100% Humboldt
Humboldt County CA USA is the home of some of the most iconoclastic, genuine, and interesting folks in the world.
We are getting curious about the movers, shakers, and difference makers in Humboldt County CA-Home of the giant redwoods, 6 Rivers, and the vast Pacific Ocean.
We will discover what makes people live/evolve in the beautiful, diverse, isolated, and ever-changing Northcoast of California 100%!
Listen in and learn what it is to be 100% Humboldt!
100% Humboldt
#70. Yana Valachovic’s Conservation Journey: From Humboldt Roots to Community Collaboration, Embracing Environmental Stewardship and Building Resilient Futures
Uncover the secrets of successful community collaboration and conservation with our special guest, Yana Valachovic, a Humboldt local and director of a unique partnership program. Discover how her educational journey, from South Fork High School to the Evergreen State College and Oregon State University, paved the way for her role in fostering teamwork and community development. Jana's insights on programs like 4-H and the Master Gardener Program offer a glimpse into her commitment to education and environmental stewardship in the counties of Humboldt and Del Norte.
Engage with the challenges of forest health management and the evolving conservation movement as we explore the fascinating intersection of science, education, and community needs. From combating invasive plant pathogens like sudden oak death to streamlining the California Forest Practice Act, we address the complex role of Extension work in empowering landowners and protecting public trust resources. Our conversation also highlights the importance of community dialogue in shaping environmental policies, emphasizing the limitations of structured processes and the potential of design charrettes for inclusive public engagement.
Join us in a thought-provoking discussion on building resilience through the lens of fire management and biophilia. Learn from Yana’s experiences with wildfires in California and explore practical insights for homeowners on fire adaptation and preparedness. We delve into the emerging need for specialized professionals in real estate and the role of community engagement in addressing climate change challenges. This episode promises to equip you with a deeper understanding of how to protect and enhance ecological and community resilience in a rapidly changing world.
About 100% Humboldt with Scott Hammond
Humboldt County CA USA is the home of some of the most iconoclastic, genuine, and interesting folks in the world.
We are getting curious about the movers, shakers, and difference makers in Humboldt County CA-Home of the giant redwoods, 6 Rivers, and the vast Pacific Ocean.
We will discover what makes people live/evolve in the beautiful, diverse, isolated, and ever-changing North Coast of California 100%!
Listen in and learn what it is to be 100% Humboldt!
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and neighbors. Scott Hammond with 100% Humboldt Podcast with my new best friend, jana Valakovic.
Jana Valachovic:Good day to you.
Scott Hammond:I did good.
Jana Valachovic:You did great. I said it, mr Hammond. Hi Jana, how are you? I'm great.
Scott Hammond:It's great to have you. Yeah, Tell us what you do, who you are, what your job is, your duties and what you're all about. What you're all about.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, it's great. It's always a little complicated to explain what I do, but Take your time.
Scott Hammond:We have like 10 hours.
Jana Valachovic:Perfect, perfect, born and raised here.
Scott Hammond:Oh, wow, you're local. Yeah, okay, yeah.
Jana Valachovic:Where'd you go to school? What level of schooling?
Scott Hammond:High school.
Jana Valachovic:I went to South Fork High School.
Scott Hammond:Cool, oh you're.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, and the greatest school I could have gone to was at Humboldt. But I didn't know what I wanted to study, and so I left and went to Washington State. Cool, a good 12-hour drive away. Bellingham no, I went to Olympia.
Scott Hammond:Olympia yeah.
Jana Valachovic:Where's Washington State, is it? No, I went to the state of Washington, the state of Washington and. I went to a college in Olympia called the Evergreen State College. Oh, in Olympia called the Evergreen State College. Oh, cool, which was a little edgy but interesting. It ended up being a great fit for what I ended up doing, not knowing that, of course, wow.
Scott Hammond:Do we?
Jana Valachovic:ever. No, we never know. You know, learn that. You go to college to learn. And you don't have to go to college to be a thing. You really just need to become an inquisitive person with some decent skill.
Scott Hammond:That's a really hard stop on that one that's so smart to go. Hey, I'm coming with a flexible brain.
Jana Valachovic:Well, you didn't know it at the time, right? No, I was an ocean major, by golly, and then I was a wildlife major.
Scott Hammond:When I found out I couldn't. I'm just dumb. I couldn't do calculus or physics and all the science.
Jana Valachovic:That's hard stuff. Yeah, liberal arts, way to go.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, so what did you study then?
Jana Valachovic:I studied all science, actually All natural science Geology, plant ecology, a little bit of birds we call that ornithology and I went to this school. That was taught in teams.
Scott Hammond:Oh, that's cool.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, so we had 16 units at a time that were coordinated and coordinated study, meaning like four faculty would coordinate all of your study for a year.
Scott Hammond:Wow.
Jana Valachovic:Which the coolest part about all of that is if you wanted to go on a multi-day field trip, no problem, because you weren't having to skip other classes, because everything was organized.
Scott Hammond:That's cool.
Jana Valachovic:So we did a lot of field courses and field travel.
Scott Hammond:So you had to decide as a team what you wanted to do, and then create it, propose it.
Jana Valachovic:Well, no, not necessarily. I mean just that you could take a group of students for multiple days and they weren't missing their other classes because everything was all organized in that way. That's really cool for me. Which I didn't realize is just this whole idea of team and project-based work, and that rarely do you work alone in at least in my professional world and you're always in collaboration and in partnership with a whole bunch of different folks, and so that's a true reflection of what my field has been, and so it's a. It was a good fit for me. I then went from there to Oregon State University and got a master's degree in forest ecology.
Scott Hammond:And I know that's Corvallis.
Jana Valachovic:That is in Corvallis yes the beavers.
Scott Hammond:So what was your undergrad in?
Jana Valachovic:It's a general kind of forest ecology-related degree and I thought I'd become kind of a nerdy field scientist and maybe work for the Forest Services Redwood Science Lab in Arcata and maybe work for the Forest Services Redwood Science Lab in Arcata and answer key questions about how ecosystems work and forests work. And I ended up coming back here with someone I grew up with here and we tried to figure out how to make it work and at that time which was in the late 90s, I don't know we didn't think we'd find real jobs like that. That was not what.
Scott Hammond:Turns out, you did.
Jana Valachovic:I know, and within a year I landed a job that I've now had almost 25 years. Wow Look at you go. Look at that 25 years. I know Hard to believe.
Scott Hammond:In Humboldt.
