My wife grew up in Santa Rosa, California, and her best friend was a woman named Joy Durand who lived on the northeast outskirts of town. At midnight on the evening of October 8, 2017, Joy's telephone rang. The voice said simply, "You must evacuate now. You don't have time to pack. Fire is coming." Joy gathered her parents and her six-year-old son, and they hurried outside. The wildfire, which at that point was just over the ridge from Joy's house, sounded like a jet engine going at full throttle. The family got in their car, drove away, and within minutes, their home had burned to the ground, incinerated by the blowtorch flames of the Tubbs Fire.
我的妻子在加利福尼亚州圣罗莎长大 她最好的朋友是一位 名叫乔伊·杜兰德的女人 她住在城镇的东北郊。 2017年10月8日晚半夜, 乔伊的电话响了。 那声音简单地说: “你现在必须撤离。 你没有时间收拾行李。 火来了。” 乔伊聚集了她 的父母和她六岁的儿子, 他们急忙跑出去。 野火当时就在乔伊家的山脊上, 听起来就像喷气发动机全速运转。 一家人上了车,开走了, 几分钟之内,他们的家就被烧毁了, 被塔布斯大火的喷灯火焰焚烧。
All night long, my wife got texts and messages from friends and family, and while we didn’t know the whole situation, it was clear that a disaster was unfolding in her hometown. No one thought that fire could penetrate so deeply into the city. But on that evening, 22 people lost their lives and over five thousand homes and structures were destroyed.
整个晚上,我的妻子都收到朋友 和家人发来的短信和消息, 虽然我们不知道整个情况, 很明显,她的家乡 正在发生一场灾难。 谁也没想到, 大火能够深入城市如此之深。 但就在那天晚上, 22人丧生 五千多座房屋和建筑被毁。
Wildfire is a large and growing challenge to the West and to the world. What happened in Santa Rosa is becoming all too common. Paradise in 2018, Australia in 2020, Europe in 2022. And fire experts say that we should get ready for more Santa Rosas because it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
野火对西方和世界来说 是一个巨大且日益严峻的挑战。 圣罗莎发生的事情变得司空见惯。 2018 年天堂, 2020 年澳大利亚, 2022 年欧洲。 消防专家表示 我们应该为更多的圣罗莎做好准备 因为在好转之前情况 可能会变得更糟。
Now beyond the major costs in lives and property and the economy, there's also a big carbon impact to wildfire. In fact, the additional carbon from California's 2020 wildfires was greater than the carbon that Californians had worked so hard to save over the previous two decades.
现在超出了主要成本 在生命、财产和经济方面, 野火也会产生很大的碳影响。 事实上,2020 年加州 山火产生的额外碳 大于碳 加州人付出了如此多的努力来拯救 在过去的二十年里。
The largest fires are called megafires. These are the ones that burn over 100,000 acres with the intensity that can threaten aquifers and biodiversity, and even cause forest conversion, in which trees are so damaged that they just don't grow back. These fires are getting worse as well. In fact, eight of the ten largest megafires in California history have happened over just the last five years.
最大的火灾称为特大火灾。 这些是烧毁面积 超过 100,000 英亩的 其强度可能威胁到含水层 和生物多样性, 甚至导致森林转变, 树木受到严重破坏, 无法再生长。 这些火灾也变得越来越严重。 事实上,加州历史上 十大特大火灾中的八场 就在过去五年里发生的事情。
Many people feel overwhelmed by this situation. I know I did. So two years ago, working with great people, I closed a chapter of my life in aerospace and I started a new journey to see if I could understand the wildfire crisis better and what could be done about it. I started working with leaders from firefighting and philanthropy, entrepreneurship, science, tribal communities, and together we cofounded an organization called Megafire Action, whose sole purpose is to solve the megafire crisis.
许多人对这种情况感到不知所措。 我知道我做到了。 所以两年前, 和伟大的人一起工作, 我在航空航天领域结束了人生的篇章 我开始了新的旅程 看看我是否能更好地 理解野火危机 以及对此可以采取什么措施。 我开始与消防 和慈善界的领导者合作, 创业、科学、部落社区、 我们共同创立了一个名为 “Megafire Action”的组织, 其唯一目的是解决特大火灾危机。
And I've come to believe that if we take a holistic approach, we have an opportunity to establish a new relationship with fire, to work safely with fire and potentially to solve this wicked problem. The path forward has three solutions. The first is fire-adapted communities, the second is resilient landscapes and the third is innovative fire management.
