Transcript:
This podcast was transcribed through a third-party application. Please disregard any misrepresentations.
Intro:
Welcome to Civic Warriors, brought to you by WIthum. On this podcast, we bring the conversation to you, sharing, engaging stories that motivate and build consensus in the nonprofit community. This podcast is about the innovators, the leaders on the front line of adversity, guiding lights in the nonprofit industry affecting change. And through their stories, we can all join forces to become civic warriors.
Brad Caruso:
Hey Warriors, Brad Caruso here and I’m joined by another Withum partner, Joe Coover. On this episode of Withum Civic Warriors. We have a real treat for you today, Warriors. We’re lucky to have two fine gentlemen, Mike O’Connell and Dave Raetz from the Irvine Ranch Conservancy in Southern California. Here to discuss some issues that are near and dear to my heart. Uh, the Irvine Ranch Conservancy is a 501c3 not-for-profit organization located in Orange County, California. That ensures the protection, restoration and enhancement of the Irvine Ranch and other natural landmarks. Their footprint covers about 40,000 acres of Southern California urban wildlands and includes activities like habitat restoration, wildlife prevention, invasive species control, and community engagement and education. Mike O’Connell is the president and CEO of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. He oversees all aspects of the operations and has over 25 years of experience in land protection and conservation science. Dave Raetz is the Irvine Ranch Conservancy’s Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. He oversees the finances, budgeting staff and volunteer management and public programming. So welcome to the show Mike and Dave, Joe and I appreciate having you both with us today.
Mike O’Connell:
Thanks. Happy to be here.
Dave Raetz:
Yeah, thank you.
Brad Caruso:
Let’s kick off the show. Talk to us a little bit about how did you get to where you are? How did you start at the conservancy?
Mike O’Connell:
I’ve been in, uh, in conservation basically my entire life. I went to school and studied conservation biology and got a graduate degree and then have worked in government, worked in the private sector for a little while, but spent most of my career working in nonprofit conservation and uh, worked actually with the Nature Conservancy and was the managing director of Southern California. And one of the projects that we worked on was the Irvine Ranch. And the Irvine Ranch was a unique situation in that it has was protected, more than half of the original ranch has been protected in open space and a lot of that is wildland and there was a real need to make sure that that land was taken care of to the highest possible standards and there wasn’t really anybody to do it. And so working together with the Irvine Company, the Nature Conservancy and the Irvine Company framed out a non-profit organization that would be the partner to all of these landowners, like the county of Orange and the city of Irvine, the public landowners that own the land and help them take care of it. And I was the first and I guess only executive director and now president and CEO. So I’ve been here almost 18 years and I was employee number one and I think Dave was employee number four. Weren’t you Dave?
Dave Raetz:
Yeah, four or six. One of those two.
Mike O’Connell:
Four or six two.
Dave Raetz:
A long time.
Mike O’Connell:
<laugh>. Yeah, we’ve all, we’ve both been here quite a while and it’s been really a great source of satisfaction to build the organization and the community of people around the land. We take about 30,000 people a year out on the land on guided tours and activities and it’s just a whole lot of fun. So I’ve been in nonprofit conservation my whole life and planned to be for the rest of my life.
Dave Raetz:
Took a different route than Mike did, but I spent a lot of years in the pet industry and then from there into environmental education and I actually ended up managing the environmental science programs for the Department of Education here in Orange County. And I was there for 13 years and it blended really well with basically all the environmental stuff that was happening within the county because we were kind of the funnel for a lot of staff that would come in right outta college. They would get some environmental ed stuff. We basically were seasonal work and then they would move on to different positions throughout the county and elsewhere in doing environmental work. And so for many, many years, most people in environmental community in Orange County, I knew them because I had hired them at some point in time in their career. And then coming to the conservancy that, you know, Mike, when he started the conservancy, cuz he’s been here 18 years, I’ve been 16, so he, it was still kind of the beginning and developmental part of it and he hired a guy named Bob Chandler who was a superintendent for the National Parks Service. And he was kind of the fixer superintendent when something went wrong they would send him to go fix it and he put together the Santa Monica Mountains national recreation area up north of Los Angeles. And then he had retired and Mike hired him to kind of go around Orange County and figure out, you know, what’s what and who’s who and who should be involved in what and that kind of stuff. Bob ended up interviewing me, he set up an interview with actually my boss at the time who didn’t show up to the meeting and instead called me and said, You need to go talk to this guy. And we spent, he, we were supposed to meet for half an hour and I think we spent about two and a half hours together in that interview. And then he, he went back to Mike and said, You need to hire this guy <laugh>. No.