Jana Valachovic:In Humboldt. Yeah, so I work for an interesting partnership between the University of California and the county of Humboldt and the county of Del Norte, and in my present position I'm the director of the program for both of those counties. And underneath us are a focus in agriculture, a focus in natural resources and a focus in community between health, nutrition and youth development, and so we have some pretty well-known programs that are more well-known than we are, but 4-H is one of our cornerstone programs, and then we also have a lot of what we do is in partnership and in working with volunteers, so we have other programs such as the Master Gardener Program.
Scott Hammond:Heard of it Yep.
Jana Valachovic:And we have Master Food Preservers and, tangentially, we have a Master Naturalist Program. So there is this whole network of people that come and work and study with us and then go out and share what they've learned and do great things in the community.
Scott Hammond:Far out. So you're south on Humboldt Hill.
Jana Valachovic:Yep, I'm in Humboldt Hill.
Scott Hammond:Let me show you on the map oh, humboldt Hill's right over there, by Humboldt Bay, yes, and over kind of by where the radio station is, over that way.
Jana Valachovic:Correct, I'm right next door.
Scott Hammond:K Red, whatever Correct, I'm right next door. K-red, whatever, yes.
Jana Valachovic:And as-.
Scott Hammond:Channel 3.
Jana Valachovic:As Brian Papstein always likes to say on Kins, I'm from Spruce Point.
Scott Hammond:Spruce Point. Thank you, Brian.
Jana Valachovic:Shout out to Brian.
Scott Hammond:The only guest I've had on twice Right. Look at you go, Brian.
Jana Valachovic:Look at you and I spend a morning a month with Brian. I bet you do yeah. A month with Brian? I bet you do yeah. One of his regular.
Scott Hammond:A 30-minute journey to wherever.
Jana Valachovic:Wherever we're going to go, it'll always be good and we'll laugh the whole way.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, oh, he's great. I really like Brian. He and I went to Humboldt together.
Jana Valachovic:Oh, did you yeah.
Scott Hammond:Okay, yeah. Then he went back east to Creighton or how do you say it, alaska. Just go back there and finished. Right, anyway, shout out to Brian. So that's a pretty complex. So are you over the entire UC extension? Are you over?
Jana Valachovic:it no. So we draw the short straw and have a largely volunteer assignment to be the administrator, plus our other technical job, and so I've been doing that since 2009.
Scott Hammond:I think it's cool that you're a local gal and you're the head honcho and it makes sense because you know the culture I mean.
Jana Valachovic:Extension's all about being place-based and knowing your people and knowing what they care about and understanding and anticipating what challenges they're facing. And we're really here to bring science and but, bring energy and thought to vaccine problems and try and find solutions to those which sounds super vague and ambiguous, Like what the heck does that really?
Scott Hammond:mean? What does that really mean?
Jana Valachovic:Don't we all you know why are we here. You know we're trained problem solvers and we can bring science to the table. We can bring facilitation skills to the table. We can bring educational opportunities to help do workforce development, to stage an important conversation, to work through an issue. Every day is very different.
Scott Hammond:So name some, some of the principal ones that maybe you've came to the solved and worked on, or with there's a lot of things.
Jana Valachovic:So I started my term really working in forest health and trying to work on the introduction of an invasive plant pathogen known as or. The disease is known as sudden oak death, and it's a disease that escaped our plant trade and you know we go to the nursery and we buy beautiful plants plant in the backyard, and it got into the wildland that way, and so what I learned through that process is that there isn't really a formal system to protect and safeguard our natural resources from hitchhikers and they can get it, get in. And so I spent the first decade of time working on trying to find ways to manage that invasive plant pathogen when it comes in to our communities and try and figure out how to mitigate its impacts and prevent additional spread. And it brought me into this whole world of international quarantines and plant trades and science, and it was, it's been, an amazing journey. I've met fantastic people and you know we all love our forests, we all love our natural resources and we all don't want to see them, you know, change in some deleterious way.
Jana Valachovic:So, it was a unifier in that way and it has resulted in a lot of changes in nursery practices and things you might not know behind the scenes. But if you go to the nursery, sometimes all the plants aren't on the ground anymore. They're lifted up off the surface because to prevent splash in case the disease or other pathogens are in the soil. It prevents splash up into the pots.
Scott Hammond:Miller Farms has all their plants up.
Jana Valachovic:Right. And then we separate plants that are hosts between non-hosts, so change the arrangement of how they're placed, change watering schedules and regimes and a number of things that such as cleaning pots, as an example. You know you buy a plant in a pot. What do you do with it? Well, hopefully recycle it or, you know, get to use it again. But inside the pot has, you know, residue from wherever it was there before. And you know, prior to working in this field of pathology, I'd never really thought about those as being vectors.
Scott Hammond:What's the stuff in there?
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, what's the stuff in there? So now we clean pots.
Scott Hammond:That makes sense. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, so you have like no days the same.
Jana Valachovic:No days the same. And then early on I ended up getting pulled into Sacramento to try and figure out ways that we could relieve some of the regulations and the stuff that just didn't make sense. It made it hard to be a good steward of your forest land. We have a really thick book that is the California Forest Practice Act and then the forest practice rules associated with it. It's in size eight font. It's literally like this thick and you know it's a collection of good ideas that you know aggregate out together to a lot of agony.
Jana Valachovic:Aggregate to agony Sounds like a book just to you know the ticket to play essentially. And so it's expensive and it costs a lot of money. You cut a lot of trees just to pay for that plan as opposed to the stewardship that you might have want to have. So I ended up in Sacramento early on trying to think about ways that we could streamline that, ways that we could improve the process, and what that tangibly worked out to be was really developing more of a pre-consultation process. So before you write the harvest plan, before you really commit your consulting forester to put that time and energy in that you pre-consult with the agencies and you talk about the issues in front and so that there's less surprises, because it's the surprises that cost money.
Jana Valachovic:Imagine that, having an agenda first, perspectives of those that are there to safeguard the resources and, kind of, when we use certain words, what? Do they mean to each other and try and understand. If you know that tree looks like it needs to be set aside for some protectionary reason, Maybe that tree has 10 times more economic value than the one adjacent to it that has the same ecological value, and so being able to swap trees and understand the goals of each.
Scott Hammond:Love it. So, North Coast Land Trust, do you work with those guys so they're part of this landscape.
Jana Valachovic:If you'll forgive the pun.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, they seem to be amazing the stuff they're doing.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, yeah, I was there at the beginning when they started coming together.
Scott Hammond:In the 25 years now, so these are ranchers and landowners that want to keep it ecologically cool and so they bequeath it to the tribe. Do I have kind of the easy math on?
