Ep 250 - Fires in a Heatwave?

This week Wem and I get into something that's been rumbling through forest school Facebook groups all summer: fires, heatwaves, drought, and where individual choice ends and collective responsibility begins.

It started with a post about forest school leaders lighting fires during the current UK drought, and the pile of comments underneath it. Some people were arguing it's down to individual practitioners, their training and their risk benefit assessments. Others were pointing at local fire services actively fighting wildfires and asking whether "I've done my RBA" is really enough justification right now. We try to pull that apart properly rather than picking a side.

Along the way we talk about the headline game, a tool I use for weighing up risky decisions, and how it applies just as well to cancelling a session as it does to lighting a fire. We get into whether forest school is a community or a collection of individuals doing their own thing, my ongoing argument against the mycelial network metaphor and my pitch for lichen instead, and where the line sits between influencing someone's practice and controlling it.

We finish on training and accrediting bodies, what a climate-literate Forest School Leader Level 3 might actually need to cover, and how we might get better at critiquing each other's practice without it turning into a pile-on.

• Forest School Association, the UK's professional body for Forest School, which runs the Recognised Provider and Endorsed Trainer schemes we talk about: forestschoolassociation.org

• The Met Office Fire Severity Index, the tool fire services use to rate wildfire risk and which prompted our "what should Level 3 training actually cover" tangent: metoffice.gov.uk/services/government/environmental-hazard-resilience/fire-severity-index

• The Beaufort scale, referenced as the wind equivalent of the fire index conversation
  https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/beaufort-wind-scale

Links and references mentioned