Mike O’Connell:
All I knew was I got a call after he met with Dave and he said, Here’s a guy you gotta hire <laugh>. And uh, you can see it worked out pretty well. <laugh>
Dave Raetz:
It was funny cuz the interview process was basically Mike and I would go to lunch and they’d be like four hour lunches and we talking about what the vision is for all this stuff and what we can do and all that. And I was in, I was like, Yeah, I’m good. I’m into doing something new and exciting that and and quite frankly, you know, I had my finger on the pulse of the environmental community in Orange County and what Mike was presenting was stuff that people had talked about doing for decades and not ever pulled it off. And so that was very exciting and intriguing to come over and have an opportunity to do stuff that, you know, people have been talking about but couldn’t get done.
Brad Caruso:
So couple things that uh, I definitely wanted to cover today. You know, I love using this platform as an education opportunity. So maybe we start out just talking a little bit about the work you do, a little bit about a couple of your programs and what conservation means to you. I think that’d be a great place to start. I definitely wanna cover a couple of the wildfire and fire related efforts that you do. Cause I genuinely curious about it.
Mike O’Connell:
So I think at its most basic, one of my favorite quotes, uh, of all time is from, uh, Richard Leaky who was the son of Louis Leaky, the one who was the famous anthropologist. And Richard Leaky was among other things, the head of the National Park Service in Kenya. And he once described conservation as enlightened self-interest. And I think that is a really, really good way of describing what it’s about. We’ve become disconnected from the natural world in modern society and we don’t realize how much our lives and our futures depend on conservation. And I think that there has been some antagonism towards it in the past. But we’re starting to see, particularly through efforts like ours, which are oriented towards stewardship of nature, not resolving conflicts. It’s about taking beautiful natural areas and making sure they remain healthy for the future. Everyone likes that idea. And so the, what we think of when we think of conservation is, is management and stewardship of nature for future generations and for the health of the planet and ultimately the health of ourselves.
Brad Caruso:
What are some of the biggest challenges you face from a conservation perspective?
Mike O’Connell:
The area we work in is part of an ecological region called a Mediterranean climate zone. And there are only five of those places on the planet and they all occur on the western edge of continents. So there’s southwestern South America, Chile, and and that area, um, Western Australia, Southwestern Africa, the Mediterranean proper, and Southwestern California and Northern Baja. These areas are only 2% of the land area of the planet and they have 20% of all known plant species. They are a biological diversity hotspot. They are globally significant from a, um, a species perspective, from a biodiversity perspective. They also happen to have some of the best climate on the planet which attracts people. And so in every single one of these Mediterranean climate zones, there is a lot of development and there’s been a lot of habitat loss and Southern California is, you know, no exception to that.
Mike O’Connell:
And so what we find ourselves in then is the remains. And fortunately we have a very large chunk of it left in in Orange County because of the conservation efforts on the Irvine Ranch. We have a big chunk of that, but we find ourselves in a highly urbanized context. So we live in one of the densest urban areas of the world as well. In fact where where we’re sitting right now, we’re about a half an hour’s drive from over three and a half million people. That means that it’s varied, dense, and that the effects of those developed areas on the wildlands are really significant. And so that’s what leads to the threats that we have. We have done, as part of our conservation strategy, we’ve done what’s called a threats analysis. And what you do to complete a threats analysis is you look at what your objectives are for conservation and ours are the long term health and resilience of these lands forever. And then you look at what is affecting those. And it turns out that there are a number of issues that are affecting that here. And I’ll, we can talk about, I’ll let Dave talk about a few as well. You then develop your programs to try to minimize, mitigate or ameliorate those threats. And so that’s what our strategy is as an organization. Those at various levels of intensity are two frequent wildfire fragmentation of habitat that causes ecological connections to be lost, invasion of invasive species of plants and animals from other places. Not only is it a wonderful place for humans to live in a Mediterranean climate zone, it’s a great place for all kinds of other species to live that weren’t native here. So we have a huge problem with invasive species, too much access, loving the land to death. That’s another threat that happens and that’s something that I’ll let Dave talk about a little bit because it’s a tricky balance, right?