Jana Valachovic:that the easy math. Well, I don't represent the land trust, so let me just make that clear. The conservation movement has taken a lot of different forms, but in the way that it evolved into the early 2000s was this idea that maybe you might sell or donate your development rights in some way for financial value or for tax relief, depending on where you were at and what was important to you, and that would take away the development pressure. In exchange, you know it would allow that land to you know be unable to subdivide, or you know, maybe it gets rid of your mining rights or you know some element of value that you could exchange. And so you know, materially nothing changes for you as the landowner, except for you maybe get some compensation for that and the public trust resources are, we hope are, better stewarded as a result of that.
Scott Hammond:It makes sense. I like that. So the UC extension. Are there other extensions like in Shasta County, la County, all over the state?
Jana Valachovic:So our program came about in the United States in 1913, and Humboldt was the test case.
Scott Hammond:Go figure. Yeah, I know, isn't that cool why we're so far away.
Jana Valachovic:I know we're so far away. I spent a long time because I was director in 2013,. So I was the first director to have to think about how to celebrate a centennial and what does that mean. And I came into that in 2013 with this idea. I was like we were just too far away. Okay, it was like all right, let's just give Humboldt something, because we'll never be able to service them. Or it was like the pity model, or like you know, is that a thing?
Scott Hammond:I don't know. The pity model I've seen that used a lot.
Jana Valachovic:Or, you know, we talk a lot about being behind the redwood curtain, so there's no way that it could have, you know, been a place that we'd want to service because it's just so far away. And what I came to realize is that that was all a bunch of BS, that really, I mean, we all have a lot of humble pride, I think, and we are self-reliant and we're independent and we know generally how to work together because of our distance and our isolation, and so that collaborative nature and our innovative nature was true for us in 1913 in a way that I didn't see, for us in 1913, in a way that I didn't see, and so we were thought of as a place that was ripe for investment because of that historic character of our culture.
Scott Hammond:Wow, I wish I saw more of that. I love that and I think it exists. But it seems like there's so much not-in-my-backyard sort of obstructionist BS that occurs in the community Right For different reasons, like the we Are Up Project, I mean.
Jana Valachovic:Mary.
Scott Hammond:Keene's doing an amazing act and they continue to bend over backwards for people that start to get kind of nitpicky out there in my opinion, but that's just me.
Jana Valachovic:No, I mean, I think I appreciate that. I think in my job I get to travel a fair bit across California and there are many worse places for that.
Scott Hammond:It gets weirder it gets weirder, it's harder.
Jana Valachovic:But I think you know one of the questions is where do we have a place for reflexive conversation as a community and how do we enable that civil discord and advancement of ideas? And you know one of those used to be the newspaper, and newspapers have had a really hard time.
Scott Hammond:What's a newspaper?
Jana Valachovic:Right Newspapers had a really hard time and we're a radio culture right True podcast. We're a podcast culture. Here we are. Hey, nick, what's up? Here we are. We're on radio culture, right, true, podcast. We're a podcast culture. Here we are. Hey, nick, what's up here we are.
Scott Hammond:We're on a podcast. Khsu Want to hear about that in a minute.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, like how do we collectively think about issues in a way that's safe and a way where we can let down our guard and have a place for openness and understanding?
Scott Hammond:Yeah, so you're not saying loco trolling and bombing people on a loco thread and just uh, cause that's so common anymore, Just like people tearing each other.
Jana Valachovic:Well, I mean cause we can be anonymous when we make comments on those, on those threads, and we can't, we don't stand up for what we believe and we don't let our neighbor know how we feel. And it's true, our neighbor know how we feel. And so I mean I think the fabric, the civil fabric, breaks down when you don't have those places for dialogue. And so I mean I think it's predictable that we would get to a place with more rancor and more Good word Rancor.
Scott Hammond:I'm going to use that word for a little while.
Jana Valachovic:It's a good word, isn't it?
Scott Hammond:I like the 25-set word it does. It devolves into rancor and crazy and attacking. Yeah, it's like how dare you attack by anonymous-ness, right, you don't even know me? You never will.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah.
Scott Hammond:So it's kind of sad. It's become kind of a thread in this podcast, because my thinking is that everybody had the say-so. They went to the hearings, they went to the county, the planning commission, whatever, where they were heard and they didn't get the result they wanted. And now it doesn't stop, and now I'm not going to stop.
Scott Hammond:It's like, at a certain point, does there not need to be some? We did process, we had you had due diligence, due process, and so it troubles me that sometimes we said no and now the answer is hell, no, and you gotta drop it and we're moving on from your, your rancor, yeah, um, and that troubles me, that no never really registers with some people.
Jana Valachovic:I'm going to pivot a little bit because I don't know this story as well, but let me, I guess, since I think a lot about community process and community dialogue.
Scott Hammond:I love it. It's a good topic.
Jana Valachovic:I think part of the challenge is how do people get heard and how do we recognize that people are heard? Because often someone will say something and throw a zinger out and be angry about something, but the real issue is something else and they use that vehicle of an argument to advance the real issue.
Scott Hammond:Of not being heard or seen.
Jana Valachovic:Of whatever they're trying to communicate is veiled under this other issue.
Scott Hammond:Yeah.
Jana Valachovic:And we don't have a way to kind of veiled under this other issue and we don't have a way to kind of peel back the onion and understand what is it that's really they're concerned about, and how do we legitimize and respect and hear what their issue is and then help them channel that energy, because often it's unrelated to the project at hand. It's you know it's something about how you were treated as someone you know was aggressive on the road with you 10 years ago and you're never going to forget it, or you know there's some wrong that needs to be righted.
Scott Hammond:I want to make a compliment on that comment. Pastor Bethany talks about that a lot at Catalyst Church in. Arcata where Joni and I go and it's the idea of being heard, and some of us haven't been heard in forever or never and it's like that creates a whole cascade effect of other things, other problems down the road yeah perhaps and then the way we structure our sequa process or california environmental quality act process, which dictates normally how there's some review, doesn't give, uh, the freedom to explore some of those things and it's often so scripted that it doesn't.
Jana Valachovic:Um, the timing gets weird. People don't see how their ideas come in, and you know it's this. Sometimes it's so long. So you have meeting one with a certain community members and then you come back six months later in a redesign process based on what they said. But you have meeting two. You have a whole different group of people that show up which are now stirred up by how meeting one went, and then you have to stop and try and hear what the new comments are. But you've already advanced the process and so by the time you get to meeting three, which is another six months later, you have these disjunct conversations. People don't see that their ideas have been brought forward, the thread is lost and there is just unhappiness with the process and unhappiness with knowing how to contribute meaningfully, and you know you're rigid in how this process is structured.
Scott Hammond:It has to be by law, right, right it has to be.
