Rising high schoolers study wildfires in Oakland amid historic dry season
A two-week wildfire ecology program on Northeastern’s Oakland campus took lessons from the deadly blaze along the Colorado-Utah border.
OAKLAND – A group of 11 high school students on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus raced to rip open reflective, fire-resistant bags from their backpacks before jumping inside and lying flat on the grass.
The exercise simulated the type of last-resort, lifesaving measures used by firefighters who find themselves trapped by raging wildfires.
The hands-on demonstration, part of a two-week pre-college program led by Northeastern faculty on wildfire ecology and mitigation, coincided with a fast-moving blaze along the Colorado-Utah border. The harrowing incident earlier this month resulted in the deaths of three firefighters despite their deployment of the same emergency fire shelters, exemplifying the often harsh reality of battling wildfires.
“It was weirdly useful and illustrative of the problem,” said Sarah Swope, an evolutionary ecologist and associate professor of biology at Northeastern who led the pilot Accelerate Pre-College Program.
The course is part of the 10th edition of the summer offering for rising high school juniors and seniors from around the world, and the first year of a location-targeted lesson plan for the Oakland campus.
Over the two-week course, Swope educated students about the effects and various costs of climate change in the wildfire-prone region through lectures, field trips and research paper analysis. They learned about the ecology of fire, how natural fire regimes are being altered and the consequences for the state’s ecosystems and people.
“The program was specific to California and the Western U.S., something that you really couldn’t do in New England,” said Swope, whose research has focused on the ecological and evolutionary challenges facing rare plants. “Fire just isn’t much of an issue there, certainly not the way it is here.”
Wildfires have erupted across the West in recent weeks, supercharged by months of dryness, an increase in high winds and a historic lack of snow over the winter, which is important to maintaining soil moisture, according to Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy, urban affairs and philosophy at Northeastern.
“This is largely driven by climate change, which tends to extremize weather when it happens,” Thresher said.
Having grown up in Stockton, California, 11th-grade student Jennifer Onyekwere entered the program well familiar with the sight of a blood-red sky and the smell of wildfire smoke, she said. The state has endured an annual average of more than 4,300 wildfires over the past five years, according to CAL Fire, leaving 82,000 acres burnt each year on average.
Onyekwere said she was drawn to the Northeastern program because of its connection to her home. And though she had been conditioned to fear fire’s harmful impact on urban communities, she said she was surprised to learn about other points of view.
“Coming into this class, you see all of the benefits that fire can have on the environment,” she said. “I think that gives you a new perspective.”
Prescribed burns remove dried plant matter from the ground in fire-prone areas, cutting off one of the most dangerous sources of potential fuel for wildfires, Swope said.
Cultural burns, an indigenous fire mitigation practice that has been used for thousands of years, involve lighting a small, low-intensity blaze to nourish the underlying soil and clear underbrush, she said. The practice also promotes new growth in native plants like tule, which Native American tribes have historically used to make baskets and canoes.
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Students sparked and controlled one such “good burn” at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve’s Tending and Gathering Garden under guidance of Swope and a PhD student, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Swope said. Onyekwere called the instructive lesson, which the nature preserve also offers as a public workshop, an antidote to the more concerning lessons on wildfire management and climate change.
“It was so calming to be there because you’re guiding the fire rather than trying to put it out, so you’re letting the fire do what it has to do,” she said. “That’s so cool.”
Inside a sunny second-floor classroom in the Natural Sciences Building, Swope taught students about plants and animals’ adaptation to recurrent fires, a 200-year evolution of fire management policy, the increasingly costly economics of firefighting and the methods used by fire operators to extinguish large-scale wildfires. She also acted as a life skills mentor for the high schoolers, she said, teaching them everything a college student should know, from how to read a scientific research paper to proper public speaking.
Swope’s aim when designing the novel program was to help students view fire as an unavoidable ecological process and consider the ways humans should live and act with that understanding in mind.
“But one of my biggest learning goals was: I just wanted them to have a lot of fun learning,” she said. “I wanted them to get so engaged that they forgot that they were learning, and I think that worked really well.”
More than an academic primer for ambitious students, the not-for-credit, pre-college programs are meant as comprehensive college experiences.
Over the past three years of pre-college programming, an average of 89% of participating high school students went on to apply to Northeastern as undergraduates, according to data from Northeastern.
Onyekwere gave up two weeks of her summer vacation to learn from Swope on the Oakland campus, an immersive experience that cemented her passion for environmental studies. When college application season comes, she said, Northeastern will be near or at the top of her list.
“There’s so many things that I’ve learned that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn until college,” she said. “Not only did it further my interest in certain subjects, but it also helps me think about what the next step is.”