Mike O’Connell:
You want people to fall in love with the land and help protect it and go out and enjoy it. But if they overrun it and there’s too many people out there, then it can degrade the lands over time. And then all of those threats are wrapped in the huge unknown of climate change and what that’s going to do in these areas. Whether it’s gonna get hotter and drier, whether it’s gonna get hotter and wetter. We know it’s gonna get hotter, but we don’t know what’s gonna happen as a result of that. And there’s all kinds of implications for that. Like for example, almost all the species that live on these lands have evolved in a certain climate regime and that if it changes, they may not be able to survive in the new climate regime. Some of them can migrate, but because we live in a highly fragmented urban area, many of them have nowhere to go. And so we don’t really know what is gonna happen there. And that’s one of the big challenges that we face that there’s not a whole lot we can do about, frankly. So Dave, I don’t know if you wanna talk about building a community and the threat of people not loving the land.
Dave Raetz:
Sure. As Mike said, in Orange County there’s about three and a half million people. And if everyone came out there, you know, at the same time or regularly, you literally are gonna love it to death. Just the footprint alone will expand, you’ll mash stuff up, that kind of stuff. But the other thing that happens is it’s also about, you know, the wildlife, remember it’s an ecosystem. So the ecosystem has to function with various systems that are rolling all the time. If there are people out there all the time, the wildlife don’t get to forage the way they would, they don’t get to reproduce, they don’t get to survive the way they would normally survive, which is parts of those systems. So each little piece starts to break down. And so what we do in working with the conservation of the land, there are different access, um, like human access configurations that are applied in different areas like some maybe nature preserve areas where it’s only accessible by, you know, guided activities and or select open days where people can come and do self-guided, but it’s only for select periods of time.
Dave Raetz:
And then there’s other areas that, you know, it’s seven day access, you know, sunset to to sun down kind of stuff. And so we really try to, to balance as much of those as possible. We
have one area that we manage where the perimeter of it has seven day access and can be used, but the center area where the most sensitive species is actually guided access only. So in engaging the community, we’ve done it mainly through volunteerism and we basically, these lands were set aside and preserved and then our role is to be like, okay, what’s next? How do we care for these lands? How do we get the community to care for these lands and and support them? And our volunteer program was a big way to do that. We built this volunteer program to attract all kinds of people that may wanna, you know, give once a month, they’ll give a couple of hours to, we have docent level people who sometimes they’re here more than our staff are and we have hundreds and hundreds of ’em now and they’re leading activities. They’re helping to, you know, remove invasive species, they’re helping to implement stewardship activities or restoration habitat restoration activities. And we’ve been really successful at engaging the community in a meaningful way and really incorporating them into everything we’ve done within our organization that has expanded kind of throughout Orange County. It’s been really refreshing to, for a long time there was environmental activists who were the ones that were fighting to save the land in the first place, which is great, that needs to happen, but a lot of the activist people don’t have the same kind of desire as the stewardship people. Like, okay, it’s here, I wanna help keep it here and and introduce people to it and expand the knowledge of the community of why it’s here. And, and so I think we’ve been really successful with that and engaging that community and they’ve, you know, they’ve turned around give, they’ve given tens of thousands of hours annually when we have big fires or stuff like that, they donate money, you know, all of a sudden the checks start flowing in because they love it as much as we do.