Jana Valachovic:But the heart and soul of community learning is not there. A good friend of mine, jen Rice, who does a lot of facilitation here. She once introduced me to this idea called a design charrette.
Scott Hammond:A charrette.
Jana Valachovic:I know what's a charrette. I don't even know what the word means, so I'm embarrassed now that I've just said that. But the idea is really for like public works projects or building projects, that it's kind of hyper compressed and so you would come together and I've never done this actually, but I hold it up as like something really like an interesting way to.
Scott Hammond:Could happen.
Jana Valachovic:Could happen. So you basically bring in all the right people. You need to analyze a project, so let's say it needs geologists. Let's say it needs an architect. Let's say it needs a transportation planner. Let's say it needs you know, whatever that group of people is, you meet, meeting one in the evening, collect the community ideas. The group is already assembled in a room, in a special place where they can take that information, think it through, and then a day later or two days later, come back together to the community and say I heard you, here's what I think you said.
Jana Valachovic:We took those ideas. Or and here's the constraint list around the slope, the geology, the whatever. And here are the three options that we think we can do based on that physical constraint. And here's the ideas that we heard were important to you. What do you think? And then the community, because they were there three days ago or two days ago can give an immediate response. They feel heard and you can kind of take care of a lot of that in a compressed way. But that means you need to have a facility that can handle that. That means you've coordinated everybody's schedules, that means you've done it in a place where the people are capable of going to, so it's probably in a local location.
Scott Hammond:I love it.
Jana Valachovic:You know you've dealt with all your IT issues, which have got to be horrible to do this.
Scott Hammond:Jen Rice shout out.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, shout out where you can meet a natural rhythm of thought and get in front of the thing that bugs you, which then turns into a really acute issue and then causes you to send a viral email out to the world being unhappy. And then, you know, it just grows and grows.
Scott Hammond:It goes down the spiral of that long process, yeah, and then things die.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, and then we get to intractable conflict and no way forward.
Scott Hammond:Or someone takes, you know, the political lump and says we're going forward Right. Begone and then they're the villain and it goes forward. Yeah, interesting. So let's talk about fires. You're back from Los Angeles, so let's do the arc. Maybe the last month or so, pre-fire, we have santa anna's, we have fires.
Jana Valachovic:You're a fire, something specialist maybe I should just give a little. How did I get to in the fire space? So?
Jana Valachovic:let's talk about that the neat thing about extension is that you are given the freedom to pivot to issues that of the day, and nobody scripts my day, nobody tells me what I need to do, but we hope to hire people that are curious and that are really committed to public service and committed to making the world a better place, and so we describe it as mission work, work with purpose, work with meaning, which is one of the keys to happiness, right, love it.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, absolutely purpose work with meaning which is one of the keys to happiness.
Jana Valachovic:Right, love it? Yeah, absolutely so. You know, in my job I get to learn things every day from other people, and sometimes I am then asked to share and tell what I've learned, and by practice that becomes developing a new specialty or new expertise. And a long time ago and I'll say that my dad started a wildfire weed whacking with a metal blade when I was 10 and in the southern part of the county where I grew up, so I was scarred by being the only one home when that happened.
Scott Hammond:Was he a kill fire or something?
Jana Valachovic:No, no, he was just cutting the grass. Oh, he was Okay it was a windy day and he had a rock and all of a sudden we had a big wildfire, whoa I. It was a windy day and hit a rock and all of a sudden we had a big wildfire Whoa I. Lived in Oakland, I dropped out of college for a while and I was living in Oakland during the Oakland Hills fire Rad.
Jana Valachovic:That's terrible fire, terrible fire. So fire wasn't a different theme than it is now. I went to graduate school and fire was looked at more from an ecological perspective and kind of the services that fire can provide and trying to understand that. But for the most part, you know, california has sort of walked away from fire being good and into, you know, fire just something to worry about. And then we've sort of lost the culture and tools of using prescribed fire, using fire intentionally to provide beneficial services, from fuel reduction to things in the ecosystem, to cultural use. And anyway, in that space I picked up some skills around how buildings burn and wood durability and trying to understand how to reduce risk and how to manage the hazard, and so I would bring programs from other places and I started bringing these programs here and you know how many people showed up in 2007, eight and nine for those classes.
Scott Hammond:Meh.
Jana Valachovic:Two.
Scott Hammond:Two.
Jana Valachovic:Four, maybe six.
Scott Hammond:Not that interesting.
Jana Valachovic:Not that interested but I found it really interesting and I was really. I like wood products. I'm a forester now by training. I'm a licensed forester. You know when you build it's every time you have wood exposed. It makes people happy for the most part. Good fun word, yeah, biophilia.
Scott Hammond:Biophilia. Ladies and gentlemen, the word of the day, we have one Nick, we have our word Biophilia. What is biophilia?
Jana Valachovic:Well, biophilia is biology, you know, and how you feel in that space. So if we're in an environment where we either connect with nature or nature is present in there, we can see natural grain wood, like we're looking at a table here with natural grain wood, like people's experience is well known to be better and people are happier.
Scott Hammond:So it could happen in a forest or in a.
Jana Valachovic:But when we have exposed wood, you know.
Scott Hammond:You look at a building now and you see exposed wood and you're like, oh, that kind of feels right, carson Mansion's kind of cool.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, I want to hang out there when I see that wood. It comes from the really. It's being promoted through the mass timber movement, which is how we build, ways that we can build differently, where we replace cement and concrete but with panels and cross laminated timber and other ways to construct.
Scott Hammond:Hardy plank.
Jana Valachovic:No, hardy plank is a cement.
Scott Hammond:Right, it's not wood. It's not wood. Yeah, but that replaced wood.
Jana Valachovic:Well, so this is really about designing buildings of the future that use wood in a panelized frame or in an interlocking frame to build something that's stronger, can be pre-developed, and you assemble it on site, and so it can be cheaper.
Scott Hammond:Do we name some? Do we have some in Humboldt we? Don't have any in Humboldt yet, but it's kind of this new trend and new movement.
Jana Valachovic:And in the architectural world they talk about biophilia. So anyway, I learned about how buildings burn and would try and promote some classes around how we can do things differently from a fuels management perspective and other aspects. And people are just like yawn, I'm not interested.
Scott Hammond:And then the fires.
Jana Valachovic:And so then the person I was working with, who I was learning from within the university system, he retired and he went somewhere else. He retired early and took a second job at a really interesting lab called to the building products industry and insurers to get a better handle on how we might mitigate that risk. Thinking about hurricanes water damage is the number one problem in hurricanes, so how do we design a different roof to manage that? Okay, so 2017 happens and if you remember, that's the North Bay fires or the Tubbs fire, and that's Santa Rosa, where it all came down.
