John Miri (24:06)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (24:24)
If we want to leave the listeners with what to do, who to listen to, where to find information about this, what recommendations do you have? So we make this, we always have a call to action at the end of our episodes. Let's call this the call to action of what you want people to do.

John Miri (24:45)
Sure. So one thing that the top thing that I would recommend for for individuals now, so this is really because we all we all live somewhere as part of a community. I think as as individuals, I think the first thing to do is to get involved with at the most at the lowest level. I get get involved with your if you have a an HOA or a neighborhood association or something like that. So there's a group

Seyi (24:55)
Yeah.

John Miri (25:10)
If you do a Google search just for the word fire wise, all one word fire wise, the National Fire Protection Association has this program that communities can use to, and it's a very helpful sort of pretty easy to follow set of templates that basically let a community kind of assess its own risk, identify areas and things that can improve the, can reduce their risk and so on.

That's a great, as individuals, that's a great place to start because whether or not the leaders in your community want to, I'll be a little hard on them and say whether or not they choose to lead on the issue, we can all start to bring awareness to say, in our neighborhood, we're gonna look at our specifics. What's around us? What are the ingress routes, outgress routes? How does this work?

Seyi (25:49)
Yeah.

John Miri (26:00)
And there actually have been, it's a great program and a lot of times your local, whoever your local fire service is, whatever the fire department is that covers your facility, they will help you with it. They'll usually be very excited about homeowners working on that. There's some communities in West Travis County, especially around West Lake, West Lake Hills that have done some Firewise plans and that's been very, very helpful.

It's a great education thing. brings neighbors together and it starts to build, even if higher level people choose or choose not to work on it, it starts to build some pressure too, where the public is talking about this saying, hey, we're concerned. One other plus is that in areas, and this is happening in Austin, this has already happened in California and unfortunately has happened to a lot of the people in Southern California that just had their houses burned down. Insurance, are public officials,

are debating whether they wanna confront this risk or not. The insurance companies are not debating it. If the area is too high of a wildfire risk, they will just cancel your insurance or not give you coverage or charge you a ridiculous amount of money that you may not be able to pay. And that's an issue that I think we're just noticing in California, but it's gonna become a real challenge. There have been a lot of good success stories where

Seyi (27:08)
already. Yeah.

John Miri (27:17)
The reason a community put a Firewise plan together was their insurance was going up too much, where the company was saying, hey, I'm not sure we want to cover you. And by putting those plans together, there were a lot of communities that were able to get their costs down and to get more options for coverage, because then the insurance companies were like, okay, you're reducing our risks, you're insurable now. So I think from an individual level, that's a really good option.

Seyi (27:22)
Wow.

Yeah.

Thanks a

lot.

John Miri (27:47)
You know,

think for folks who are, I'll give you two other quick things. So I think for folks who are in leadership positions, so if they're working in smart cities or they're working in urban planning in a city or county or utilities, this is a big topic because they also, especially electric utilities, because they have the added issue of potentially, you know, they don't want to be the cause of a fire either.

You know, for folks where they're in a leadership type role and they're saying, want to take and help my organization do this, they'd definitely be happy to, if they want to reach out to me, you can either find me on LinkedIn, just search for John Meary, M-I-R-I. It's a pretty, luckily, pretty uncommon last name, so easy to find me. And my email address is meary at bedrockstrategy.com, M-I-R-I at bedrockstrategy.com.

Seyi (28:36)
We'll

share in the show notes as well.

John Miri (28:36)
Yeah, great.

That'd be awesome. then, so I'm, you know, for folks who are like, that's, I spend a lot of my time with the folks that are in those types of programs, city managers, heads of utilities and so on to say, how do you, how do you, you know, okay, I believe I wanna, I wanna talk to, I wanna tackle these risks. How do I do it with my executive team and my board and that kind of stuff? The last thing I'll point out for folks on what to do, especially for those who work in the smart city side is that,

there within the Department of Homeland Security, there is a small little research group called the Science and Technology Directorate or DHS S &T. They are really awesome and nobody knows about them. So I'll give them a little plug. they're small but mighty kind of DARPA for human for Homeland Security. So they are

mad scientists trying to come up with new, you know, IOT devices and AI and sensors and things that have value to people like first responders and so on. They have some really awesome research programs that have made very cool stuff from firefighting equipment to sensors to all kinds of things that have value. And one of the challenges is,

they have a hard time finding communities that are willing to help test or try new things. So they'll develop, they'll use our tax dollars efficiently to go develop some new technology, but they need folks to partner with them to go try to test it out and practice and to pilot it. And so I think for folks that are, I imagine a lot of your listeners are innovative folks thinking about stuff like that to, there's,

Seyi (30:06)
pilot thing.

