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.
我太太在加州的聖羅莎長大, 她最好的朋友喬伊‧杜蘭 住在小鎮東北的郊區。 2017 年十月八日半夜, 喬伊的電話響了。 電話中的聲音就只是說: 「你現在必須要撤離。 沒有時間打包。 大火燒過來了。」 喬伊叫醒她的父母 和六歲兒子,衝到屋外, 那時,野火已經燒到 離喬伊屋不遠的山脊上, 聲音聽起來像是 全速運轉的噴射引擎。 這家人馬上開車離開, 在幾分鐘之內, 他們的家就完全燒毀, 被塔布斯大火的高溫烈焰燒為灰燼。
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.
整晚,我太太不斷收到 來自家人朋友的訊息, 雖然我們不清楚整個狀況, 但很顯然她的家鄉 正處在一場災難中。 沒有人料到,大火能 如此深入到城市中。 但那晚, 二十二人喪命, 超過五千間房子和建物被摧毀。
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.
野火是個巨大且越來越大的挑戰, 對西方和對全世界都是如此。 聖羅莎的遭遇開始變得太過常見。 2018 年發生在天堂鎮, 2020 年發生在澳洲, 2022 年發生在歐洲。 大火專家說,我們要準備面對 更多像聖羅莎的狀況,因為狀況 在好轉之前很可能會變得更糟。
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.
除了付出巨大的成本,包括生命、 財產,和經濟, 野火還會帶來重大的碳衝擊。 事實上,2020 年加州野火 所產生的額外碳量 超過了 加州在過去二十年間相當努力 節約下來的量。
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.
最大型的火災稱為超級大火。 指的是會燒掉超過 十萬英畝面積的大火, 強度會威脅到含水層和生物多樣性, 甚至可能造成森林轉換, 也就是樹木受損太嚴重, 不可能再長回來。 這些火災也變得越來嚴重,事實上, 加州史上最大的 超級大火,十次中有八次 都發生在過去五年間。
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.
這個情況讓許多人不知所措。 我知道我是其一。 所以,兩年前, 我和很出色的人合作, 我結束了我在航空業的職涯, 展開全新的旅程, 想看看 我是否能更了解野火危機, 以及可以做些什麼。 我開始和各界領袖合作,包括消防、 慈善、企業家精神、科學、 部落社區等領域, 我們共同創立了一個組織, 叫做「超級大火行動」, 目標就是要解決超級大火危機。
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.
我漸漸相信,如果我們能 採取一種全面性的方法, 我們就有機會可以 和大火建立新的關係, 安全地處理大火, 且有可能可以解決這個棘手的問題。 邁向未來,有三個解決方案。 第一個是適應火災的社區; 第二個是有韌性的地景; 第三個是創新火災管理。
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.
所以,先談第一個, 適應火災的社區, 我們要做的是清除灌木和植被, 家中不要有, 家附近不要有。 接著,我們得要使用 防火材料, 家中和屋頂都要用。 第三,在有可能的範圍內, 針對飛灰餘燼做好保護措施, 做法是保護好家中的 對外開口,比如通風口和煙囪。 社區有很強大的共同利益, 因此可以沿著社區的外邊界 進行這項工作,因為, 這樣做能減少大火 深入到城市中的機會, 以免步上聖羅莎的後塵。
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.
第二個解決方案是 有韌性的地景,如果你只能從 這場演說學到一課,就是它。 為了解決超級大火危機,我們必須要 將我們西方的地景 帶回到健康的平衡點上, 做法是減少在荒野和森林中過度 生長的灌木和樹木。 在這方面,我們終於開始將 美洲原住民的智慧銘記在心, 原住民知道火是地景中 很自然的一部分, 他們會製造低強度的 火災,好的火災, 定期在適當的時機這麼做。 如果做得好, 就像南太浩湖社區附近所做的那樣, 就可以引導超級大火轉向, 包括他們在 2021 年 經歷的嚴重超級大火。 這麼做也可能可以 預防超級大火發生, 有些人認為去年的納帕 就是這麼一回事。
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?
