A Wilderness Ranger turned PhD, Tamara Wall of the Desert Research Institute is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Between getting her master's in New Mexico and her PhD in Montana, she worked as a wilderness ranger for the US Forest Service in Idaho and Wyoming.

That role sparked her interest in wildfire mitigation, which is just one part of the vast research she does at the Desert Research Institute in Reno.

Tamara Wall, Deputy Director of the Western Regional Climate Center, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

We're happy to have you here in Las Vegas.

And you are here for the Wildfire Recovery and Resilience Summit put on by DRI.

This is the inaugural summit.

And for our viewers who did not get to watch our Nevada Week interview, will you explain the need for this summit.

(Tamara Wall) So I attend a lot of wildfire conferences.

And at those conferences, the dominant topic is always fuels, you know, wildfire suppression, fuel mitigation, reducing the amount of available fuel on a landscape.

But where I think we really need to focus is on community resiliency.

And community resiliency does include fuel mitigation, but it also includes retrofitting existing homes to make them more safe from embers intrusion.

When you have a wildfire, there's a lot of burning debris in the air.

So we want to make sure that that debris doesn't get into very tiny vents--like soffit vents, attic vents--and ignite the insulation.

We need to talk about insurance, because insurance is a huge issue right now with people being able to get property insurance.

We need to talk about utilities and the role of utilities in wildfire ignition, but also what happens when we do a power safety shutoff and how that impacts the economy of a local community.

-It's so much more than just putting the fire out itself.

-It is.

-You have been involved in wildfire research for how many years now?

-My dissertation was on wildfire research, so I started in 2000.

So I guess that's 24 years.

-Okay.

Of all the research you have done, what are you most proud of?

-I still really like my dissertation research.

I go all the way back to that.

And then some ways, this conference is kind of coming full circle.

My dissertation research, really, I went around and I interviewed people who lived in wildfire-prone areas in Missoula and Seeley Lake, Montana.

And Seeley Lake was one of the first communities that was almost burned over.

And I'm trying to remember what year that was, and I can't quite remember.

It was in the early aughts, but that was a big deal at that time.

We hadn't, you know, quote/unquote, almost lost a community before.

And if the wind hadn't suddenly changed, they would have lost Seeley Lake.

Now, sadly of course, we've lost many communities in the last 24 years.

But I interviewed people in those areas about their perceptions of wildfire risk and what they were willing to do about it.

-What did you find?

-It was really interesting, as I'm a social scientist, so I looked at it from kind of a place-based identity of framework.

And what I really found was most interesting to me was people could either be very place congruent or place referent.

And people who were place congruent like certain types of places.

I always say that I'm a very place congruent person.

You know, there's lots of places that I've lived in Idaho and Wyoming, even Northern Nevada, that have certain similar characteristics that are really valuable to me.

Like, I like living in mountains.

I like being able to walk each day in a treed environment.

I like access to rivers.

You know, Northern Nevada has a lot of those attributes as well.

People who are place referent, they are very tied, very attached to a very specific place, and no other place will do is how I think about it.

And so for people who are place referent, they were more willing to do wildfire mitigation that would change, visually change the landscape, because it was really important that they stayed in that place.

And so whatever they could do to protect that place was really important to them.

People who are place congruent were maybe less willing to alter the landscape because they could move to another place that looked the same.

-Give me an example of altering the landscape.

-Let's just say thinning, so doing fuel mitigation.

Say I had a, you know, a lot of the people I interviewed had trees surrounding their decks.

I would ask somebody, If a fire was approaching, would you cut that tree down?

And people who were place referent would be like, Oh, yeah, I'd take that out, no problem.

Put a dozer line around-- you know, these are often people with high levels of self-competency.

They would be like, Yeah, I would do whatever I had to do to save my home.

Or as somebody who was placed congruent, they were more likely to say no.

-How do you overcome this human behavior, then?

Can science impact it?

-Oh, I think-- I think we know how people work, right?

We're pretty good on-- we're pretty good at kind of figuring out ways to nudge people into behavior patterns that, you know, we would like.

I mean, think about seat belts, right?

When I grew up, it was seat belts were optional.

-Yeah.

-They're not really optional anymore in people's heads.

-So what would a place congruent person, what might influence them?

-The way that I approached it, or we talked about it with them, because I would ask these questions, like, What would make you shift?

And I had a lovely couple who had moved out from Pennsylvania, and they were new to the region.

And so they were just like, We had just had no idea that this was even important.

And what really motivated them to do some thinning on their property was the idea that it was beneficial for wildlife.

Wildlife was hugely important to them, and so that was a motivating factor.

-You had mentioned to me in a phone call we had that you wrote your dissertation while pregnant.

-I did.

-I think you also interviewed for your first job at Desert Research Institute while pregnant with that same child.

-Nope.

There was a little gap in there.

-Okay, so a different child?

-Yeah.

And I think that child was maybe-- I had a zero and a two at that time.

Yeah, when I-- when I started at DRI, I think my son had just turned two.

Or, no, my son had turned two, and my daughter was four, yeah.

-Those are big life events happening simultaneously.

