175: Fighting Fire with Aspen and Birch

Andrea Askowitz  0:15  
I'm Andrea Askowitz.

Allison Langer  0:16  
And I'm Alison Langer and this is Writing Class Radio. You'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories. Together, we produce this podcast which is equal parts heart and art. By heart, we mean the truth in a story. By art, we mean the craft of writing. No matter what's going on in our lives, Writing Slass is where we tell the truth is where we work out our shit. 

Andrea Askowitz  0:39  
Shit.

Allison Langer  0:40  
We do work out our shit there. There's no place in the world like Writing Class, and we want to bring you in. 

Andrea Askowitz  0:45  
Today on our show, we bring you a story by Nick Link that was originally performed on stage at the Flagstaff Festival of science in October 2023. Like on our last episode, where we brought you a story by Bruce Hungate, this was a collaboration with ECOS, the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. And story collider, a podcast that airs true science stories. 

Allison Langer  1:14  
Yeah, quickly, we want to just tell you how this came to be. It's on the last episode. So if you've already heard this just fast forward, but Jane Marks and Bruce Hungate are two scientists and professors at NAU. They're conservation ecologists and they happen to be married. 

Andrea Askowitz  1:32  
And they're brilliant and awesome. 

Allison Langer  1:34  
Oh, yeah, they're there. Yeah, beyond the two of them have been taking our classes for like three years or so and come to our retreats and just are amazing and we love them like crazy. And for some reason, they trust us, thank God. Anyway, they were like, hey, can you help our students present their, you know, write and present their science stories because we really want to bring science to the world in a bigger, better way. So their vision is coming true and they hired us to work with their students and we did that online and in person. And it culminated into this amazing show at the Flagstaff Festival science and everyone got a standing ovation. It was insane. I mean, the festival owner or director, yeah, the festival director said it was like the best showing the best show like everything of the whole festival, and and she can't wait to have us all back. So we're psyched. They went from the page to the stage these stories and so it required a lot of memorization, but also storytelling, you can't just memorize otherwise boring. So they worked on presentation skills, they really got their story they nailed like different points and endings. And it was just really, really cool. They took all the things that were taught to them about live storytelling and made them amazing. So real quick, before we get to Nick's story, just want to give you a little bit of blurb about him. He is a PhD student in the Mac lab and part of ECOS, the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. Back with his story after the break.

Andrea Askowitz  3:15  
We're back. This is Andrea Askowitz and you're listening to Writing Class Radio. Up next is Nick Link, reading his story 'Gathered From Coincidence'.

