This film is more than a wholesale indictment of political policy. It’s peppered with real stories of loss and near-disaster told by victims, firefighters, researchers, and native peoples who are passionate – and more than a little disheartened – about our emergency approach to fighting wildfire. Unlike some documentaries that poke and prod at a problem until the credits roll, Elemental proposes solutions on both personal and policy levels. This film is a disciplined, multifaceted approach to a complex problem. Whether those solutions are possible, workable, or practical is another (untold) story.
* * *
Filmmaker Trip Jennings translates our fascination with fire into stunning visuals and pragmatic urgency in his documentary Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire. Jennings (Rewilding a Mountain, Postcards from Climate Change) has worked with National Geographic for almost ten years. He’s also the founder of Balance Media, a video company that works with nonprofit video projects, commercial videos, and television. Executive producer Ralph Bloemers, president of the Green Oregon Alliance, also produced Jennings’s 2010 documentary, Trout on the Wind. Jennings and Bloemers have intimate experience and strong opinions about our relationship with Nature.
Frustration is palpable from the documentary’s opening scenes: flyovers of neighborhoods charred to a crisp, accompanied by voice-overs from President Biden, ex-president Trump, and former president Obama. It’s a tacit accusation of decades of political inaction.
People still suffer. Homes still burn. Politicians make speeches.
This film is more than a wholesale indictment of political policy. It’s peppered with real stories of loss and near-disaster told by victims, firefighters, researchers, and native peoples who are passionate – and more than a little disheartened – about our emergency approach to fighting wildfire. Unlike some documentaries that poke and prod at a problem until the credits roll, Elemental proposes solutions on both personal and policy levels. This film is a disciplined, multifaceted approach to a complex problem. Whether those solutions are possible, workable, or practical is another (untold) story.
With his “keep calm” British baritone, acclaimed actor David Oyelowo (Selma, Spooks, The Help) offers an understated narration that balances the passion of advocates and victims.
First up is Jack Cohen, a research scientist at a Fire Sciences Lab in Montana. Cohen says that thirty years of research demonstrate that “we can prevent a high level of destruction,” but if we treat each fire like an emergency, “disasters will be inevitable.”
Cue up the disaster.
Elemental recounts the harrowing story of a young family that barely escaped Paradise, California’s deadly Camp Fire in 2018. A scruffy-bearded dad runs through flames to reunite with his family, only to be part of the traffic jam from hell. Wobbly cellphone video is a disorienting melange of orange and black, punctuated by the car tires exploding from the heat and a young mother’s choked-up attempts to calm terrified children. Everyone wanted to get out of Paradise. Eighty-six people did not escape. They lost their lives in the most catastrophic fire in California history.
Screenshot
It’s not your imagination: wildfires are becoming more destructive. Still, Reimagine Wildfire’s experts claim the actual number of wildfires has remained fairly constant for the past forty years, averaging about 72,000 blazes each year and that 98 percent of those fires are controlled. The 2 percent of wildfires that get out of control cause massive destruction.
Timothy Ingalsbee, who works with Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology, has fought fires with the Forest Service and Park Service for years. Imagine a younger, fitter Wilford Brimley: Ingalsbee is a guy with the quiet confidence of his convictions. “You don’t really put out a fire,” he says. “You put a fire line around the fire, and over time, (it) will burn out of burnable fuel.”
The most dangerous fires are wind-driven, exacerbated by vulnerable power lines that stick up out of the ground like cigarette lighters. Frightening conflagrations in areas with a lot of vegetation whip up in a hurry. These fires can literally turn day into night and launch embers that act like fire grenades, often traveling surprising distances to ignite more blazes.
That’s what happened on the West Coast on Labor Day Weekend, 2020. After a hot, dry summer, five megafires ignited more than a million acres.
The number of fires is pretty steady, so why does it seem so much worse? The answer lies in peoples’ proximity – and attitudes – about fire.
Here, the documentary takes a step back, introducing the Yuroks, a native tribe on Oregon’s Klamath River. For the Yurok people, fire was a major tool. Without fire, meadows shrink. Grazing habitat disappears. Hazel and acorn gathering depend on a fire cycle. For generations, families were entrusted with what we would call “prescribed burns.”
Screenshot
Colonizers changed all that. By the 1920s the mandate was clear: if there’s a fire, put it out. The Dust Bowl made things much worse. Then, suddenly, ocean currents shifted. Chris Dunn, an Oregon State University wildfire scientist, explains that this incremental wet period was accompanied by a building boom (forests were harvested for homebuilding) and grazed-down grasslands. In a short time, instead of losing 7 million acres per year to wildfire, only about a million acres burned annually.
