The Burn Scar: Bonus Episode
Listen to a behind-the-scenes conversation with The Burn Scar’s producer Ariel Lavery and The Modern West host Melodie Edwards. Ariel says the idea for the series came to her in the shower. “I just needed to record this. I just needed to somehow remember the feelings of visiting the site, being there.”
This time on The Modern West, we get an intimate look behind-the-scenes at the making of the our latest season, The Burn Scar. It’s an interview with the producer, Ariel Lavery, in which she discusses what drove her to create this series, the impacts the Marshall Fire had on her and her family, and the implications this wildfire carries, beginning with what makes the Marshall Fire in particular, so unusual.
ARIEL LAVERY: This fire was the very first time we had ever seen an urban wildfire in Colorado. Colorado had never seen anything like this before. People who had lived here for a long time were well acquainted with wildfire in concept only or just from images that they saw through the media. And suddenly, there was a wildfire that was burning through suburban neighborhoods in a very heavily populated area of the Front Range.
Seeing those images on the television screens, where I saw it from my hotel room in the middle of Kansas, was also just incredibly arresting. The media grabbed onto it right away because these images were so remarkable and disturbing to see. These were homes in an affluent area, large homes, people who had never imagined that they would be experiencing something like this. Because this community was an affluent community, they ended up being pretty well connected, based on my own observations and the observations of other experts that I've talked to. And even though most people in the community were severely underinsured, I think the community came together in a way that helped protect everyone, helped keep lawsuits and claims against insurance companies down and helped keep insurance companies accountable.
MELODIE EDWARDS: In episode one, your parents are evacuating and you're in the hotel, and kind of stuck there because of a freak ice storm. I wonder if you can talk just a little bit about that combination and what that felt like to your family, in that moment?
AL: There was a realization, the day after we all woke up and we knew that my parents’ house was gone, we knew that they were now refugees. My husband and I had a conversation, not long after that, about the weather that was moving through where we were in Columbia, Missouri, that we should probably stay put, because if we were gonna get on the road, we might be facing some severe weather that could put us at risk. So I was thinking, ‘okay, my parents are staying in their friend's basement in Boulder, we are facing the choice of having to stay in this hotel room.’ And although we were safe, it definitely brought my mind to an imagining of the future, thinking, ‘is this kind of what I need to prepare for, to be experiencing more and more? Is this what it's going to feel like to be a climate refugee?’
I know that people all over the world are going to have different experiences of climate change, and what the effects of climate change are on their community. But in this country, we're probably going to be seeing people having to live out of their cars, be more mobile, be more specific in their choices about where they live – not because it's a pretty area, or because they like the people that are there – but they're going to have to be thinking about what the weather conditions and what the seasonal conditions are going to be.
ME: I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about why it feels like it was important to share your family's experience of surviving the Marshall Fire? Why was that was important to share with the world?
AL: Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, like, ‘Why do I get to be the one that's privileged enough to be able to put a series like this together.?’ And I think, number one, I feel a responsibility to educate myself and to share what I know and what I learned with as many people as possible. There's so much sort of mis-education or just non-education, people just don't know what climate change could and does look like, and how we can prevent it, and what we can do in our daily lives to try to take action against it.
Something else I'm just thinking about right now is, I know climate change is an unpopular subject, and I think that one of the things I haven't heard a lot of is how human-caused climate change is affecting families and personal relationships. So this is an opportunity to normalize some of those conversations a little bit, and make it okay for people to start addressing these things in their families.
ME: I think one of the parts of the series that affected me the most is when you talk about being homesick for a place that is gone.
AL: The feeling that you're talking about is called solastalgia, and it was a term that was coined by Glen Albrecht who's an Australian philosopher. He came up with this term, thinking a lot about small communities in Appalachia who witnessed their mountaintops destroyed for mining, which also provided their main source of income eventually – those communities were sort of reorganized around the industry. But it doesn't mean that those people were any less sad or affected to see their environments destroyed that way.