Nick Link  3:25  
Back in what must have been my sophomore year college , me and the guys on the track team thr e w a big Christmas party (o r at least it seemed big at 19 and after a couple of Keystone Lights ) . Even a t a big State school like North Carolina State the student - athlete community is still pretty small , so the way party invitations worked was that somebody knew a girl from volleyball , or a guy that wrestled , and eventually word would make its way back around to the guys from football and basketball . Once they arrived , the party would blow up because they all brought their girls , and all their girls would bring their girls a nd next thing you kn o w , you c an’t hardly walk thr ough the house . See , b eing good hosts, w e always felt a need to spruce our place up with a couple of Christmas trees . And , lo and behold , those trees got pushed into corner s , knocked down , and walked all over . Come to find , most of the needles came off and end ed up stuck in the carpet (o r worse , they found themselves glued to the linoleum from a mix of spil led beers and jungle juice ) . Cleaning up after the party , we – f or whatever reason – thought it ’d be a real clever idea to take the now beaten - down and raggedy Christmas trees out into the backyard , get th em in a pile , and light th at pile on fire . T ell you what , Christmas trees burn like you wouldn’t believe . I have such a clear recollection of being halfway between drunk and hungover , watching the flames lick a telephone wire that must have been 20 feet in the air . I looked across th at fire – that we now had no power to put out – and seeing the fear of God in the eyes o f my roommates ( these were boys , mind you, who had gone to private school and hadn’t grown up in places where people burn their trash ). Standing there – frozen by size of the flames – I struggled to wrap my head around just how in the hell this fire got that big . That towering blaze – which at this point had started to kiss the lower branches of the big white oak in the yard – had been thrown up there by trees that , just the night before , had gotten absolutely steamrolled by a small er gal from the soccer team. A fire that runs that hot eventually burns itself out (which is go od because the 2 - 3 Tupperwares of water we had thrown on it hadn’t done nothing ). After a , let’s call it “terse”, conversation with the neighbors and local FD, we were left with t he small pile of smoldering ash es, which felt misaligned with how domineering the fire had been . A a snarky reminder that all that commotion was from j ust a couple of tore - up , little old Christmas trees That moment, burned into my brain, followed me over the years. But the severity of that fire was sparked again in the recesses of my memory when I started my PhD in biology, where I found myself cutting trail through the dense forests of Alaska’s Interior. F orest s comprised almost entirely of Christmas trees . Now a s a brief aside , “ C hristmas tree ” ain’t a species. During the holiday s , you might see a b alsam fir, or a blue spruce, maybe a white spruce . In Interior Alaska , the forests are made up mostly of black spruce, a close relative of th os e other spruces and – importantly for our purposes – also burn like you would not believe. While b ushwacking through those thickets of spruce , I found it unsettlingly clear how primed everything was to burn . That fear wa s also fueled by the fact that wildfires were actively tearing across 3.1 million acres of Alaska . These f ires are that can onl y accurately be described as biblical . And t hese fires are only gonna get bigger. Alaska is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, driving up both the number of acres burned and fire severity . What’s worse, bigger and badder fires emit mor e greenhouse gases, making the planet warmer and future fires even more destructive. In scientific circles this is known as “a positive feedback . ” See b ack home we’d call it a clusterfuck. T hat’s what drew me to Alaska . Every summer , the folks who live up there are one lighting strike away from losing everything . In an effort to prevent the worst , around cities, villages, and homes, Alaskans are creating “ fuel - breaks . ” Th ese are a reas where you cut down those flammable spruce trees in hopes of limiting a wild fire ’s ability to spread. But what grows back after you get rid of those trees? Is it the same old black spruce? Or l ess flammable trees , like say aspen or birch? And is there anything I can do , with my scientific understanding of the natural world , to build fuel - breaks so that they do reforest with those less - flammable trees? In a way, making a living and natural fuel - break. Create a space that’s safe from wildfires, if not safe from teenage boys

Allison Langer  11:29  
I heard this actually so much more impactful right now and I've heard it a bunch of times through rehearsals through stories through writing it and the whole thing is like, what's our purpose in the world? And why do we continue doing it when some people are not getting it. And then we talked about that last episode, about how dumbing down science to the people who are listening may have a bigger effect on the earth and saving our world. And I heard it this time that all he looked at, in this story is the effect of that living fuel break on that one firefighter and that was everything to him. So it's like one person at a time. If you can make a difference one person at a time, then maybe that's enough and I just thought that was really cool. We may not change the world, but we did change something for one person. 

Andrea Askowitz  12:24  
Hmm. I love what you're saying. But I understood that, because this firefighter, his life was saved by aspen and birch, it made our narrator's work matter.

Allison Langer  12:39  
Exactly the one person. 

Andrea Askowitz  12:41  
Yeah. But that's one person who's lived through fires. So in my mind, it's not just like a random person who cares. He didn't just make a random person and care, but he was, it was like, he got affirmation. Because our narrator, Nick, he seems to be thinking like, oh my god, I'm just, I'm just focusing on this like, minute tiny thing by trying to make aspen and birch trees grow up in the middle of Christmas trees, so that there's a natural fire break. Is that worth doing? Is that worth spending my time on? And then this firefighter tells them that, yeah, Aspen and birch trees saved his life. That is so cool. 

Allison Langer  13:23  
I wonder if he's saying it's enough or if that was just the ending to his story? Or does he really believe it? Because you know how all the time people are telling me like I'm trying to change the criminal justice system, but what they're saying is, is you may never change the criminal justice system. But by working with these guys who are in prison, that I can change them, or I can help them, and it's mattering to them. And they tell me, it matters to them, even if I'm not, but I feel like it's not enough. So does he you know, like in this instance, he's saying it does. But I don't know. Is it enough? Is it enough what we're doing if it can't achieve effect change in a big, big way? So I think that's just a bigger picture.

Andrea Askowitz  14:07  
I believe that in this case, if if this narrator can make the forest and Alaska, naturally grow aspen and birch trees, then he can save the forest of Alaska, not just one person or one tree. I really feel like he because he got the affirmation from someone who actually lives within these fires and tries to fight them by hand. He he got affirmation that maybe what he's doing matters.

