Temperature Rising: Stories about forest fires

Wildfires can impact so many things, from ecosystems to the air quality, to even the economy. But in this week’s episode, both of our storytellers take a look at the more personal impacts of forest fires.

Part 1: In college, Nick Link almost burns down the entire neighborhood when he and his friends set some Christmas trees on fire.

Nick Link is a second year PhD student at Northern Arizona University and part of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. His research broadly focuses on wildfires - and how we can apply our scientific understanding of the ecosystem to protect communities across Alaska and the Yukon.

Part 2: After moving to America from Mumbai, Urvi Talaty feels like she has finally escaped the heavily polluted air that choked her as a kid.

Urvi Talaty is an environmental consultant and creates life cycle assessments and carbon footprints for clients. She is also a dancer, a poet and a self-proclaimed funny woman who likes to read and travel the world. Urvi holds a Master’s degree from Yale and a Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and an MBA in technology management from NMIMS University in Mumbai, where she is from.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I ran track and field in college, and me and about half the guys from the team lived in this Animal House‑style dump. It was six guys, five‑and‑a‑half, people coming in and out all the time, constant movement. And this was our party house. Everything was always sticky.

The team would throw big parties, as we do, but our Christmas party was always huge. It came in between cross‑country and track and field starting. So that was a time between seasons for us. At least those parties seemed pretty big at 18 and after a couple of Bud Lights in you.

My sophomore year, we put our heads together and said, “Let's make this one big. Let's make it a banger.”

Nick Link shares his story at Kitt Recital Hall in Flagstaff, AZ in September 2023. Photo by Joshua Biggs.

And so even at a big state school, like North Carolina State where I went, student‑athlete community is still about 300 kids. It's not that many people. So party invites worked in the way that Craig knew a girl from volleyball, Sam knew a kid from wrestling and, eventually, word makes its way around.

Now, word finally makes its way back around to football and basketball, and those guys roll deep. It's an 80‑man roster and they all bring their girls, and all their girls bring their girls. Next thing you know, you can't hardly walk through the damn house.

So, cutting back to us setting up for the party, trying to be good hosts, we go out and get a couple of Christmas trees. Get them decorated nice, a couple condoms, a couple empty beer cans, you know, as one does. It's traditional. And you all might have more foresight than me. You might have more foresight than all of us. But, lo and behold, each and every last one of those trees got pushed into corners, they got knocked down, they got trampled on, and come to find about half the needles ended up stuck in the carpet or, worse, they got glued to the linoleum from all the spilled beers and Jungle Juice.

Getting up the next morning, first order of business is cleaning up the house. And the first order of business of the first order of business is getting these damn trees out the house. So, again, we put our stupid little heads together and the solution we come up with is getting the trees together, dragging them out in the backyard, getting them in a pile, and lighting the pile on fire.

Now, Flagstaff Festival of Science, make some noise if you ever lit a Christmas tree on fire before.

[applause]

A picture of Nick with his friends the night the story took place. Photo courtesy of Nick Link.

All right. A couple of you all grew up trash like me. That's good. For those of you who didn't clap, I'll let you all in on a secret. They burn like you would not believe. I had such a clear recollection holding up in the backyard, about halfway between drunk and hungover, watching those flames lick a telephone pole. Must have been 20, 25 feet in the air.

And I remember looking across that fire, which at this point we had no power to put out, and seeing the fear of God in the eyes of my roommates. And these are boys, mind you all, who had gone to private school. They didn't grow up trash like I did.

So, there I am, utterly rudderless, no plans of what to do. Now, thankfully, the neighbors had a little more thought, which is good, because the two to three Tupperwares of water I had thrown on it hadn’t done much.

The neighbors call the fire department. Raleigh Fire Department comes. They put out the fire. They have a terse conversation with me and the boys and they leave us with this little pile of ashes.

So, now, I'm nursing a splitting headache, trying to figure out just how in the hell that fire got that big. This little pile of ashes that nearly burned down the whole neighborhood, just the night before was only three Christmas trees, right? We nearly took out the whole neighborhood, lost the house over three Christmas trees.

So, that memory was burned into my brain and I carried it for years. But the severity of that fire was sparked anew when I started my PhD here at Northern Arizona University. I was bushwhacking my way through the dense brush of Alaska's interior. Forests comprised almost entirely of Christmas trees.