Dave Raetz:
It’s been really neat. And then, you know, they influence, you know, the local politics and the, you know, the pressure on even executive level people within the different cities or counties of like, hey, this is important to us as your constituency. So it’s been a, a fun run to build that and watch it grow in Orange County. I think it’s really, really successful and it’s been part of our adaptive management and balancing of you know, the human desire to go to these areas versus, you know, the wildlife needs and requirements. That balance is always going, we’re always monitoring it, we’re always changing our approach but it’s a really key point to conservation itself. If no one cares, no one’s gonna do it.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah, agreed. And you list a couple important things there and I think there’s a lot of different interaction that takes place between people, between the environment species that live there. And just to clarify something, not everyone may know when you use the term invasive species, what you’re referring to there, maybe give a couple examples.
Mike O’Connell:
Yeah so, uh, every ecosystem sort of evolves with all of the species interacting and forming that ecosystem together. Often a species will get introduced into that ecosystem and because it did not evolve with the balance of that ecosystem, it doesn’t have any predators or it doesn’t have any parasites or it has nothing to keep its population in check and it goes nuts and expands and in many cases can take over entire ecosystems and make them an ecosystem of a single species. And there are non-native species, there are species that don’t normally occur here that are not invasive. We use the term invasive to mean aggressive that they’re aggressively spreading. So there are a number of grasses from Africa, for example, that are from the Mediterranean region in Africa that are completely unchecked here. And when they escape people’s backyards, a good example is a, it’s not a grass, but a good example from the Mediterranean is artichoke thistlei. Artichoke thistle is not a native thistle and it’s from the Mediterranean eco region in Southern Europe and in Southern California its populations grow without any kind of limit and they will, it will take over entire natural areas and we’ve seen that in various places. And so then we have to go back in and remove those invasive species and try to restore the habitat back to its natural state. Somebody might say, well why do you need to do that? You know, the artichoke thistle is also a natural, you know, being right it’s a plant. The problem is that it will disrupt a lot of the other things that are important in that ecosystem. Like it provides a much, much better fuel base for wildfires. This is a wildfire adapted natural community and wildfires normally occurred between about every 70 to 150 years historically, which is pretty long between fires.
Mike O’Connell:
We’re now seeing fires every seven to 10 years in the same areas. So it repeats every seven to 10 years instead of every 70 to 150 years. That will completely destroy the integrity of these ecosystems. And not to mention threaten all of the human communities that are around there. We see that almost every year. But these invasive species make the problem exponentially worse. Like mustard is a really good example. So mustard was introduced several hundred years ago and now in the spring for about a week and a half it has beautiful yellow flowers and everybody loves it. And then the rest of the year it’s basically tinder ready to burn. And that is one reason that we would want to get rid of ’em. So invasive species at the basic level, they perturb the balance of the ecosystem that we’re trying to maintain and the consequences ripple out and often have direct effects on people like wildfire, for example.
Joe Cover:
One thing that’s very cool about the conservancy and some of the work that they do is they do kind of de weed and take out some of that non-native type species that can cause
problems. And at the same time they also restore in a sense of they’ve got a native seed farm where they actually go out into the wilderness to collect native seed from the plants there and then also grow their own. So that come time with wildfire, right? If wildfire burns down a whole bunch of plants let’s say, and an invasive species can kind of come in and aggressively repopulate that area, these guys can go in, take their native seed that they’ve then procured and put it on those areas to make sure that that habitat regrows in a way that’s going to continue that balance that Mike was talking about.
Mike O’Connell:
Yeah, thanks Joe. That project, the native seed farm is one of our most exciting initiatives actually. We’re working at such a large scale on these lands. We manage about 30,000 acres of land and we’re restoring on the order of about 5,000 acres. Ultimately that’s our goal is about 5,000 and we’re at about 2,000 right now. To work at that scale, you need enough plant materials to restore the land and there isn’t enough plant material anywhere. And so we just decided in the spirit of innovation, let’s grow it ourselves. And so we got 14 acres of land that is designated as permanent open space but was a, an old farm and we started growing native species there and we grow between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds of native seed a year from 52 species, some of which are not being cultivated anywhere else and some of which are rare and endangered.
