"We tend to look at the interface… as much larger than a lot of people do."
Earlier this year, we did a fire and had people walk up to us—on every fire, people come up to us during the fire—we had an individual walk up to us and say, "You know, I'd lot rather see this kind of smoke than Los Alamos smoke." And that's a very wise statement. I think as long as we do prescribed fires reasonably and professionally, and explain that to the public within the Flagstaff area, we will continue to be successful. I don't like the term controlled fire, a controlled burn. I like the term prescribed fire. There's always a risk when we light a match and put it on the ground. And I think that any prescribed fire person that doesn't do—their stomach doesn't tighten and they don't do a little bit of a gut check before they put the match on the ground, they probably shouldn't be putting the match on the ground. It's a serious business. The benefits are tremendous, and probably more important, the risk of us not burning, of reintroducing fire into an ecosystem that it's been excluded from for far too long, the risk of that is extremely serious. We are going to have serious fires. And we need to reverse that trend.
...We tend to look at the interface, the area in and around Flagstaff, as much larger than a lot of people do. There are groups of people that look at the interface strictly within a few hundred feet of homes, with the thought, "All we need to do is treat that couple of hundred feet around the house—vegetation treatments—and that's all we need to do to protect it." We take a much bigger view, a much bigger picture than that. Because while it is true that if we treat within a couple hundred feet, we can protect homes, we look at it from the perspective that there is much more to a community than homes. Homes are one aspect of it. Wildfires are relatively easy to deal with—even big ones. They all go out eventually. And what is much more—and if we focus on homes, we lose sight of the community. There are so many other things that involve community. They are the watershed, which is so important to so many western communities. Recreational opportunities around town. The scenic values that people have, or vistas that they may have out of their windows are from the community. The emotional or spiritual attachments that groups or individuals may have to certain sites. Wild or threatened or endangered species habitat, wild habitat...