Now, I won't bog everybody down with too many pesky scientific details, but, if you didn't know, Christmas tree ain't a species. It's not the botanical term. Around the holidays, you could see a blue spruce, a white spruce, a balsam fir. Up in Alaska, they have black spruce. It's a close relative of those other two spruces and, noticeably, for our purposes here today, folks, also burns like you would not believe.

Walking through those forests, getting to my plots, it was unsettlingly clear to me how primed everything was to burn. And that fear was also fueled by the fact that that summer, summer of 2022, 3.1 million acres were burning across Alaska. These are fires that can only accurately be described as biblical.

The people that are up there know it, too. They're only one lightning strike away from losing everything. And so around their homes, their towns, villages, what have you, they're cutting down those flammable spruce trees These are areas that we call fuel breaks. It's a break in the fuel.

So, where do I slot into all this? What is my piece of this? I'm trying to figure out what grows back in these things. In five, ten years, are they going to have to come back and cut down these same flammable spruce trees? Or do less‑flammable trees, like aspen or birch come back? And is there anything we can do to push them to come back as those less‑flammable trees, in a way making a living natural fuel break?

I will let you all in on a secret, though. If you can't tell by my feet build, I never fought wildland fire. This living fuel break thing, it's the kind of stuff one can learn in technical papers and textbooks, ecological theory. But I do know people who fight wildland fire.

This summer, I was out with guys from the Yukon Territory and they were helping us set some stuff up. They were asking me about my work, I was asking them about theirs, and I got to wondering aloud, “Does this make any sense to y 'all? Like living fuel breaks? You know, this whole aspen and birch thing. Like, does that make any sense, y 'all who work for a living?”

And the chief of the crew, who was a first‑nationer, a guy from northern British Columbia, had been fighting wildfires for 30‑something years. He piped up and told me that when he first got into the game, the first thing he learned was that if you're going to get overtopped by a wildfire, all your escape routes are cut off, if you can make it to a stand of aspen or birch, it just might save your life. And for him, it had.

So, that has kept me afloat, because I can get lost in the details of my work, the minutiae, the small stuff, the insignificant, and forget why I'm doing it. Forget if it matters. So, the fact that it meant anything to that man meant the world to me. Reminding me for why we're doing it. Trying to make a world that's safer from wildfires, if not safe from teenage boys.

Thank you for your time.

Part 2

I grew up in the city of Mumbai, India's most populated city, 21 million people. When I think about Mumbai, I think about home, the Arabian Sea, drinking chai and the best food in the world. New York, who? I will fight anyone who disagrees with me because your food is bland.

Urvi Talaty shares her story at Hudson River Park’s Pier 57 Discovery Tank in August 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

When I think about home, I also think about the fact that I had trouble breathing growing up. I almost always had a cough. And every afternoon as I would walk home from school, the smell of smoke would fill my lungs.

My grandfather also had trouble breathing. He had asthma and he had to use this machine called a nebulizer that would help him take his medicine.

He was an extremely disciplined man. You could set your watch by him. Every morning at 11:00 AM and every evening at 5:00 PM you would hear the low whirring sound of the nebulizer. I was just reminded that this is the machine that is helping him breathe.

I was lucky that I didn't have to use a nebulizer. I just got away with making sure that I had my inhaler on hand at all times.

There was one activity that always made me feel alive despite the fact that I had trouble breathing and that was dancing. I think the biggest reason for this is my mom. She is an amazing dancer. I don't think, no matter how hard I try, I will ever be as good as her, but I try.

I grew up with all sorts of dance styles. Indian classical, folk, salsa, waltz, you name it. It was the one thing that kept me smiling through all of my huffing and puffing.

In 2005 when I was in the fourth grade, Mumbai came to a standstill because of flooding. I remember walking home from school that evening. My aunt was firmly clasping my hand and I was walking through water that came up to my knees. It was really scary. The streets were full of abandoned cars and buses and all of these people trying to figure out how to wade through the water and get home. I think despite the fact that I was frightened, I was also secretly happy that this would mean no more school for the next few days.