Mike O’Connell:
That’s been a great way for us to help restore. But Joe brings up a good point, which is if all you do is remove the invasive weeds and you don’t have a plan to restore it, then it’s just gonna get invaded by something else. In fact, there’s a classic example in Orange County of an initiative that was done during the 1990s to do a lot of artichoke thistle removal and they removed all the artichoke thistle successfully but didn’t plant anything native. And what came back was a bunch of mustard and the habitat isn’t any better off than it was. So all of these things kind of go hand in hand and that’s why we work in each of these areas.
Dave Raetz:
I think the farm too is another, you know, we talk about climate change and climate change is a, you know, it’s a huge unknown, you know, we worry about it all the time. But one of the ways I think that we can somewhat do what we can do now with addressing some climate change issues is when we are doing habitat restoration, we’re taking genetic materials from very specific micro ecosystem or, or biomes and within that area that we can then propagate and bulk up on the seeds to put it back into that same exact spot. So the, the chance of success for restoring that habitat are much greater and ideally the, the plants that are reproducing right now in the wild with the droughts that we’re having are a little more resilient to the less water situation. So hopefully by being very selective on the locations for the genetics and putting it back in there, we can help offset a little bit of the impacts of climate change and make those ecosystems more resilient to the things that we’ve seen so far, which is apparently lots of drought and and higher temperatures. It gives us a little bit of a laboratory experiment with on that.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah, it sounds like a very, very difficult challenge to address considering you’re managing, as you mentioned, 30,000 plus acres, you’re managing a drought, climate change is real and it that having a serious effect. When we think about fire starting and things like that, what types of efforts can you do or do you do to counteract some of this climate change or counteract some of these acceleration of events? Cuz based on what you said, you know that they’re gonna happen, but is there anything you can do to help prevent that?
Mike O’Connell:
Brad, you characterize it correctly, which is this is a really, really complex problem. It really is difficult and it’s not something that any entity can handle alone. And one of the core values of Irvine Ranch Conservancy is partnership and we work on everything we do with partners, with a, with networks of partners if we can because there’s so, so much strength and power in working together on these issues that is nowhere more significant than on the wildfire issue. In fact, our good friend and partner, um, the chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, Brian Fennessy said, the problem with wildfire is it’s everybody’s problem and it’s nobody’s problem. And what he meant by that is no one is singularly responsible for it, but it’s everybody’s problem. And then the next thing he said is, So we all have to work together in if we’re gonna solve this problem, right?
Mike O’Connell:
So what Irvine Ranch Conservancy does is we manage the land, we actually don’t manage the roadsides where most of the ignitions of these fires are coming from. The fire authority, their job is to put out the fires. Their job isn’t to prevent ignitions from happening. It takes everybody at the table. And so one of the efforts that we’ve been involved in for quite some time is a working group, a fire prevention working group that’s convened by the Orange County Fire Authority and Irvine Ranch Conservancy facilitates that group and it’s called the County of Orange Area Safety Task Force, which was an acronym that was created to create the acronym Coast <laugh>. We started with the acronym and then came up with the words to make it. But anyway, Coast is a fantastic working group of 26 entities and it includes Southern California Edison and Caltrans and the every local fire department and all the landowners. And we’re getting together and working on these complex problems where everybody shares a piece of it of the solution but nobody has the entire solution in their hand and it’s as difficult as it sounds.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah, and if I remember from my ICS NIMS class, it’s a task force cuz there’s multiple parties involved and it’s not a strike team with all the same resources involved affecting the problem.
Mike O’Connell:
That is correct. Yes, that’s exactly right.
Brad Caruso:
I paid attention to my 36 hours of ICS.
Mike O’Connell:
Good for you.
Brad Caruso:
For those out there that haven’t taken ICS, it’s, it’s not as fun as it sounds.