Jana Valachovic:Right, so it starts.
Jana Valachovic:It's one of the first power line fires attributed, and it rushes over from Calistoga into Santa Rosa and you know it's very devastating and I was like and I'm like you know we've been talking about this for a long time and no one's been listening and my industry in the forest side was all like we need more fuel breaks, we need more fuel reduction. It's all about the forest and I'm like you know what? We lose more buildings in fires unrelated to forests than we do in forests, statistically, across the United States. That's the trend Grassland systems, chaparral systems, shrub systems.
Scott Hammond:How would the Paradise Fire fit into that statement.
Jana Valachovic:So Paradise is a forest-based fire.
Scott Hammond:But Santa.
Jana Valachovic:Rosa, those fires aren't, and LA is not, as an example, and what you see is that buildings tend to burn from the inside out. And it's like, how is that happening? And it's not because the flaming front causes the building to spontaneously combust. It's that in front of the flaming front, when you've got wind behind it, the fire is picking up pieces of debris and throwing embers in front of it, starting spot fires, and those embers are capable of landing on or in the building and they can worm their way into the structure and the structure burns from the inside out.
Scott Hammond:Wow.
Jana Valachovic:Because we have vents that allow embers to enter.
Scott Hammond:See, now, that's pretty rad. That's revelation to me.
Jana Valachovic:It's radical, different thinking.
Scott Hammond:So that's why we have screens on things that don't probably work perfectly.
Jana Valachovic:We have screens on things to keep animals out Right, but it doesn't to keep animals out, right, but it doesn't keep embers out. It doesn't keep embers out, and so there's a whole new class of vents that are basically designed to be like Gore-Tex. You know where, gore-tex we wear it to keep the elements from coming in but still allow our you know moisture and heat from whatever we're doing out, and we need that on our buildings.
Jana Valachovic:And so the rough term right now is called home hardening which is basically retrofitting or designing the exterior element of the structure to be more robust to fire exposure, and there's three ways. So there's direct flame, contact flame coming at the building, embers, small bits of debris that land on or in open dog or cat door, open window, skylight through the vents.
Scott Hammond:Foundational openings.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, a little bit. A little less, so there's not often that much stuff under there. And then the third piece is radiant heat, which is your neighboring building burns and it produces enough heat to cause damage on the primary structure.
Scott Hammond:And then start it.
Jana Valachovic:And so typically in that case it'll be that the glazing on a vinyl window will melt and then the window panes fall out.
Scott Hammond:Whoa, and then you're off to the races and then you've got a hole in your house.
Jana Valachovic:It's over, yeah, so that it just like everything clicked. I'm like you know I know about the forest, I know about the buildings, I know a lot about public policy, I know a lot about how we bring policy to rational conversation and how do we advance this community framework and this community protection framework? We've got to do something differently. We can't keep living and building in the same way.
Scott Hammond:So how does it feel to have the message and not be heard? We talked about not being heard, yeah, and now have your moment. That's magical and in such a hard but wonderful opportunity to fix something it's a crazy moment, you must be like where's the, where's the? Do you get interviewed a lot?
Jana Valachovic:I mean you must be like starting to find stages yeah, I spent this week with the new york times in in los angeles. Rad um, tell us about that in the real world, when a whole lot of communities burn down, because unfortunately we've tested that in Santa Rosa, we've tested it in Redding and and out in and around Paradise. I've been to the Marshall Fire which is in Boulder and the surrounding communities around Boulder, a couple fires in Los Angeles or Southern California so your, your people, give you the latitude to go.
Jana Valachovic:Here's my new focus yeah you have that flexibility and the thing is, I mean this is about bringing good concepts home, and I haven't been able to bring the good concepts home unless I go out into the bigger world to understand the issues and then help drive the conversation around funding allocations, around policy that can make a difference, around where do we make investments so that we are more resilient and more robust and so that Humboldt doesn't have to burn first?
Scott Hammond:before we have to learn those lessons.
Jana Valachovic:Right, or the next part of LA, or whatever, or whatever it is, and you know, we can't afford to keep burning communities up, we can't afford to the loss of life and we're driving our economy on the edge of the cliff when we connect it to insurance and connect all these tracks and threads coming together. So I've been in this really engaging rich conversational space and education space around how do we connect these? And you know, fire adaptation means turning the dial to 11, you know, and it's on every front and it's about breaking down silos and about really reprogramming how we operate, how we think about things, how we do our emergency response, you know. So this is Cal Fire, this is Sacramento. How we think about things, how we do our emergency response.
Scott Hammond:So this is Cal Fire, this is Sacramento, this is the insurance industry.
Jana Valachovic:This is everybody coming. Yeah, and it's brought me into many of the Western states in conversation.
Scott Hammond:Rock and roll.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, so I'm having a moment where I feel like, well, I'm doing something that's going to make a difference for generations to come and if we can, you know, recognize it took the state that we live in more than 150 years to develop the infrastructure we have. We're not going to pivot overnight, but we can't make better decisions without good information.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, and I think that'll take time and decades to do. But if you could write the manual for it, then that'd be really magic, yeah.
Jana Valachovic:I mean, for example, seatbelts. We learned that we die in cars without seatbelts, and seatbelts came out first for the front seats and not the back seats, and then it took another decade to get them for the back seats and then there's airbags, and then there's car seats. And who's the ambassador for sharing that information?
Scott Hammond:And so trying to develop a whole system of social change is Wow. That would be a study. To find out who were the front-running champions for different things like that and what they did, what they had to go through and how they were successful. That'd be a whole study.
Jana Valachovic:I thought about car seats and if any of our listeners had that moment and that privilege of having a baby. There's this moment where you have to take your baby home if you don't have that baby in your house. And there's this horrible moment of decision around. I want to hold it in my arms. It's swaddled all up so the arms and legs don't flail.
Jana Valachovic:And the last thing you want to do is unswaddle that baby because it's going to wake up and I want to hold it in my arms. I do not want to put it in that car seat. Maybe I could put it in a box in the back, you know, behind the driver's seat. Seems like that might feel safer, because a multipoint harvester involves taking that swaddle out.
Scott Hammond:Right right.
Jana Valachovic:And like heck, am I going to do that?
Scott Hammond:Right.
Jana Valachovic:But how. When you buy a new home and you get the keys to the house, it doesn't come with a nurse.
Scott Hammond:Ain't no nurse.
Jana Valachovic:And there isn't anybody that tells you how the system of that house works, how it functions.