John Miri (30:16)
They're a great resource and they often sometimes even have grant funding for cities that are willing to try out stuff. I worked with them a few years ago on some IOT-based flood sensors and it was one of the best things I've done in my whole career was talking to them. mean, their one project brought the cost of flood sensors down by more than 80 % from...

Seyi (30:30)
time.

for awhile.

John Miri (30:39)
Yeah, I mean, amazing from 75 from the typical old ones would cost 25 to $75,000 a piece. They brought that cost down to $3,000 a piece. And the old ones used to be very labor intensive. So they, you'd have to send a technician out every six to 12 months. The new ones they developed were sent a technician out like once a year. and when I met them, they had already, they had already invested, you know,

Seyi (30:45)
Wow.

Wow.

John Miri (31:04)
$20 million or something into this research program. had hundreds of prototypes and literally no one in the country that wanted to test them. And I was like, I'll test them for you. And they're like, I said, well, it's going to cost us money. They're like, we'll give you money. They gave us money. So now I'm not, I'm not saying they'll probably be like, no, John, don't, don't give my money away. I have no ability to, to control who they give money to, but Dan Cotter, David Alexander, there's a whole team there that are just,

Seyi (31:13)
Thank you.

Dun dun dun, yeah. Yeah.

John Miri (31:31)
really, really great, great public servants who have some, you know, they're the James Bond's queue of Homeland Security. And yeah, so I recommend for your innovative, you know, folks that have a little mad scientist streak to go find them and see how they can help, because they're good guys.

Seyi (31:38)
of moment security.

Fantastic,

John. on that optimistic note, we will leave it there. This has been so enlightening for me. Thank you. And I'm sure for our audience, too. And you shared how they can reach you. We'll include that in the show notes as well. And we'll also include the DHS S &T.

John Miri (31:54)
Yeah.

Seyi (32:10)
actually, because I'm pretty certain a few of our listeners would want to check it out. Thank you so much, John.

John Miri (32:18)
You're welcome. My pleasure. And it was great, great to meet with you and thank you because I think, you know, my, my hope as I was watching all those, all the coverage of Southern California was I was like, I just, I just want to share what I know about this to get it to more people because we've, really do have, we're hugely at risk, especially in Austin and a lot of other communities. And it'd be so nice to just have an ounce of prevention, get, you know, get the stuff under control, get that risk down to a moderate level.

Seyi (32:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Miri (32:47)
not have to watch any of those. We don't have to watch the stuff on television again.

Seyi (32:50)
It's why I reached out. The fact that it is possible to prevent that, and as you've shared, I hope, puts our listeners, everyone who listens to this, a more sort of hopeful and the possibility of addressing it has increased for me now that I've had this conversation with you, and I hope they feel the same as well. So thank you.

John Miri (33:09)
Yeah.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Seyi (33:15)
fantastic.

Seyi (33:18)
Hi again, Reza.

Reza (33:20)
Hey Seyi that was really very interesting. I had not really thought about the history of why central Texas has become a place that is at risk for wildfires and sort of thinking it from our future forward perspective and cities, how, you know, by changing, you know, the system or ecosystem of the land,

created a situation where we just have a great deal of more fuel that is combustible that puts a city of Austin, a city like Austin at risk. And so that's like the first thing that struck me. And so I'm so glad you brought on John. know many of our listeners don't live in Austin, but it's just an example of how historical choices can lead to consequences that put

puts a city at risk and makes the need for that city to be thoughtful about being resilient with what has happened in the past, as well as choices that they're making going forward into the future, not to create another sort of situation like that.