Mike O’Connell:
<laugh>. Well, and to just expound a little bit more on the wildfire issue, I think we’re rapidly waking up in California to the notion that the wildfire is not a problem for the fire department to solve. And both the state agency, which is Cal Fire and the local fire departments, like I said, their job is to do their best to suppress fires once they start. Their job isn’t to go out to people’s homes and help them retrofit their homes to make them more resilient against wildfire. They may inspect a fuel modification zone but they don’t perform the work. So for the longest time I think historically we just kind of abandoned the solution to the fire department. He said, well it’s wildfire, it’s the fire department’s problem. And I think we’ve very, very quickly woken up in California to the fact that that is not true.
Mike O’Connell:
And having said that, it turns out that wildfire behaves differently in different regions of the state when it’s a really, really important thing in our area. It’s not as important in, for example, the Sierras. In the Sierras, the issue is there’s way too much stuff to burn up there. The forests are not healthy, they’re overgrown, there’s a lot of dead and dying trees and it’s what we call a fuels problem. Well in Southern California it’s not a fuels problem, it’s a wind problem and it’s an ignition problem. So we have probably, I would say something on the order of 10,000 times the number of ignitions now in 2022 that occurred historically when these ecosystems were evolving and it’s because there roadsides everywhere and there are, you know, people doing careless things everywhere and these ignitions happen and when you combine ignitions and wind you get catastrophe. And that’s what we have in Southern California. So our challenge is much more difficult than, well if we just managed our fuel loads better, we would be okay. That just doesn’t apply here.
Dave Raetz:
And I think it’s really interesting Mike, cuz we just connected a whole bunch of things. You’re talking about urban edges that we talked about the human population and how they affect things. Well you talk about fuel loads, we could have a fire that burns everything in this one area. We’ll get a little bit of rain and mustard comes back and it literally could burn again the next year and do it again within one season. And so you can kind of see how all these things start to fit together and really are connected to each other. And that’s, that’s why we focus on all of them cuz they’re all components that, you know, one thing leads to another, to another, to another.
Brad Caruso:
I think too, like just looking at the overall effort, I mean your word partnership and your word, everybody has skin in the game on this I think is just such an important concept and why I love just being able to share your message and talk about it a little bit further. I mean I, I’ve heard stories of someone, you know, kids playing with a smoke bomb and it, you know, destroys 20,000 acres cuz they throw it out the window and it’s like if all you did was not do that, but once you did it, you know, with the wind and the dryness and the the fuel load and all the brush and stuff everywhere, you can’t stop it. You know, so the fire department tries to stop it, but all you can do is mitigate it or push it or do something you can’t stop it.
Dave Raetz:
We actually have a volunteer program called Firewatch and when we have predictable winds in Southern California that are known as Santa Ana winds and they usually come in the fall, they’ve been, they’ve been expending their seasonality over the years. But when we know that there’s gonna be high winds, low humidity, high temperatures, it’s what’s called a red flag alert it from the weather service. We actually deploy volunteers., they’re called our fire watch volunteers, throughout the county to very select roadside edges or urban edges where we know there’s been a historical problem with ignition sources. And we also know that the spread with the wind will turn into a, what’s called a conflagration and it basically means a really gigantic wildfire event. And so you have the fuel loads that, it just explodes very quickly and turns into a really serious problem. And that was our first real attempt to try to intervene with the ignition versus wind versus fuel load kind of situation. And we’ve been doing that for
Mike O’Connell:
2000 October, 2007 was when we deployed Firewatch <That’s right>. For the first time. So it’s actually been 15 years we’ve been working on that. <Yeah> And it’s interesting cuz people say, how do you know it works? And it, it’s really, really hard to prove a negative. Right Joe? I mean you you have a tough time with that. <Yeah.> But, but at the same time we know that it has made a difference because the community is engaged. I’m confident that there are fewer ignitions as a result of Firewatch, certainly fewer intentional ignitions like from arson.