Jana Valachovic:Your real estate agent might know something. And so what do you do? You call your dad, you go to the hardware store, the lumber store, and try to understand something. Google it, you Google it. But I think the point to me is that when we want to invest in social change, we invest in a different level. We invest in the nurse that's going to help us manage that pivotal moment of how to address that car seat with that infant. And I feel like we need the nurse equivalent in the home acquisition process to say guess what? You've just bought this house. Let me tell you how that. Let me help you.
Jana Valachovic:Let me help you, let me share the way it works. Let me help you think about these systems.
Scott Hammond:Who do you think of as the nurses to be Realtors?
Jana Valachovic:I mean yes, Can they do that?
Scott Hammond:I don't know.
Jana Valachovic:I mean there's the home inspectors. There's a lot of different people, but I think there's a whole new industry of people that and workforce that could be developed.
Scott Hammond:It's called fire hardening right. That's kind of the general layman's term.
Jana Valachovic:And so, like some of the things that have occurred now, when you purchase a home and that's where you have the most flexibility is, people are right. You know they're willing. They're willing to do things for the sale. You know they're willing to make the sale happen one way or another.
Scott Hammond:Regardless Right.
Jana Valachovic:And so that's when people are more nimble. And so there's now a disclosure process for the fuels reduction that have happened on that property. That's cool, which can become a negotiating point. It's not mandatory.
Scott Hammond:But it's in the system to do so.
Jana Valachovic:Right and soon coming is going to be a disclosure about the home hardening. That has or has not happened, so I think maybe the home inspectors could be someone that could be trained to describe the systems and how they function and where the weak points are.
Scott Hammond:And I'm surprised there's not that many of those folks. Even in Humboldt, I mean, there's a handful.
Jana Valachovic:And I mean for all of those folks that are out there. I'm going to say something. I don't mean to be picking at you, but there isn't a license that I'm aware of that says it's like the quality of the experience is really based on the word of mouth from the real estate agent who said you know, I think that guy or that lady knew something about what they were talking about. I'm going to continue to use them. It's not like they're certified in certain systems, in certain systems, and I would like to train as many people as I can and develop programs that work with people that have you know, that touch people in some way. So from the the person, I mean look at the Pearsons folks. I mean you go to Pearsons and all the people that work in Pearsons, for the most part, have all been professionals, in whatever department they're in, and they know a lot about it. Like, how do we have quality folks like that available, you know, to us as homeowners to help us make wise decisions?
Scott Hammond:Love that, love it.
Jana Valachovic:So I just went to LA because. So you have a mission, I do.
Scott Hammond:You're a.
Jana Valachovic:Blues Brothers. What a mission from God. No, I don't, yeah, no, I love it.
Scott Hammond:So tell us about LA and the New York Times and I imagine it's devastating taking the drives.
Jana Valachovic:It is. This is not my first rodeo with it, so I'm a little bit.
Scott Hammond:You've been down a couple times already, right?
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, but I mean just in terms of seeing communities I don't have. For me it's possible because I don't really know anybody and I don't know anybody's home, and so I can look at it from a learning lesson place. You can't get in right now. They're still under barricades to just allow the contractors to do what they need to do. In terms of the cleanup process, I have gone in both with CAL FIRE as well as with some research partners, and then this last trip with the New York Times, and in all of those I'm really looking at the question of why do certain buildings survive? Can I figure out what the key ingredients were?
Scott Hammond:It's a forensic sort of stuff.
Jana Valachovic:It's kind of this detective forensic CSI stuff. And it's. You know it's cool. I like that. It's nerdy and it's fun to me. And you know you're trying to recreate what you think happened in certain locations and once you see a building that's burned, it's collapsed and there's not a whole lot you can pick up from that. It's the buildings that are either damaged and are still intact to some degree, or the ones that you know only had very limited exposure.
Scott Hammond:The one outlier in the neighborhood that's still there.
Jana Valachovic:Right, and so the New York Times was curious around soul survivors, as they were calling it.
Scott Hammond:So what are your top three takeaways from what worked for the soul survivors?
Jana Valachovic:Well, I don't know if you were like me, but when I was listening to the media, my sense was that there was nobody there, that there were no fire officials that were helping, that there was no water and people ran out of water, and it was.
Jana Valachovic:Overplayed, yeah, and that turns out not to be true. There were a lot of firefighters deployed and ready and waiting in anticipation of that wind event. That wind event was was recognized as being very dangerous, and so a lot of good work happened and there were a lot of people that responded and helped homes survive. And what did that look like? That looked like a wooden gate that would attach to the structure, could become the wick of the fire to the building, people coming through, kicking them open, chainsaw, cutting them off, smashing them off. So I would find a partially charred gate and that gate thrown away from the building so that disconnects the wick from the fence to the house.
Scott Hammond:And the house is a sole survivor.
Jana Valachovic:And the house is a sole survivor.
Scott Hammond:Quick shout out to all the first responders. Those guys and gals pretty amazing.
Jana Valachovic:And you can do a lot too. So you know they're making strategic decisions around this house has. You know, I've got a chance I can do something that I can't and it's hard to see water and where water was applied, but where you can see that physical disruption, you can see that Sometimes you can see a section where, like, the fire gets right at the door, base of the door, because there's debris that connects, collects right at the, like, the entryway, and they'll take an ax and they'll just chop into the wall a little bit to make sure they've got the fire out of that little section. So of the wall a little bit to make sure they've got the fire out of that little section.
Jana Valachovic:So, you can see some of that kind of history. Wow, you can see hose lays. You can see hose rub marks.
Scott Hammond:There's different pieces that you can see for that sign, so you're going in with a whole new set of eyes. So if I walked around Nick and I would go, wow, bummer, You'd go oh look, this is evidence that this was saved because they did this.
Jana Valachovic:Yep, yeah I met a homeowner the day before yesterday. His neighbor's house was one that was on our list to go look at and um, he was. He was in a dark place and I 100 understood the dark place that he was in and for the most part, I'm not meeting people, I'm.
Jana Valachovic:I'm there just looking at buildings and it takes the emotionality of it away, which is still people around but you know that I ran into and so, you know, if I'm poking around, I'm like, hi, I'm from the university of California and I, you know, I, I look at how buildings survive. Do you know what happened here? And so he, you know he, started telling me and then, um, I said, do you mind if I look around? I, you know, I'm curious.
Scott Hammond:What might have happened this is a sole survivor building, yeah, and he's like.
Jana Valachovic:You know, it was just luck. And I said do you mind if I look? And he's like? Eh, so he let me and I walked around and I found three wooden planters that had all ignited and they were small pots, smaller than a wine barrel, but kind of that concept, and they all had evidence of burn on them, but they were splintered apart. Someone had come through with an ax, knocked them apart, kicked them apart and prevented the fire from continuing to expand.
