George Whitesides
speaker
69 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
George Whitesides’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So like on the cheaper side, you know, everyone can clear out the five or 10 feet immediately around their home from brush and shrubs and plants, basically.
That makes a big difference.
Everyone can put metal screens in their eaves and vents around their home so that when a big fire comes through and embers start blowing at high speed, they don't blow through into your attic and burn your home down from the inside out.
Other things are more expensive.
It's really great if you can have a roof that is made of something that's fire resistant.
Those make a huge difference.
Arguably up to 50% of your risk is what those materials are.
We have a huge interest to having everybody in that community take these steps, particularly those around the perimeter, because if you can protect some of those outer boundaries, then you have a way of reducing the risk that that fire penetrates deeply into the city.
The second solution is resilient landscapes.
And if you take one lesson from this talk, it's this.
In order to solve the megafire crisis, we need to bring our Western landscapes back into a healthy balance by reducing the overgrown brush and trees in the wild lands and the forest.
Here, we're finally starting to take to heart the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the Americas who knew that fire was a natural part of the landscape and who introduced low-intensity fire, good fire, on a regular basis at the right times.
When this is done well, as around the communities of South Lake Tahoe, then it can actually divert a megafire as bad as the one that they experienced in 2021.
Yeah, thousands of years.
And there are now, you know, many places that are working on this stuff.
And, you know, a great example is the area immediately around South Lake Tahoe, you know, which spent on the order of over $100 million on forest treatments.
Hmm.
And that's a hopeful example of a situation with the Caldor fire where you had this terrible, huge mega fire bearing down on South Lake Tahoe.
But those forest treatments were accredited by some as sort of giving the firefighters enough pause, bringing the fire intensity down enough.
They were able to keep it from tearing through South Lake Tahoe, you know, where you don't do that work.
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