但這個難題的規模很巨大, 美國森林就包含數億英畝的荒野。 國家森林局希望在接下來 十年間能夠針對最高優先的 五千萬英畝來減少風險。 但難題在於他們一年 只能完成幾百萬英畝。 處理這個難題所需要的步調 和規模,我們都還達不到。 那我們需要做什麼? 我們需要做的第一件事
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.
是實際上去僱用、訓練, 和留住更多工作者, 他們要做的艱鉅工作是 解除我們西部森林中的定時炸彈。 我們得給他們好的薪資待遇, 提供全職工作來支持他們, 在必要的時候,也要 保護他們讓他們免責。
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.
接著,我們要用創新 來賦予他們更強大的能力。 目前, 有相當多很出色的公司和組織 在努力讓這些創新成真。 其中一家公司叫 BurnBot,他們想做的 是讓人為控制的燃燒 能更安全、更快速。 他們打算用遠端遙控的 路虎(全地形車) 來建立一個區域燃燒邊界 接著他們可以用無人機 在該區域投下火種, 把邊界內的區域安全地燃燒掉。 這是個很高明但很簡單的點子。 我認為我們會需要 更多更多這類創新, 才能夠把規模擴大到能夠 處理我們面臨的巨大問題。
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.
我剛才跟各位分享的前兩個 解決方案都能被大家認可。 第三個解決方案,創新火災管理, 就比較有爭議性, 但我認為它有很大的潛力, 能處理和解決野火問題。 我們需要的是能夠快速偵測 和評估火災的創新和技術, 並能在情況變糟時盡快將它撲滅。 在這裡,最重要的是速度,因為 當火災發生在條件 最糟糕的日子——最炎熱、 最乾燥,風最大的日子—— 如果你無法非常迅速把 火災管理資源帶到火災地點, 你很可能就無法控制火勢。
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.
我們來看看南加州快速 應變部隊(QRF)的例子, 在某些層面上,該部隊就是為 這些最棘手的日子所設計。 QRF 是由公私合夥關係, 現在有三架契努克直升機, 契努克是大型雙旋翼直升機。 每一架都可以在火災現場 空投高達三千加侖的水, 不分晝夜,且能做到非常精確, 它們一小時也能補水高達六次, 因此能帶很大量的水到問題所在。 在為期兩年的示範中, QRF 展示出這個模型 有很大的潛力, 事實上,如果你能很快速將 大量火災管理資源帶到火災現場, 你可以在火災變大到 難以控制之前掌控住它。 這帶來了新的未來 可能性,讓人十分興奮。
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.
想像這個模型搭配 一系列更大型的無人機 載具,安排配置到 高火災風險區域的地景各處。 想像定期沿著 公用事業管線設置這些載具, 或者設置在森林深處 火災風險較高的區域。 如果把這樣的配置網絡 和正確的感測器系統連結, 我們在未來就有可能做到 即使火災發生在條件 最糟糕的日子,也能把它撲滅, 甚至包括快樂在偏遠社區的火災。 Rain 和 Joby Aviation 等公司 現在都在努力實現這個遠景。
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.
要解決這個問題, 感測器系統也非常重要。 這個系統——它將會包含地面 以及空中與太空平台—— 重要性不僅在於 我們將能夠知道和偵測到火災 會何時在何地冒出來, 也在於它能讓我們可以 區別出好的火災和不好的火災、 低強度火災和高強度火災, 這點相當重要,因為我們需要 讓地景上有更多低強度火災, 讓森林恢復生機, 我們也同樣非常需要知道 何地的火災在何時有變成 高強度的風險。
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.
火災是個棱鏡, 透過它,我們能看到未來 人類和大自然系統的關係, 同心協力,再加上科技的支援, 我們可以改變世界,讓社區 擁有對抗野火的韌性, 把森林帶回到健康的平衡點上。 最終,我們能讓未來變成 管理火災的目的不只是 要保護人類的生命和財產, 也是要保護生物圈, 為了全球碳排放, 也為了生物多樣性。 最終,我們必須要扮演 「地球太空船」的機組員, 咱們上工吧。 讓我們向火災中學習, 並建立一個有韌性的永續未來。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)