The Land Remembers: Water, Fire, and the Systems Beneath Recovery. Watch this Day Two panel from the 2026 Wildfire Leadership Summit in Sonoma, California, presented by After the Fire USA, on post-fire watershed restoration, prescribed fire, grazing, and land stewardship after wildfire.
Four people who work the land in very different ways talk about what burned land teaches us and how healing it is tied to healing the people who live on it. From a steep gulch in Kula, Maui, to a family ranch worked since 1851, to the filmmakers who tell fire's story, this conversation covers the part of recovery that happens long after the headlines.
Moderator: Diane Moss, Energy Policy Expert and Renewables 100 Founding Director, After the Fire USA Advisory Board Member, and Woolsey Fire survivor, owner, and rebuilder
Panelists:
Ralph Bloemers, Director, Fire Safe People Productions
Algeo Che Casul, Rancher, The Ranch at Bodega
Sara Tekula, Executive Director, Kula Community Watershed Alliance
What the panel covers:
- Restoring a burned watershed one neighborhood at a time, parcel by parcel, with fire survivors leading the work in Kula, Maui
- Home ignition zones on steep slopes, and why a house and its watershed are one continuum
- Prescribed fire and rotational grazing as tools that keep communities safe, restore soil and waterways, and put water back in the ground
- Gully stuffing, erosion control, and raising the water table
- The paradoxes of fire: why a burned landscape is not destroyed, and how storytelling helps people prepare before fire comes
- Why long-term thinking has to begin right away after a fire
- Kilo, the Hawaiian practice of careful observation, and listening to what the land is telling us
- A burned landscape as a metaphor for human healing and recovery
Topics covered: post-fire watershed restoration, wildfire and water quality, erosion after fire, prescribed fire, grazing and fire, land stewardship after wildfire, home ignition zone, native plant restoration, Kula Maui, Maui wildfire recovery, Woolsey Fire recovery, community-led recovery, fire ecology, wildfire storytelling.
The Wildfire Leadership Summit is an invitation-only, three-day convening from After the Fire USA, an initiative of Rebuild NorthBay Foundation. 2026 Summit: September 15 to 17, 2026, The Hanna Center, Sonoma, California.
After the Fire: Recover. Rebuild. Reimagine.™
afterthefireusa.org