Dave Raetz:
Well I know for a fact that our Firewatch people have reported like down power lines and uh, other things during these wind events that very easily could have turned into something really badly and, and it they’ve been handled. So I’m gonna claim some success on it <laugh>.
Joe Cover:
Yeah, absolutely. Well when, when you take a look actually though at, at kind of fire maps and uh, in significant fires over the last number of years and you consider San Diego County, Los Angeles County and Orange County, right? Orange County seems, and and maybe I’m completely wrong on this, but it feels at least like you have far less loss of life structure and, and plants and, and acreage when you talk about Orange County. And I don’t know if that’s some combination of the way that we’re kind of niche between different freeways that lead the Cleveland National Forest to be a little bit more defensible or if there’s just less fuel like there are in the sierras, like you mentioned before, if there’s like a, a micro climate within our Mediterranean climate that helps that out or if it’s literally just all the efforts that you guys are putting in.
Mike O’Connell:
It may very well be circumstantial in the sense that in an area like San Diego is so much larger than Orange County that just they’re gonna have more fires. When you look at the size of the fires in proportion to the amount of open space that’s there, we pretty much are up there with them in terms of the frequency, we also are getting fires as frequently as they are in the same areas. And so our problem is smaller in scale, but it’s still the same problem.
Brad Caruso:
And how does, just thinking about other parties involved when it comes to like the federal and state government perspective, like is it, are you involved with them, not involved with them? Is there actions they take that are good actions they take that are bad?
Mike O’Connell:
Yeah, thanks Brad. We are involved with, for example, the federal agency that we work with most closely is the Forest Service because of the large shared boundary with the Cleveland National Forest. And they do their best to steward their lands as well and prevent wildfires. They’ve got a big initiative they’re working on right now to try to prevent a wildfire ignitions along roadsides that go through the Cleveland National Forest. And we, you know, are excited about and encourage that they participate in this coast working group at the state level, up until recently, most of the responsibility for wildfire was vested with Cal Fire, which is the very, very large agency it’s called, called the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection or Cal Fire. But recently, because the catastrophic wildfires have gotten so big and so frequent and so statewide, the state has launched a, a task force of agency executives and administrative appointees and they are really, really aggressively looking at how to attack these problems at the regional level.
Mike O’Connell:
I’m very happy to see that they’ve recognized that there are regional differences in how fires behave. And so they’re starting to look at how to invest in the kind of things we need down here in Southern California that may be very different from the central coast or maybe very different from Northern California. So I think it’s taken an unfortunate size of, of catastrophe in order to get people’s attention, but everyone’s on it now. It’s very similar to what happened in Florida in the 1990s when they had a hurricane. Andrew came through and just woke everyone up and said, Hurricanes are gonna just wipe everything out if we don’t figure out how to be ready for them and be more resilient. We have an advantage though that they don’t, in that we can actually prevent a wildfire and they can’t prevent a hurricane. And so also what’s coming up now more and more is this idea of managing fire better and preventing it in areas where it’s too frequent and actually encouraging it in areas where it hasn’t been, you know, some of the areas in the Sierras are in the condition they’re in because fire was eliminated from those areas and it actually allowed the habitats to become too dense.
Mike O’Connell:
And so, you know, in some areas, too much fire in some areas, too little fire. But the state is starting to recognize that and we were really happy about that.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah, that’s great to hear. And you know, we keep talking about it, but just the complexity of this problem and of the work that you’re doing and how involved and how many people have to be involved is definitely a challenge. And, and just the fact that you mentioned that, you know, everyone’s kind of on the same side of solving set issue or trying to prevent set issue, it certainly leads to a better future for all of us, including the land that you manage. You know, I guess just thinking about your organization and might always like to do some call it action, either what can the public do to support you or just in general, if I’m a, you know, civilian in a neighboring community, what can I do to help?