-Yeah.

-What did you take away from those experiences?

What did you learn?

-You know, in academia, there's a lot of pressure for women.

You know, it can be really hard to juggle family and the demands of academia, any job, and so I think a lot of times in academia, it's-- I think this is changing, but when my children were young, it was still seen as disadvantageous to have a young family.

I was very fortunate to have a advisor during my PhD process, Dr. Sara Halverson, who actually grew up in Reno, and she had three young children of her own.

So she was just like, It's not a problem.

And so I kind of took Sara as a model, and I just had my babies.

So that was that.

-And that is a message that you give to fellow female students wanting to become, one day, like you.

-I tell them, Don't wait.

There's, there is no perfect time, and waiting is not going to do you any good.

-How many children do you have?

-Two.

-How do you think they've influenced your work?

-They've made me set good boundaries.

I have to be very careful with boundaries, because I have-- I often, you know, I work in what I call "the cracks of my day."

I can't tell you how many calls, conference calls I've done at my kids' dojo when they were little, like huddled in the corner.

And if you've ever been to a dojo, which you will probably one day, they are insanely loud.

So I would, like, cower in the corner, like trying to hear on conference calls or answering emails on my laptop, sitting in bleachers.

So in that sense, I always joke that the two things that made me, made me, allowed me to be a working mother, were Amazon and smartphones.

Amazon Prime, savior for a working mother.

And my smartphone, because I could take conference calls, answer emails from almost anywhere.

So those boundaries are really permeable, but other boundaries I've been really firm about.

For example, I take almost all of my time off in the summer, and my kids and I have done what I call "Mama's version of summer camp" since I didn't have to pay for daycare.

So as soon as my son was heading into kindergarten, we started taking the summers off and going on adventures.

-Very neat.

-Yeah.

-We had talked off camera about other advice you give to students, and you tell them about your own path.

And I guess, you know, when I talked about you being a wildfire, a forest-- I'm sorry, what is the title?

-Wilderness ranger.

-I keep wanting to say forest ranger, but that doesn't-- okay.

-That was an older term, so it's not incorrect.

It's just not used anymore.

-So while you were doing that, you were also waiting tables in Wyoming?

-Yeah, it was all kind of a mishmash.

There was summer work, there was winter work, you know, things like that.

So I had a very seasonal, what we call a seasonal lifestyle for a couple of years, a number of years.

-And you had said that had you told yourself back then that you would end up being this huge figure at the Desert Research Institute, you would have thought, No way!

-Yeah.

Well, I think the key for me was that I always kind of just tracked along with what was interesting to me.

And if it was interesting, I went and did it.

And because it was interesting, even though those things look like they were very different and very disparate, they all kind of added, they had an additive quality over time in helping me become a better supervisor, a better researcher, a better scientist, a better mother, because it was a really varied set of experiences.

I don't often encourage people to go straight from their bachelor's to their master's to their PhD to an academic job.

I think there's a lot of value in there of taking some time off and doing wildly different things and then coming back.

-I also waited tables, and I think that it enabled me to better interact with a lot of different people.

Can you connect that to the work you do now?

How did waiting tables help you, do you think?

-Maintaining politeness no matter what.

Yeah.

-You mentioned earlier that you have kind of come full circle from you were doing the dissertation work to now this summit.

How is that full circle?

-I think because it's focused on communities.

A lot of the work I've done the last 13 years has been working with the fire management community and the National Weather Service.

A lot of the research I'd done have been on wildfire weather products.

And so that is kind of taking me away from that community aspect.

And so the conference really comes back full focus onto communities, which is where I started with my dissertation research.

-And currently you are involved in a project that is very community based in Northern Nevada.

It involves wildfires and extreme heat.

Will you explain the connection and what you're looking to figure out.

-If a wildfire doesn't happen in a vacuum, right, or in isolation, it often happens-- I mean, we increasingly were having shoulder season fires, but a lot of our fire activity, particularly when we get smoke from Northern California, those are big summertime fires.

And it's really hot, right?

And a lot of people in Northern Nevada just don't have HVAC systems.

They don't have air conditioning, and so they use-- they either have nothing and they rely on opening their houses at night to cool it down and then closing it up, which is a really standard practice in places, historically in places like Northern Nevada and Northern California, or they use swamp coolers, which just do not filter particulate very well.

So they have to make decisions between keeping their house at a comfortable, safe temperature versus filling it with contaminated air, with polluted air from the wildfire smoke.

-If they open up their windows at night, let's say?

-Mm-hmm, yeah.

And so that's just a really, that's a hard bargain.

It's a hard set of trade-offs.

And so we're trying to understand people's decision pathways and what is more important to them, right, and why they're making the decisions that they make.

And the hope is that we can then more effectively develop policy and processes and perhaps devices that could help them.

-And last thing.

I found interesting that that is going to include a mental health survey.

Why?

-Because for those of us, anybody who's lived in prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke, knows mentally how draining it is and how damaging it can be.

-All right.

Tamara Wall, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

To see more episodes like this, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

And I will see you next week on Nevada Week and Nevada Week In Person.

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