Scott Hammond:Some more wick material.
Jana Valachovic:Wick material and there was a couple other details too. And I walked back to the front of the house and I was like you know, thank you very much for letting me look around. Would you like to know what I saw? And he's like I don't know. Nobody was here and I said there's clear evidence that somebody was here and I've said you know, someone was here and had your back and they made a difference and and, and I don't know that he wanted to hear it still yeah.
Jana Valachovic:But, um, I don't know the ability to be an ambassador in that moment and help people understand that there were a lot of folks that put their heart and soul into it and ran into the flames, where we were asking folks to run out of the flames and because you know, abc News did three minutes on it and I got it.
Scott Hammond:It was all not there. So Altadena Fire went to that and Pass and Pacific Palisades yeah.
Jana Valachovic:I've been to both. So there's that part right. There's a lot of people there, but then there are a lot of things that put homes in better condition and are more likely to be successful, and so I was also looking for those signs and double pane windows much better than single pane windows. Most of the structures in both of those two fire footprints are from 1970 or earlier, so there's a lot of single pane windows that were still left, and a single pane window can't handle heat and it will break and then the fire starts inside.
Jana Valachovic:And the fire gets inside. So, yeah, when people had upgraded their windows made a difference when, like new remodels, use tempered glass windows and tempering changes the heat resistive quality of the glass, and so people that had tempered glass windows had had much better outcomes.
Scott Hammond:so not as much about siding as I would have thought, it's windows and other.
Jana Valachovic:Well and that's important, because in Southern California it's mostly kind of that Mediterranean style construction. You'll see a lot of barrel tiled kind of terracotta roofing and you'll see a lot of stucco or stucco-like products, and so the siding itself is non-combustible Are there any shake roofs anymore?
Scott Hammond:Not many, and so the siding itself is non-combustible.
Jana Valachovic:Are there any shake roofs? Anymore, not many, and those would have gone down there.
Scott Hammond:Those are terrible.
Jana Valachovic:They're beautiful. I mean, I had one for a long time. They were the big kind of thing.
Scott Hammond:They were cool, so were bell bottoms.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, well, it's in bell bottoms. Yeah, right, right. The other piece, though I just want to bring it forward, is that what we plant around the building really matters. So having a lot of garden beds with combustible mulch all around the structure is like putting dynamite around the outside of our house. Right, you are setting the stage for ignition from embers and then you've got flames directly on the side of the house. So for people that had put gravel walkways, had done some cool rock work, maybe had a patio, it looks cool, but it's totally.
Jana Valachovic:But it fit in in their aesthetic and those details made a huge difference.
Scott Hammond:So you're kind of dangerous. You're a game changer. I mean, at least your thought pattern would be hey what if we could mitigate fires? But mulch industry is going to die, has to go away or do something different.
Jana Valachovic:No, I think mulch just needs to be used appropriately.
Scott Hammond:Maybe away from the house.
Jana Valachovic:Right, I mean think about it this way why do we have fire retardant chemicals in our beds?
Scott Hammond:So they don't burn.
Jana Valachovic:Right, but well, that came from people's behavior around smoking and you couldn't change behavior. So you changed the nature of the product and everyone got caught up in that, and so you know I work in the forest products industry. I'm a proud contributor to that space, and for me I don't blame the bed and I don't blame the wood, I don't blame the bed, and I don't blame the wood. I want to change behavior so that we can use wood appropriately in the right places and wood-based products in the right places.
Scott Hammond:Why do we not smoke in restaurants? Because it's secondhand. Smoke kills people.
Jana Valachovic:Right, but we have changed. I mean, we've passed a law and we've changed that behavior, right, right, so we shouldn't store stuff underneath our wood deck because that stuff's going to get ignited by direct flame contact or embers and then the deck burns. It's not the wood on the deck's fault, it's really our our behavior around, not recognizing that we can make that deck more vulnerable by doing certain things so I'm a homeowner in humboldt and you're just going to speak to millions of people on the podcast, you.
Scott Hammond:So where would you send us to fire? Harden our home this summer or earlier?
Jana Valachovic:Well, pretty simple to look at University of California fire and you'll run into our fire website. Where we've got. We do not represent an organization. I mean, you know a product. We're not trying to sell you anything, but we have detailed information around what each product does, how the assembly works and kind of where the vulnerabilities are, so start there, you could go there. And so I mean the top three. You need a roof in good shape. Roof shoulders the majority of the responsibility for protecting the structure from hail, from snow, from water, from fire.
Scott Hammond:This is a good roof right here in this house, by the way, perfect.
Jana Valachovic:Notice your roof on the way.
Scott Hammond:Perfect.
Jana Valachovic:Notice your roof on the way in. Number two, the vents need to be a finer mesh screen and you can upgrade to the new new ones or you can just add another layer of mesh screen. That's one eighth inch.
Scott Hammond:Not that hard to go put those on.
Jana Valachovic:Not that hard. Don't spray them when you paint. Don't spray the vents, though, because you will clog them up, and then you can mess up the moisture management and the airflow. So you know you have to treat them a little differently.
Scott Hammond:This includes those roof fence that come out.
Jana Valachovic:The three roof fence Yep. And from the inside though. And then third, we need to have a moat, a zone we call it zone zero around the structure that has no combustible material for the first five feet that means you can keep your property line fence. But when it attaches to the house, upgrade that attachment point to something non-combustible it's a wick, it's a wick.
Scott Hammond:That deck fence, oh, my deck fence comes right into ooh.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, no, that's the one place that it's going to feel a little rougher, but great place for innovation. So much potential to make beautiful gates. I haven't been able to talk anybody into it yet, but this is a marketing opportunity for someone to really jump into.
Scott Hammond:Something non-combustible.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, I mean, with a CNC machine and Corten steel you could make some really cool gates. There's other things you can use too.
Scott Hammond:So a do-it-yourselfer could do all this.
Jana Valachovic:In the do-it-yourself space.
Scott Hammond:You don't need to have a bunch of builders there.
Jana Valachovic:No, I mean you're going to have to have a conversation with whoever gardens and say you know what? We just need to move that a little bit farther away from the house. It's great for you know, moisture management, insect management, being able to paint the house. I mean it's good for many other reasons. But fire adaptation basically means that we have to adapt. I like it, we Adaptation basically means that we have to adapt.
Jana Valachovic:I like it. We have to live differently and I'm not afraid to rebuild in paradise or LA, but I would do it differently and I you know, in the rebuild space there's a lot to be thought about in terms of building design, materials and other elements, but thinking about exposures from the front end being just as important as how the kitchen functions and how you know the other elements, like that is not a conversation that we've typically had Right, and that's the conversation that we need to start to have.
