Photo: The 2022 Hermits Peak–Calf Canyon Fire is the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s state history. (Image: Hillary Bachelder)
This interview by Bea Portela appeared in The Daily Yonder in July 31, 2026. This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. We are sharing it in two parts.
DY: Throughout the film, changing climate looms as a theme in the background. It’s one of the Forest Service’s main talking points for why the prescribed burns will and must continue. At one point, the fire ecologist you followed, in talking about upset locals, said “their cause is just, but climate waits for no one.” In the context of wildfire in northern New Mexico, are the goals of justice and climate adaptation mutually exclusive?
HB: You hit the nail in the head. In the writing and thinking that we did around the film as it was getting made, we were trying to hold justice and science, to boil it down loosely, and to hold those as potentially conflicting themes. I really hope that they aren’t. Having moved alongside this story for four years now, I’m not going to choose a side. I think justice is so important, and also a scientific approach to dealing with the climate crisis is so important. There’s nothing in how those actually boil down into land management that means that they need to be mutually exclusive. It’s just the relational aspect and the historical baggage that’s preventing those things from going hand in hand.
I don’t think the relational trauma that’s there is easy to solve. I don’t mean to say oh, just to fix that, and the rest lands nice and neatly into place. In our story, justice and science are going to bat against each other, and it’s a distraction from the real issue.
DY: A glimmer of hope in the film is a joint land stewardship project where Latino community members are paid to steward a portion of national forest land. Where does that program stand now? And what is your sense of what it can and can’t do to rebuild trust between the Forest Service and those in the burn scar?
HB: I am really excited about that program, and what it does locally, mostly here in Taos County. I’ve talked a lot with one of the founders of that program, and he’s always been really clear about the strengths and weaknesses of the forest council and co-stewardship approach. It is one of those things that is a good relational solve. It builds bridges between individual community members and individual forest service folks, and it creates economic opportunities for those local community members, which is really important.
At the same time, it’s not a program that you can scale up to confront the climate crisis. We need to manage millions of acres of land, and these guys going out with their chainsaw to do one acre at a time is not going to be the solution writ large for all of our public lands. It needs to be a “yes, and.” We should do this program, and we need to do other things as well. I look at this one as being a great economic benefit to the community, a great trust building step. It’s all in service of goals that the community and the Forest Service agree on, so it’s a win, win, win in a very local, grassroots way. But again, there’s no plan to like scale it across the country in exactly this iteration.
The forest program here is modeled off of the acequia structures, which are hyper-specific to northern New Mexico and have a lot of cultural significance here. Something we’re really excited to talk about with the film when we go to screen it in other places is, is there a version of co-management programs that would involve something that holds that same level of cultural significance, but that’s true to where you’re based and you’re from? We can’t take the acequia system and export it to Maine or to Idaho, but what feels true and meaningful in those places?
DY: I know that you are building an impact campaign around the film. Can you tell me more about that vision as it’s taking shape, and how the film will travel to other rural communities?
So far we have three prongs to our impact goals. The first two are centered around having conversations around good fire and healthy fire, and what that looks like. [We’re] also bringing a greater level of focus and attention to communities who are impacted by climate crises. That’s fires, floods, everything else. We see in the film that FEMA is totally insufficient at supporting those communities after loss, and so we want to have those conversations through the film.
The third prong is what we were just talking about around co-management. People walk out of the theater and want to talk to us about what a complicated dynamic there is between rural communities and the federal land management agencies, and what do we do about it. We’re really excited to see what we can do about it. We want to spark some of this dialogue around co-management projects, and what’s possible on public lands.
There’s a forestry guy who watched the film, and he was like, “What I was really struck with was trying to wrestle with this question of if I had to choose, gun to my head, between a land management strategy that prioritizes local interests or a land management strategy that prioritizes scientific best practices, in the situations where you can’t have both, which one are you going to choose?”
I don’t have an answer to that question, but I think that’s an interesting and helpful framework for us to get people in a room together, see where everybody’s coming from, and see if there’s room to build bridges.
DY: My last question is about the final scene in the film. I was left sitting with it after I watched it. I’m curious how you chose that last scene, and how you feel about it.
That’s my favorite scene. It was always in the film, but it wasn’t until later cuts that we realized it needed to be the ending. The scene is of one of our protagonists, Ernie, who’s a rancher. His son notices all this wheat grass growing that has been dropped by the Forest Service after the burn. Because there’s so much erosion, they drop seeds from planes to try and create new growth and hold the ground in place to prevent flooding. But this type of wheat has little barbs that can cut the cow’s mouths. It’s just this mismatch. Did the Forest Service consult with anyone locally when they made that choice? It seems like something easy to solve that would prevent this, again, this hit to the relationship [with the Forest Service] that the ranchers are experiencing when they see that weed.
The thing that I love about the scene is that it feels really indicative of how I sometimes feel facing the climate crisis. I’m down on my hands and knees trying to pick up one seed at a time, and there are planes full of seed being dropped over the landscape. How is any one of us going to be able to solve this? But I love that Ernie’s son gets down there and starts picking it up, and then Ernie gets down and starts picking it up as well. I find something really hopeful in that. It’s really hopeful to me that everyone that I interacted with around this film, even when they have really strong differing opinions, it all comes from a place of passion and commitment to the land. Everyone in their own way is getting down on the ground to deal with the seeds. I find that really inspiring and hopeful. No one is giving up, no one is apathetic, and it still feels to me like something that we can solve.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.