Seyi (34:31)
Yeah, no, it's a really good point you're pulling out Reza. The thing about complex systems is that there is always, almost always a time lag between the actions and the consequences of those actions through the interaction of several components or actors within the system. So,

it will the actions we take today to address problems in cities. And it's why we need to take action today. We will not see the immediate positive or negative outcomes. The time lag will always play out with complex systems. And that is exactly what is going on.

with wildfires in cities and Austin and a few other cities, their lists of cities at most risk absolutely have to take action today to avoid what is happening in LA and environments happening in their cities too.

Reza (35:36)
Yeah. Yeah, the other thing Seyi, you know, I did a little bit of research to understand a little bit more about wildfires and, you know, one of the experts that I follow, Brian Potter, he writes this newsletter on Substack called Construction Physics. he had, sorry, one of our favorites, exactly, one of our favorite, you know, favorite experts out there. And he,

Seyi (35:54)
one of our favorite. I said one of our favorite.

Reza (36:03)
put out his newsletter with some links about wildfires. And I found some of what he shared really interesting. He found some research and I'm gonna read some of this because I don't want to misstate anything. So he said, several commenters have stated that the high risk of fire means that we shouldn't be constructing buildings out of wood in wildfire areas.

a previously written about wood construction and the risk of fire and noted a study that suggests buildings with metal or masonry doesn't seem to help as much as you would think. And he quotes from this research, which really ties into one of our 21 laws. And he says that Seifard in 2017 studied over 1,500 buildings exposed to wildfires between 2003 and 2007. While certain materials and details had significant effects on building survivability,

Wood in general wasn't a significant factor. Interestingly, the most significant factors were structural density, the number of houses per square mile and structural age. Young, densely packed houses all survived. Old houses spread far apart were all destroyed. I thought that was very counterintuitive and very interesting. What do you think, Shae?

Seyi (37:13)
Yeah, it's so, you shared it with me before the call and it took me a few minutes to wrap my head around it because you sort of expect the opposite to be the case. And we, but we see that because one of the things, I don't know if it was John who said it, the embers are what cause most of the carry on fires.

Reza (37:23)
Yes. Yes.

Yes, yes.

And it's the distance between a home that has fuel, enough fuel for it to continue to spread. You have a little, you have an ember that falls, you have this fuel, it picks up speed again and goes to the next house. And that was so counterintuitive. But this makes sense because as I've looked at the maps of

Seyi (37:42)
Exactly. Yeah. Yes.

continues. Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (38:05)
LA and where the fires have occurred. And it's just terrifying to look at, just sad to see the destruction. But you see areas that are more densely packed, less impacted by ones that are sort of closer to where the, you know, the canyons and there's greater space between, you know, the homes to where the fire spreads. I, and it goes back to our 21 laws where we talk about urban density.

Seyi (38:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Reza (38:33)
In that case, we were talking about urban density for other purposes, but we never thought about it for the sake, the ecological and the wildfire risk prevention that comes with it.

Seyi (38:38)
the ecological, yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting to see how, again, without touting our laws, this came out of work from a lot of experts that we researched. So it does make sense that the application of the law under one system, we're thinking about the human skills system here.

applies at the ecological level as well and rightly so as expressed in what we learned about the wildfires and some of the research you've pulled up. So I thought it was a good episode. John is deeply knowledgeable about, he kept saying I'm not an expert in wildfires or ecology.

and then would go on and share a lot of deep knowledge. But it's why I wanted him on. He represented both of the things that we talk about a fair bit on this show. Expertise plus curiosity. And you can gain expertise by following your curiosities and just going deep in something. And it seems to have gone deep.

His areas of expertise overlaps as well. He's worked a lot with utilities and vegetation management. So the risk there is apparent.

Reza (40:03)
Yep.

Yeah,

and he had a really good call to action as well, like something about what you can do to address it. So yeah, it was great having him on, Seyi. I'm so glad that you brought him on. We'll include in our show notes as well this link to the article by Brian Potter, which has a lot of additional data in there. I we only brought up one thing, but he has multiple points in there about wildfires and what...

what the unintended consequences of other actions that we have or have not taken that has led to this just tragic situation.

Seyi (40:38)
Great great and I guess on that note since he provided us a call to action we'll say thank you to our listeners. If you have any other thoughts, additional comments or something in this episode or other episodes sparks your interest always feel free to reach out it's hello at futureforward.fm

Reza (40:58)
Yeah, thanks everyone. Before we hop off, just a reminder to like and subscribe, to rate and review, share this episode with someone else. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.