Scott Hammond:Amen, I love it. So there's no reason why even us in McKinleyville, who never burn, rarely ever, couldn't do this. It just makes universal sense.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, I mean, let's talk about those that live in coastal Humboldt County.
Scott Hammond:Those people that thought they would never burn.
Jana Valachovic:Right, and so you know our frequency for burn is low. Right, but when we're in condition, when we have a red flag warning, what's going on with the rest of the state?
Scott Hammond:Crazy.
Jana Valachovic:Right, they're all dry, like when we're dry, everybody else is dry and the piece that we have to worry about is the sequence of have this whole system of mutual aid and deployment. But when you have multiple ignitions and they're near places with lots of people, the first protection is life, and so resources go to get on there to go for evacuation.
Jana Valachovic:We may not have many resources left and we may have a short period of a burn window, but it could move rather quickly. So I think of it as a low probability, high severity potential.
Scott Hammond:Good way to see it.
Jana Valachovic:Right, it's. You know it's the thing you'd least expect and we have. We have reason to sort of less expect it than other locations in California, but it doesn't mean that the risk hasn't gone away.
Scott Hammond:I think of the fire in Ashland and Medford that came up Bear Creek and they had very few resources but they were able to, but it did a lot of damage. And to see that fire is crazy. Right, and that was you know Because those are people that were already on other fires.
Jana Valachovic:Right, that was a four-hour burn period. Paradise was an eight-hour burn period.
Scott Hammond:Really, and LA was days right, la was a couple days, you know, because the wind continued for those couple of days.
Jana Valachovic:But most of the fire footprint was already established in that first window. So I mean, it's a hard, cold way to wake up and I you know I don't wish this upon any community.
Scott Hammond:This is multi-generational burdens no-transcript would suffer for years maybe. Yeah, it's like what a total. It's my home for 50 years. I was raised there, right.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, and you're going to be lucky if you can rebuild in three and it's probably going to take five, right, and your life moves on in that process and you may not. You know where do you hang out in that time period? And it's not because insurance didn't pay out quick enough, it's because of so many layered effects and contractor availability and design review.
Scott Hammond:Malibu let's rebuild in Malibu.
Jana Valachovic:Well, and just getting resources and all the materials. I mean, we went through COVID, we know what happens when you break supply chains and how difficult, that is.
Scott Hammond:Right, that demand. So parting shots on that note.
Jana Valachovic:I don't know. I mean, I really within this, to me there's got to be some optimism and there has to be some hope. And, you know, I hope that people can take a moment and don't just give up and don't just say this is climate, this, and that I can't do anything. Don't just say like this is so big, it's so much bigger than me, I can't do anything. And you know, our physicians can't save us on our own. Our physicians can't save us on our own. You know we have to be a good patient and recognize the things that are within our control in terms of behavior changes, diet and exercise. We all know that's a good idea, right?
Jana Valachovic:There's a price to pay for that, and so you know the physicians aren't going to save us if we were not capable of adding those behavioral changes into our overall health. And I guess I think of it in the same way, like we can become a better partner in the fire services effort and we can do a lot more to build durability into our structures and build communication into our communities and understand evacuation better and be more aware of the fire. You know weather that we're in and recognize like oh, it's a red flag warning day. I should have my go bag in my car. I'm going to pre-anticipate that I'm maybe not going to go home. I'm not going to come home tonight, so I've already closed my windows. I'm going to shelter my pet at the shelter today. I'm not going to leave them there, so that's tugging at me to go back.
Scott Hammond:We hardened the home six months ago. It's already Right.
Jana Valachovic:And so I know that I've put in a good faith effort, and you know there's some things that I won't be able to control completely, but I have made such a substantial difference that I'm not going to panic. And you know, fire's never going to leave California. It's this is. You know, we're in a Mediterranean ecosystem, which means that we get a prolonged drought period and the vegetation is well adapted to having fire with some periodicity. We just happen to live in the middle of that and not quite understand that.
Scott Hammond:You know it's impacting us now we haven't even talked climate change yet. That's maybe another show.
Jana Valachovic:Maybe another show, but I am optimistic that we can really improve the way that we coexist with fire and have a future that's, you know, multigenerational and has all you know, or many of the attributes that we love about California, and a way that we can protect our financial stability and our community and, you know, have our kids know that this was the place that we chose and we chose well.
Scott Hammond:I like your hope. That's good. Thanks for coming.
Jana Valachovic:Thanks for having me, yeah.
Scott Hammond:Thanks for all the things Gosh. This is where I do the thank you, all the things. Gosh, this is where I do the thank you. So thank you, thank you, and usually I do a quiz all your favorite things in Humboldt. Maybe I'll ask you that next time, yeah, river spots. Yeah, river spots. Okay, try that one Go Wait.
Jana Valachovic:For $10,000,.
Scott Hammond:Favorite river spots in Humboldt.
Jana Valachovic:Oh, in Humboldt, I really like certain places near Alder Point, to be honest.
Scott Hammond:Oh, way out there.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, on the main stem. I'm a South Fork Eel girl, so there's a lot between Myers Flat and Redway that I like. Yeah, there's some A-Way on the Metol right. Great family memories there, lots of camping trips and beautiful, beautiful river explorations there.
Scott Hammond:Yeah, how's that I have one. Okay, pistol River up the Pistol in Oregon. Well, that's not Humboldt, I know.
Jana Valachovic:You have me confined.
Scott Hammond:You're right, that doesn't even count.
Jana Valachovic:But I do love the Pistol River 100%.
Scott Hammond:It's really cool. Upriver, there's this like 20-foot deep green hole.
Jana Valachovic:Actually.
Scott Hammond:I'd go to Smith River also, not Humboldt.
Jana Valachovic:I'd go to Smith any day. Well, so I'm one of those people that I like to like work my way around the rivers, based on temperature, you know. And there's my early warm season.
Scott Hammond:I like that. That's pretty smart. I like that. Yeah, south Fork Trinity great spots in South Fork Trinity, oh gorgeous. Yeah, used to hike up there, used to go to a ranch up there. Dr, Holmes had a ranch, which was really fun. We'd go to retreats. Anyway, that's another story for another day. Hey, this is where I'm going to thank everybody. Thank everybody for listening to 100% Humboldt and you can subscribe. We have YouTube, we have podcast channels and repost, share, subscribe and thanks to all our sponsors and thanks to you, jana, thank you.
Jana Valachovic:Yeah, my pleasure, appreciate you being here. Yeah, thanks to all the listeners for listening.