A photo of the New York skyline from Urvi’s window last summer during the wildfires. Photo courtesy of Urvi Talaty.

I later found out that several mangrove forests along the coastline of Mumbai had been chopped down for new development. And if those mangrove forests were still intact, Mumbai probably would have been spared all of that flooding. That was really the starting point for me and I decided, as an 11‑year‑old, that I wanted to make my career in the environmental field.

That is how, several years later, I ended up moving to the US to go to grad school at Yale and get my master's degree in environmental management. It was this brave new world. I was living on my own in a new city, in a new country and figuring things out for myself. I think I felt like a real adult for the very first time in my life and it was great.

I had a really interesting educational experience at Yale as well. We were talking about all of these things like systems thinking and the complexity of environmental problems, but I realized that, somehow, in all of that complexity, not a lot of people were talking about the problems that I had faced growing up.

There was this time in my sustainable business class and the professor was talking about circularity and sustainable fashion and how if we kept clothes in circulation for a longer time, we would divert them from landfills. I just remember laughing to myself thinking that is the most obvious statement in the world. Because, in a country like India, we don't throw away clothes. We give them to a friend or a family member or to the less fortunate. There are also all of these environmental and social problems that come with ragpickers who go into landfills to recover usable resources.

But not a lot of people at Yale were talking about the problems of developing countries and how to solve them. There was a lot of talk of just transitions and innovation and entrepreneurship and fancy climate change conferences, but I didn't see myself being represented in all of that conversation.

Despite all of this tension in my academic life, I was happy. I felt like I had escaped the air that had choked me. For the first time in my life, living in New Haven felt like I was able to breathe freely. Then why did I feel like a coward for leaving behind my country where all of the problems existed? I felt really guilty that I was gathering all this knowledge about the environment, but then not using it to help the country and the place that had made me.

And with this realization came another one, something very important was missing from my life. You get busy, right? Life happens. I went to engineering school then I went to grad school, and I realized that, somehow, dance had become this activity that I indulged in occasionally, usually with a drink in my hand in crowded rooms with low light, and I wanted to change that.

I must have moved to New York on a Sunday sometime last year. The following Tuesday, I was in my very first tango class. Do you guys remember that time a couple of months ago when New York was engulfed in all of that wildfire smoke? It was basically like the city looked like what they make Mexico look like in every single TV show.

I had tango class that evening. I remember walking to class and just feeling really weird putting my mask back on after all of these months of roaming around mask‑free after the pandemic. It was so hard to breathe.

Now, tango is a very technical dance. You really have to pay attention to your body’s center of gravity, your body's axis, what the leader is trying to tell you to do next. It can get very sweaty very quickly.

That evening, I was dancing with Marcos with his lovely, floral Hawaiian shirt and enviable curly hair. We were figuring out this new tango move called the gancho. A gancho is basically like a football kick but sexier, sort of like this. I just remember joking with Marcos that, “Oh, my God, it's so hot in here.” But we can't even open a window because of all of that wildfire smoke.

He agreed. Then suddenly, almost without thinking, I blurted out, “It reminds me of home.”

There were a few moments of silence and then Marcos said. “Oh, yeah? Wow, I can't even imagine what that's like,” and we continued to gancho our way across the floor.

But I know what that's like. When I moved to New York, it was so easy to breathe here. I always say New York and Mumbai have the very same vibe. It's heaving with people. It's noisy. It's crowded. It's dirty and I love it. But, somehow, that night in tango class, I realized that even if I thought I was escaping all of that air, I was still very much in a place that still smell like home. I had spent all of this money coming to grad school, moved thousands of miles away from my friends and my family, but the same environmental problems were following me. In a weird, twisted way, I almost felt validated because, suddenly, all of New York was experiencing the very same thing that I had experienced growing up.

I don't know where to go from here. Every day when I walk down the streets with my main character energy and my Bollywood music blaring in my ears, I think to myself, "I really hope what I'm doing is enough," because I'm always going to be that kid, dependent on a little piece of plastic and all of those chemicals, my inhaler, to breathe.

It's a scary thought and I don't know what to do about it, but I just keep thinking to myself that maybe I'm not a coward. Maybe I'm not escaping. I'm just a girl who is trying her very best to breathe and make sure that no one else has to struggle to breathe.