In recent decades, there has been a prolonged drought. In the 1980s, “more people moved into every fire-prone landscape.” The largest, most destructive, deadliest fires in history have taken place in the last five to ten years.
The principal tactic to control wildfires has been to remove vegetation before fires can take hold. On private land, that’s meant thinning trees. On public land, it’s meant clearcutting. Advocates call it forest management. I grew up driving past the Bouma Postyard near Lincoln and the Champion Mill on the road to Missoula, Montana. We called it logging.
We use timber and its products in building materials, furniture, and in ways you might not have imagined (though Elemental didn’t mention it, grated cheese and ice cream can contain “cellulose’ wood pulp).
Congressman Tim McClintock (R-California) says, “Excess timber is either carried out or it burns out.” Shouldn’t we harvest a product instead of letting valuable materials and good jobs go up in smoke?
The experts profiled in Elemental are firm in their belief that misguided attempts to thin and clearcut makes wildfire – and climate change– worse. The documentary claims less than 1 percent of pre-thinned or clearcut timber areas encounter wildfire. It’s ineffective, costly, and counterproductive because we can’t predict where wildfire will take place. Colorado’s Dixie Fire is a case in point. Fire burned over fuel breaks entirely, causing extensive damage. The fire breaks failed.
Credit: Tyler Jennings
If managed land doesn’t work, what does? We harvest about two-thirds of US forests for timber. How do we protect what’s left?
Professor Emeritus Beverly Law is part of a decades-long research project that placed carbon-measuring towers above forest canopies all around the world. This huge global study concluded that old-growth forests are “workhorses” fighting climate change. Law is upset that solid science is being ignored. Perhaps it’s time to generate a new slogan: Save the Plain Forest.
Paradoxically, despite the devastation and tragedy this elemental force wreaks on human endeavors, fire works. “Fire is like this grand reset button,” says Maya Khosla, a biologist and writer who documented the life cycle of burned forests. “Wave upon wave of new life comes in.” It’s the interface with people that’s causing the problem. “We’re 98 percent successful in fighting wildfires,” insists Jack Cohen. “We need to change the ignitability of things that get destroyed.”
To prove his point, Cohen starts a wildfire. This controlled blaze demonstrates the flammability of building materials and helps determine how much of a “fuel break” is needed to preserve structures. It’s serious, dangerous work . . . but there’s Jack, his White’s boots licking the flames. Jack Cohen loves fire.
There are many variables – wind, humidity, temperature, drought. When Cohen and fellow researchers perform a huge lab experiment with life-size house fronts, the wood frame is lost to fire. The fire-hardened home model remains intact. The experiment demonstrates Cohen’s claim that “90 percent of the problem is burning embers.” The nursery rhyme conclusion is inescapable: the little piggy with the equivalent of the brick house survives.
Credit: Sara Quinn
Still, it’s hard for me to envision folks willingly going to the huge expense and aesthetic compromise of installing cement fibrous siding, metal roofing, and enclosed gutters, and hacking down a 70-foot graduated fuel break. Elemental doesn’t address the issue of historic preservation, either. Should we have rebuilt Glacier Park’s Sperry Chalet, destroyed by fire in 2017, with concrete fiberboard? Cohen says fire-hardened structures don’t have to look like ammo bunkers, but I understand why people swallow hard.
Margo Robbins of the Yurok Tribe ignites a sage bundle and touches it to scrubby undergrowth, as part of a controlled burn. “The most important thing,” she says with reverence, “is to bring fire back to the land.” Just not too much. And not in the wrong places or at the wrong times.
Wildfire has always been a hot topic in the American West. Activists have climbed trees slated for removal and refused to come down. There have been accusations of “tree spiking,” an act of sabotage that puts loggers’ lives at risk. Myths perpetuate and misnomers are stated as fact. Hackles are raised. Tourist tip: you might not want to wander into a bar in northwest Montana wearing an Environmental Defense Fund T-shirt.
This documentary is going to make people seethe. Pro-logging interests, of course, but even those who agree with scientifically vetted observations and conclusions may resent what they perceive as the burden to retrofit or rebuild. People move to the forest to live IN the forest. Despite the aerial view of the lone surviving fire-hardened home after a wildfire, I’m not sure how happy that family is going to be, living in forest that’s just experienced a “grand reset.”
Elemental: Reimagining Wildfire leaves the viewer with an incontrovertible, combustible fact: humans have encroached on vulnerable landscapes. The world is hotter, drier, and stormier, and so are the places where difficult decisions about our planet’s future are made.