When I visited the site with my mom, I noticed that the house finches were still there singing their song, our neighborhood and the city of Louisville is in the flight path of DIA traffic, so we would always hear the jet planes roaring overhead – that was still there when the equipment, the front loaders, and whatever cleanup crews were around the neighborhood were quiet for a second. It was a really strange feeling because I felt like I was in a place I'd never seen before. The smell, I'd never smelled anything like that at my childhood home before. But then I suddenly recognized where I was because of the sounds. That was a really strange feeling. It wasn't until maybe a year later that I came across the term solastalgia, and I immediately was brought back to that moment and thinking, ‘this is describing what that experience is, it's got to be.’ I think it's an important term to understand and to start using in our common parlance, because probably more people are going to be experiencing things like this as the climate changes so quickly.
ME: What are some of the hard decisions that your family has been forced to make as you've been recovering from losing your home in this fire?
AL: The first decision my parents had to make was where they were going to live.
Something that comes up later in this series is that there were all these code changes in Louisville, which were actually deterring my mom from rebuilding because she thought, ‘Well, number one, I don't know anything about coming back from something like this and building a new house.’ These new green codes in Louisville, she knew even less about. My dad has Lewy Body dementia, so my mom is his caretaker. She started going back and forth about whether or not they should move into senior living. Eventually, they decided to move in because of my dad's condition and Mom thought it would probably be better for him to be in that community in a place where he would likely be safer and they would be taking care of him, in terms of meals and cleaning help and things like that. And then they would also be part of this community of retirees. She was pretty set on, ‘maybe we'll just be living in this senior living facility for a long time.’ But the other twist to all of this is that insurance – depending on your insurance, you can't always do that – you can't just accept the payout money that they give you, and then choose to live on that. Even if you're in the last few decades of your life and you can clearly use this money to just live out the rest of your days.
ME: Has there been any decisions that you've had to make that maybe have led to some positive aspects of the story?
AL: It certainly brought me and my mom closer. When I was younger, she was working all the time. She was an anesthesiologist when I was little, so she was doing 60-80 hour workweeks, and I saw her very rarely. My main caretaker was my dad. This whole tragedy has actually in a strange way, I think, yielded a really nice chance for me and my mom to reconnect and to make something together. One thing I've been thinking about with my mom a lot is her role. You know, I watched my mom work her butt off. That taught me a lot, but I don't think I really realized that because she never said it outright. She was obviously an important provider to a lot of people, every person she's helped in the operating room, she's touched their lives. But that feels somewhat indirect, and this is the very first time she's ever had her voice at the forefront of a story like this.
ME: Can you talk just a little bit about the process of making a podcast.
AL: I had actually been recording Zoom conversations with my parents for a while because when my dad was first diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia, I thought, ‘I need to document.’ I just really liked documenting things, I have a pretty bad memory, so documenting things kind of helps me in that sense. So I was already recording Zoom audio, and then when this fire happened, after I had visited the site the first time, I thought, ‘I really should probably pitch this.’ And I immediately thought about you, and I thought about The Modern West, and the rest is history.
I suppose once you know you're producing a series, then you just record everything you possibly can, so I started recording phone conversations. I actually did mail my mom a Zoom recorder for her to learn how to use. Every time I was out there over the last two years, I was pulling out my phone when she would say something significant, and I'd say, ‘Say that again!’ It's a little bit cumbersome to have to record one's life in that way, but again, it was that sense of responsibility for documenting all of this.
ME: I think those are my questions, but is there other aspects of just creating this podcast, and why you felt like you needed to do it, that I didn't ask that you'd want to add?
AL: Something that I've really thought about a lot throughout the entire process and before starting to work on the production for this series, is how institutions are already setting us up to make decisions that are not climate friendly. Why is it that most insurance companies, when you get a payout (and this is the way that the tax system works, too), f you've lost your home in a wildfire or any disaster event, why is it that you can't put that money towards a lifestyle that's a little bit greener? Now, if you want to downsize, maybe you don't want to buy a new home or build a new home or contribute in that way, maybe you want to reinvent your life. I just feel like the systems and the institutions in place create a real lack of creativity for victims.