Fire and the Lands We Call Home: A Renewed Approach for a Brighter Future Presentation with Dr. Sasha Berleman, Audubon Canyon Ranch (ACR) fire ecologist

This past October, the North Bay area experienced one of its most destructive and tragic human disasters in recorded history due to fire. Over the past hundred years, the human-fire relationship has been one riddled with animosity, and this antagonism has come at great cost to people and ecosystems alike. Yet it hasn’t always been this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way as we look to the future. Attend this talk to learn about fire’s long-standing and critical role in our ecosystems, and the ways our plant communities have come to depend on fire as an ecosystem process. Discover the thousands-years-old inextricable role that people played in that relationship, and how humans depended on fire for millennia in the same way our landscapes still do today. Finally, find out how we can renew our land management techniques and revolutionize our culture so that we can learn to live with fire rather than against it. Audubon Canyon Ranch (ACR) is working with partners across the region, state and country to implement the National Wildfire Cohesive Strategy by innovating an all-hands, all-lands approach to increase the pace and scale of fuels treatments across the region, and we look forward to sharing our vision with you.

Dr. Sasha Berleman leads ACR’s Fire Ecology Program. She has her PhD in wildland fire science from UC Berkeley, and conducted her graduate research in Northern California on prescribed fire use for restoration of ecosystem health. She has been an active participant in Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX) since 2010, with most being located in Northern California (Shasta, Trinity and Klamath regions). She is a wildland firefighter with “Fire Effects Monitoring” and “Squad Boss” qualifications. She spent summer 2017 on the Redding Interagency Hotshot Crew, has planned and organized interagency private lands controlled burns, and has approximately 600 hours of hands-on prescribed fire experience. Sasha is a board member of the Central Coast Prescribed Fire Council.

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