我开始相信, 如果我们采取整体方法, 我们有机会与火建立新的关系, 安全用火工作 并有可能解决这个棘手的问题。 前进的道路有三个解决方案。 首先是适应火灾的社区, 第二个是有弹性的景观 三是创新消防管理。
So for the first, fire-adapted communities, what we need to do is to clear the brush and the vegetation from homes, from the immediate proximity of homes. Next, we need to use fire-resistant materials in the homes and the roofs. And then the third thing is to, where possible, protect against embers, flying embers, by protecting the home from openings like your air vents and your chimneys. Now communities have a strong shared interest to perform this work along the exterior boundary of the community because it reduces the chance that fire will penetrate deeply into the city, as it did in Santa Rosa.
因此,对于第一个适应火灾的社区, 我们需要做的是清除家里 的灌木丛和植被, 离家很近。 接下来我们需要使用耐火材料 在房屋和屋顶上。 然后第三件事是,在可能的情况下, 防止余烬、飞扬的余烬, 保护房屋免受通风口 和烟囱等开口的影响。 现在社区有强烈的共同利益 沿着社区的外部边界进行这项工作 因为它减少了机会 大火将深入城市, 就像在圣罗莎那样。
The second solution is resilient landscapes. And if you take one lesson from this talk, it's this. In order to solve the megafire crisis, we need to bring our western landscapes back into a healthy balance by reducing the overgrown brush and trees in the wildlands and the forest. Here we're finally starting to take to heart the wisdom of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who knew that fire was a natural part of the landscape and who introduced low-intensity fire, good fire, on a regular basis, at the right times. When this is done well, as around the communities of South Lake Tahoe, then it can actually divert a megafire as bad as the one that they experienced in 2021. It can also potentially prevent a megafire from occurring, which is what some people think happened in Napa of last year.
第二个解决方案是弹性景观。 如果你从这次演讲中 学到了一个教训,那就是这个。 为了解决特大火灾危机, 我们需要让西部景观恢复健康平衡 减少荒地和森林中杂草丛生 的灌木丛和树木。 在这里,我们终于 开始将智慧铭记于心 美洲原住民 谁知道火是景观的自然组成部分 并定期引入低强度火、强火, 在正确的时间。 当这件事做得好时, 和南太浩湖的社区一样, 那么它实际上可以转移大火 就像他们在 2021 年 经历的一样糟糕。 它还可以潜在地 防止特大火灾的发生, 有些人认为这就是 去年纳帕发生的事情。
But the scale of this challenge is huge. There are hundreds of millions of acres of wildland in the American forests. The Forest Service hopes to reduce the risk on 50 million high-priority acres over the next ten years. But the challenge is that they're only accomplishing a few million acres a year. And so we're not at the pace or scale that we need to do to address this challenge. So what do we need to do?
但这一挑战的规模是巨大的。 美国森林中有数亿英亩的荒地。 林务局希望降低风险 未来十年将占地 5000 万英亩。 但挑战在于他们每年 只能完成几百万英亩的种植面积。 所以我们还没有达到 这样的速度或规模 我们需要采取行动来应对这一挑战。 那么我们需要做什么呢?
Well, the first thing that we need to do is to essentially hire, train and retain many more workers who will be doing the hard work of defusing the time bombs inside our western forests. We need to pay them well. We need to support them with full-time work and we need to protect them from liability where necessary.
好吧,我们需要做的第一件事 本质上是雇佣、 培训和留住更多的工人 谁将承担拆除定时炸弹的艰巨工作 在我们西部的森林里。 我们需要给他们丰厚的报酬。 我们需要用全职工作来支持他们 我们需要在必要时 保护他们免于承担责任。
The next thing we need to do is to empower them with innovation. And right now there are an incredible number of great companies and organizations that are working to bring this innovation to reality. Just one of these companies is called BurnBot, and what they're hoping to do is to make controlled burns safer and faster. They're going to establish a burned perimeter around an area with the remotely piloted rover and then they can bring a drone into the middle of it, drop some fire into it and burn that interior area safely. It's a brilliant but a simple idea. And I think we're going to need a lot more of this kind of innovation if we're going to scale up to the to the size of the problem that we have before us.
我们接下来要做的 就是赋予他们创新能力。 现在有数量惊人的伟大公司 以及致力于将这 一创新变为现实的组织。 其中一家公司 叫做 BurnBot, 以及他们希望做什么 是为了使受控烧伤更安全、更快。 他们将在一个区域周围建立 一个烧毁的边界 与遥控漫游车 然后他们可以把无人机带到中间, 将一些火放入其中并 安全地烧毁内部区域。 这是一个绝妙但简单的想法。 我认为我们将需要更多此类创新 如果我们要扩大到问题的规模 摆在我们面前的。
Now the first two solutions that I've talked to you about are pretty well agreed. The third one, innovative fire management, is somewhat more controversial, but I think it offers huge potential to address and solve the wildfire problem. What we need is innovation and technology that can rapidly detect and assess fire and then quickly put it out when it gets bad. And here, speed is paramount, because when you're in the worst kind of fire days -- these are the hottest, driest and windiest fire days -- if you can't bring fire management resources to a fire very quickly, then it is likely that you won't be able to contain that fire.
