A Better Food Future: PhD Researcher and Hopi Farmer

Fire Pt. 3: Fire Is Not the Enemy

The cost of putting a fire out is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to assessing the total cost of a wildfire. Multiple studies have shown it is less than 10% of the full cost of the disaster, which includes post-wildfire flooding. In this episode, we travel to Flagstaff, Arizona in the midst of one of its worst wildfire seasons in recent history. We look closely at the “Herculean effort” it takes to mitigate severe post wildfire flooding in the short term, as well as some of the most promising long term solutions to reduce the risk of wildfire—including a surprising shift in perspective: “fire is not the enemy.”

Fire Pt. 2: Sorting Through the Ashes

In April 2022, 50 mile-per-hour winds propelled the Tunnel Fire toward neighborhoods just north of Flagstaff, Arizona where it destroyed 30 homes. Weeks after the fire—and the media attention surrounding it—fizzled out, volunteers, homeowners, and government officials were working tirelessly to clean up the damage and help the community recover. In this episode, we visit the burn site and look at the physical destruction and emotional turmoil wildfire causes, how and why homeowners insurance often fails to cover the cost of rebuilding, and how one disaster often paves the way for more in the future.

Fire Pt. 1: Fighting Angry Fires

The average area burned by wildfires in the United States annually has nearly tripled since the 1980s. But perhaps more importantly, those fires have gotten hotter, faster spreading, and more dangerous—placing the future of America's forests in jeopardy. In this first installment of our fire series, we look at how and why wildfires have changed so dramatically in recent decades, and we hear from firefighters about what it is like to fight them.

A Better Food Future: PhD Researcher and Hopi Farmer

Food production is responsible for 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions and in the Western United States, 80% of water consumption—but it could be done more sustainably. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is a Hopi traditional farmer, PhD researcher, and opera singer—and he is a proponent of applying Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (or ITEK) to agriculture. Indigenous people across the world have fine-tuned methods for living sustainably in their ecosystems and those methods hold powerful solutions for our biggest environmental problems.

Water Pt. 3: Old Technology

Fast-growing Phoenix is sometimes thought of as a “new” or “up and coming” place without much history. But as we learn in this episode, it was actually born from the ashes of a thriving culture with centuries of accumulated knowledge about how to thrive and grow food in a dry desert. In this third part of our water series, we look to the past for solutions to our current-day water problems. We explore the engineering prowess of Phoenix’s original inhabitants and travel to Ajo, Arizona where some of their descendants are working to revitalize traditional growing methods and water-efficient foods.