Wilder than Wild: Fire, Forests, and the Future, screens May 21st, 7PM, at the Brower Center (2150 Allston Way, Berkeley) in a Bay Area premiere followed by a panel and Q & A with Berkeley City Councilmember Kate Harrison, UC Berkeley fire scientist Scott Stephens, Berkeley firefighter Mike Shuken, and filmmakers Kevin White and Stephen Most.
According to Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott, "We are experiencing now the fires of the future." Wilder than Wild, an hour-long documentary, reveals how fuel build-up and climate change have exposed Western wildlands to large, high intensity wildfires, while greenhouse gases released from these fires accelerate climate change. This vicious cycle jeopardizes our forests and affects us all with extreme weather and more wildfires, some of which are now entering highly populated wildland-urban areas. Filmmaker Kevin White takes us on a journey from the Rim Fire of 2013, which burned 257,000 acres in the central Sierra, to the wine country wildfires of 2017, which destroyed 9,000 buildings and killed 44 people. Along the way, we learn how the proactive use of prescribed fire can reduce reliance on reactive fire suppression, and we meet stakeholder groups working with scientists and innovative resource managers to build consensus on how to restore and manage the lands we love and depend on.
The "fires of the future" include urban wildfires, as Wilder than Wild shows in a sequence on the destruction of thousands of homes in Santa Rosa last October. "Things are changing," says Berkeley firefighter Mike Shuken, "and if we don't change as well, we're going to see more subdivisions become annihilated in these types of fires." Shuken will speak on a panel following the Brower Center screening of Wilder than Wild along with Berkeley City Councilmember Kate Harrison, UC Berkeley fire scientist Scott Stephens, and producers Kevin White and Stephen Most.
Tickets can be purchased here at Eventbrite for $15 (plus a small handling fee).
For more information, contact Stephen Most at smost@earthlink.net
or Kevin White at Kevin@filmmakerscollaborative.org