Dave Raetz:
IRC has a very large volunteer program that allows people to, you could either come as a general public and volunteer to help out with a, an activity or pulling weeds or, or planting or something like that. Or we have volunteerism for, we have a large core group that are highly trained. They actually wear uniforms that identify them as part of our organization and or the partner organizations we’re working with. The Firewatch volunteers are part of that, they’re one component of the volunteer program, but we have other volunteers that are working at our farm. We have the other volunteers that are docents that are leading recreational and interpretive activities and all kinds of stuff. We have volunteers that monitor, you know, rafter nest and things like that, which are, you know, birds of prey. So we have a wide variety of volunteer opportunities and the way to get involved in that, if you go to the Irvine Ranch Conservancy website, which is irconservancy.org, there’s volunteer information on all of those different categories there that you can then click on and read about them.
Dave Raetz:
We also host another website that’s called letsgooutside.org, and it encompasses kind of the land in a bunch of the partners and stuff. And there’s a volunteer tab at the top of that website too that has the same things. And if you’re really serious at volunteering with us, you would fill out an interest form there and it would then come into our volunteer system and process that would allow us to engage you in an orientation and then bring you into the system and figure out what you wanna do and how you fit with our organizations. Volunteerism is a really big thing for us. The other way to kind of get involved besides volunteerism is, you know, the community donates to us all the time and including the volunteers. We have a couple of ways of doing that. We actually have a, a donate by cell phone system where you could actually text IRC to 5 6 5 1 2 and it’ll give you options on how you can donate to our organization.
Dave Raetz:
Some people just like to mail us checks, that works as well. Or if you go to our website, there’s a donate tab on that too that, that will take you to the same system. We are a nonprofit 501c3. We do do fundraising. Our main business is actually contract work with different agencies and things like, that’s really how we sustain ourself. But we do accept donations all the time and, and we apply it to mission work or like we, we, the last big fires we had, we had a lot of community donations to help support us and we lost, uh, most of our farm and the irrigation system and that kind of stuff. So most of those donations are going to replacing the irrigation system there. And that was community support in a pretty big way. So we’re always open for donations.
Brad Caruso:
Awesome. Well thank you for sharing that. Thank you guys are doing a great job.
Joe Cover:
We, we’ve been lucky enough actually as an audit team to go on in a trail ride with Dave into the back country and see some of the areas that not others can. So we’ve been very, very lucky to be able to work with you guys. And me personally as Brad knows, I mean, I, I’m probably an over user to be honest of the open space, at least as my wife would say, but I wish I could out there more to be honest. But it’s amazing having what we have here in Orange County and my whole family has benefited hugely by the work you guys do. So we definitely appreciate it.
Mike O’Connell:
Fantastic. And we’re so glad that you’re part of that community. And in fact, what I always say, if you think about the size of this landscape, it’s basically like having a national park in
your backyard. It’s actually larger than a number of well known national parks in, uh, Carlsbad, Caverns and Pinnacles and several other national parks that are well known. This area is bigger than that, but it’s owned by local governments and we should take care of it as well as we do in a national park and we should revere it. And the most important thing is if you live in this area, you don’t have to get a plane ticket to go visit it. You can sleep in your own bed and having it spectacular hike like you would do at a national park, but then you get to go home and sleep in your own bed. We’re really fortunate to have these lands near us, but they won’t stay this way if we don’t all work together to take care of them and make sure they’re resilient, not just now, but for future generations. So that’s why we exist and that’s why our job will never be done.
Dave Raetz:
We want the community to not be a user, but be a contributor.
Brad Caruso:
No doubt. Appreciate your guys time spending with us this afternoon and just sharing a lot of that insight to my friends out there in the public. Remember that conservation is everybody’s effort from everything from trash disposal to not being ignorant with fire because fire’s dangerous and it’s everybody’s effort to protect our planet and to protect your community and your environment. Just wanna make sure that everyone listens to this. Here’s it and if you have any questions, reach out to Dave or Mike. They certainly have a ton of insight. Do you wanna get involved? Check out their website, check out what they do. Certainly a lot of great work going on. Your organization has definitely had a significant impact on your community. Greatly appreciate your guys spending the time with us today.
Mike O’Connell:
Thank you Brad. We really appreciate it and we look forward to talking with you again.