现在我和你讨论的前两个解决方案 非常同意。 第三个是创新 的消防管理,争议较大, 但我认为它为应对和解决野火 问题提供了巨大的潜力。 我们需要的是能够快速检测 和评估火灾的创新和技术 然后当它变坏时迅速将其熄灭。 在这里,速度至关重要, 因为当你正处于 火灾最严重的日子里—— 这些是最热、最干燥、 风最大的火灾日—— 如果你不能很快将 消防管理资源带到火场, 那么你很可能无法控制火势。
Here we need to look at the example of the Quick Reaction Force of Southern California, which is really designed in some ways for these toughest days. The QRF is a public-private partnership, which now has three Chinook helicopters. These are the big ones with the two rotors on the top. And each of them can drop up to 3000 gallons of water on a fire, day or night, and they can do it very precisely. They can also refill up to six times an hour so they can bring a lot of mass to the problem. Over the course of two years of demonstrations, the QRF has demonstrated that this model has great potential, that, in fact, if you can bring a lot of fire management resource to a fire very quickly, you can get on top of fires before they get big and unmanageable. And this opens up an exciting potential future.
这里我们需要看一下例子 南加州快速反应部队, 它在某些方面确实是为 这些最艰难的日子而设计的。 QRF 是一个公私合作伙伴关系, 现在拥有三架支奴干直升机。 这些是顶部有两个转子的大转子。 每个可以向火中 喷射 3000 加仑的水, 白天或晚上, 他们可以非常精确地做到这一点。 它们每小时最多可补充六次 所以他们可以 给问题带来很大的影响。 在两年的示威活动中, QRF 证明了该模型具有 巨大的潜力, 那其实如果你能带大量的消防资源 很快就会着火, 您可以在火势变得更大 且难以控制之前将其扑灭。 这开启了一个令人兴奋的潜在未来。
Imagine this model with a series of larger drone vehicles distributed across the landscape in higher-fire-risk areas. Imagine these vehicles positioned periodically along utility lines or in areas of higher fire-risk deep in the forest. Such a distributed network, if connected to the right sensor system, could offer a future in which we are able to really put out fires on the worst fire days, and even in remote communities. Companies like Rain and Joby Aviation are working on this vision today.
想象一下这个模型 有一系列更大的无人机 分布在火灾风险较高的地区。 想象一下这些车辆周期性定位 沿着公用事业线 或森林深处火灾风险较高的地区。 这样的分布式网络, 如果连接到正确的传感器系统, 可以提供未来 我们能够真正扑灭火灾 在火灾最严重的日子, 甚至在偏远社区。 Rain 和 Joby Aviation 等公司 目前正在努力实现这一愿景。
The sensor system will also be very important for the resolution of this problem. The system -- which will entail both ground-based, aerial and space-based platforms -- won't be important just because we're going to be able to see and detect fire where and when it pops up, but also because it'll enable us to differentiate between good and bad fire, low-intensity fire and high-intensity fire, which is very important because we need more lower-intensity fire on the landscape to rejuvenate our forests, just as much as we need to know where and when fire risk is becoming higher intensity.
传感器系统也将非常重要 为了解决这个问题。 该系统将需要 地面、空中和天基平台—— 不会仅仅因为 我们能够看到而变得重要 并检测火灾发生的地点和时间, 还因为它将使我们能够 区分好火和坏火, 低烈度火灾和高烈度火灾, 这非常重要,因为我们需要 在景观上进行更多低强度的火灾 使我们的森林恢复活力, 正如我们需要知道的那样 火灾风险变得更高的地点和时间。
Fire is a prism through which we can see the future of humanity's relationship with natural systems. Working together and supported by technology, we can build a world in which communities are resilient to wildfire and in which forests are brought back into a healthy balance. Ultimately, we can build a future, in which we don't just manage fire to protect human life and property, but also to protect the biosphere for global carbon emissions and for biodiversity. Ultimately, we need to become the crew of Spaceship Earth. So let's get to work. Let's learn from fire and let's build a resilient, sustainable future.
火是一面棱镜, 通过它我们可以看到未来 人类与自然系统的关系。 共同努力并以技术为支持, 我们可以建设一个社区 能够抵御野火的世界 并使森林恢复健康平衡。 最终,我们可以建设一个未来, 我们管理火灾不仅是为了 保护人类生命和财产, 还要保护生物圈,减少全球碳排放 以及生物多样性。 最终,我们需要成为 地球号宇宙飞船的船员。 那么让我们开始工作吧。 让我们从火中学习 让我们建设一个有弹性、 可持续的未来。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
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