Allison Langer  14:38  
It's a little different. I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's true. It's true, because it's not just mattering to the one guy. He just got affirmation. You put that in a really solid way. Yeah, yeah, you're right. 

Andrea Askowitz  14:50  
But I do think that I do think that our narrator is, is worried in the same way that you're worried. Like, the minutia is the minutia, doing anything. So, I feel like that might be a kind of a common worry for people, especially when the problems are so big. I just want to cheer for this story because the narrator taught me things and there's something that I heard this time that I didn't really quite get and it's this part right here where he's saying he gives us the statistic. I think it was 3.2 million acres. 

Allison Langer  15:25  
3.1. 

Andrea Askowitz  15:26  
Okay. 3.1 million acres are on fire in Alaska. So it doesn't matter if I know 3.13 point 1 million. I don't know what that looks like. That sounds like a lot. But he put it in terms of like, those are biblical proportions. So now I'm like, wow, I can imagine that, like, Alaska is so in danger and they've been on fire and then he says, so much of Alaska is one lightning strike away from losing everything. So he really put it into terms that I can understand like, now it's, those are stakes. Yeah, those stakes are huge and the other thing that I loved so, so much about what we're doing with the students from ecos, and the students from Northern Arizona University is like, the reason that we're personalizing the stories like how the personalization works. In this case, it's so worked for me because here's this kid, and he was a kid when he was in college. I don't think of him as a kid anymore. But college kid who like did this dumb ass thing, that forever but he even said, like, burned such good writing, like burned a memory in his brain.

Allison Langer  16:37  
Yeah, the memory was burned into his brain. I highlighted that to really,

Andrea Askowitz  16:41  
Really well done. But there was a connection to like this thing that he did as a kid and what he's doing now.

Allison Langer  16:49  
Yeah, the anecdote that's at the top actually really led to this guy's passion. In life, basically, in this is the arc. It's a very simple arc. This is what happened. This is why it fueled him and now he's trying to save the forest from these drunk college kids. It's perfect and he just filled in the blanks. 

Andrea Askowitz  17:12  
Yep. 

Allison Langer  17:13  
With details. 

Andrea Askowitz  17:14  
Yeah, he did. Yeah, yeah. So true. There were let me just let me just like praise a little bit more like the Tupperware of water hadn't done much. God, that's so funny. And then like, he's standing there, like, how did it get this big. The other thing that I love is, if you didn't know, Christmas tree ain't a species. 

Allison Langer  17:38  
He had such a presence on the stage and his terms and his, you know, he drops in personal information about like, you know, they didn't grow up like I did, and, you know, stuff like that so we just love the guy. 

Andrea Askowitz  17:49  
I know. He was a great performer I loved loved his performance. I love his story and I think his story is so important and now I'm like, I mean, in my mind, Christmas trees are species and they burn like hell, and I'm really nervous. So God, excellent. Well done.

Allison Langer  18:09  
Thank you for listening and thank you, Nick Link for sharing your story. Thank you ECOS, NAU, Story Collider and Bruce Hungate and Jane marks for bringing science to the mainstream.

Andrea Askowitz  18:20  
Ah, yay. Thanks for bringing it to us. And

Allison Langer  18:23  
 And thanks for including us. We've learned so much and we've just I don't know it's just been such a great adventure and I hope we get more and more more.

Andrea Askowitz  18:39  
Writing Class Radio is hosted by me Andrea Askowtiz.

Allison Langer  18:42  
And me Allison Langer. 

Andrea Askowitz  18:44  
Audio production by Matt Cundill, Evans Surminksy, Chloe Emond-Lane and Aidan Glassey at the Sound Off Media Company. Theme music is by Justina Shandler. There's more Writing Class on our website, including stories we study, editing resources, video classes, writing retreats, and live online classes. If you want to write with us every week, or if you're a business owner, community activist, group that needs healing entrepreneur, scientist, and you want to help your team write better, check out all the classes we offer on our website, writingclassradio.com. Join the community that comes together for instruction, an excuse to write and the support from other writers. To learn more, go to our website for patreon.com/writing class radio. A new episode will drop every other Wednesday.

Allison Langer  19:40  
There's no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story. What's yours?

Tara Sands 19:50  
Produced and distributed by the Sound Off Media Company.