June 9, 2025
By
Annie Powell M.A. ’18, Ph.D. ’24
As the frequency and intensity of wildfires accelerate, William & Mary faculty, students and alumni are stepping up to tackle this critical issue. By promoting healthy land management practices, training the next generation of wildland firefighters and engaging in research and philanthropic initiatives, the W&M community is ensuring healthier communities and ecosystems.
LOS ANGELES IN ASHES: In January, wildfires raged across Los Angeles, devastating the city’s neighborhoods and communities.
Photo Credit: Mario Toma
Jonathan “Jon” Layne ’75 wasn’t at home in his Pacific Palisades, California, neighborhood when uncontrolled wildfires broke out across Los Angeles in early January. He and his wife, Sheryl, were almost 7,000 miles away on a cruise to Antarctica that they had booked over a year earlier.
While on board the cruise ship, the Laynes received updates with nearly unbelievable descriptions of destruction. “We kept getting new reports,” he says. “Our grocery store — gone. Our bank — melted. Our grandkids’ school — destroyed.”
First, the Laynes needed to know that their family was safe. When they finally connected with their adult children, Scott and Shelby, who also live with their families in Pacific Palisades, they learned that Scott and Shelby’s families had safely evacuated but that both of their homes had been burned to the ground.
Satisfied of his family’s safety, Layne was still unsure about his own house. By checking the app connected to his electric vehicle, he could tell that the temperature inside the car, parked in a garage connected to his house, ranged from about 60 to 70 degrees. That gave him hope that his house was still standing.
He was right: After returning to LA two weeks later, Layne found his home severely damaged but not destroyed. He later spoke with other electric vehicle owners who had left their homes during the fires and who had similarly used apps to assess the danger to their property. When the temperatures in their cars soared from 70 to 80 to 90 to 100 degrees before losing the signal, the owners knew their cars — and, therefore, their homes — had burned.
Being on the other side of the world during the LA fires was unsettling for Jon and Sheryl. “There was a keen juxtaposition of the serenity, beauty and awe-inspiring landscape of Antarctica with the pain and suffering and loss of life and property that our family and community were going through in LA,” Layne says.
The exact reason for the start of the LA wildfires remains unclear. Some point to improperly grounded wires or downed transmission towers for the initial spark, but it was a combination of natural conditions that caused the fires to grow out of control. Limited rainfall during the previous year contributed to brittle vegetation, which can easily catch fire. The fires were further fueled by Santa Ana winds blowing at 100 mph from the deserts east of LA toward the western coast.
Infrastructure and public service issues also contributed to the magnitude of the devastating fires. Damaged reservoirs in the city hadn’t been repaired, leaving firefighters without enough water flowing through hydrants. Cutbacks in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget meant fewer personnel and less equipment. And the fire department’s fixed-wing airplanes were grounded because the high winds were too dangerous for the pilots, leaving them unable to fight the fires from the sky.
When the Laynes visited their house in the fires’ aftermath, they were astounded at the level of destruction in their neighborhood. Fire had gone right up their driveway, and the house was covered with ash and soot. “Our house smelled like a barbeque pit,” Layne says.
But they were the lucky ones. Their house was still standing while the rest of their neighborhood was gone. Layne compares the scene to photos of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945.
“Block after block, every home is wiped out,” he says.
The lost homes were devastating for residents, but other losses were even more painful. When the Laynes’ children fled their houses, they didn’t have enough time to grab any possessions. Birth certificates, social security cards, wedding licenses, family photos — all are gone.
With property and capital losses estimated between $76 billion and $131 billion, according to UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, the task of rebuilding is enormous, especially in hardhit areas like Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Yet there has already been an outpouring of support.
Hats and sweatshirts with the slogan “Pali Strong” reflect the Pacific Palisades community’s resilience and motivation to push forward. Neighbors are organizing recovery efforts through Zoom meetings and webinars. Residents have had to become well-versed in subjects they previously knew little about, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which leak into air and water supplies from burned pipes.
“We’re all very resilient,” Layne says. “Our community will rebuild.”
Uncontrolled wildfires bring unimaginable devastation. In the early 20th century, effective marketing strategies like Smokey Bear and the Disney movie “Bambi” attempted to reduce human-caused wildfires. These strategies were so effective, however, that the U.S. public came to view fires primarily as negative anomalies.
Bobby Clontz ’89, statewide fire manager and longleaf pine specialist at The Nature Conservancy, would like to change that perspective.
It’s time for a new era in the public’s perception of fire, Clontz contends, one in which people recognize fire as a normal and essential component of healthy ecosystems.
Fire is meant to be on the landscape. For millennia, it was a chronic presence, whether through lightning strikes or Native American burning practices that managed wildlife and agriculture. But environmental changes such as drought and rising temperatures, combined with an overemphasis on fire suppression in the 20th century, have led to dangerous levels of uncontrolled fires.
Research from the National Interagency Fire Center shows that factors including warmer springs and drier summers have lengthened wildfire seasons in many areas. Worldwide, the frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires have more than doubled over the past 20 years, according to a study of satellite data published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Land management techniques allow fire to play its natural role in keeping ecosystems healthy while minimizing the danger to people and property. One of those techniques, practiced by Clontz and The Nature Conservancy, involves conducting prescribed burns, which are deliberately planned and carefully supervised by fire management officials.
Managing a prescribed burn is markedly easier than fighting a wildfire. “For a prescribed burn, planning and preparation is completed ahead of time,” Clontz says. “The fire lines have been prepared in advance, and we’ve notified close neighbors, fire departments and, when required, received permits from regulatory agencies. Importantly, we have chosen the desired weather conditions, and we don’t burn until the suitable weather conditions are forecasted.”
That careful planning stands in stark contrast to the rapidity of a wildfire response.
“In a wildfire, we don’t have the advantage of preparation. We are concurrently working to extinguish a wildfire while assessing weather, rate of spread and whether we have enough firefighters and engines, while also determining the risks to neighbors and traffic safety,” Clontz says.
When a wildfire breaks out in an area that’s recently had a prescribed burn, the fire will burn at a lower intensity and may burn itself out because of the reduced amount of debris.
“Used strategically,” Clontz says, “prescribed fire can be a very effective protective measure for people.”
In his role at The Nature Conservancy, Clontz uses prescribed fire as a tool for positive ecological outcomes, since many species evolved with fire and therefore developed adaptations to, or even a dependency on, fire.
The longleaf pine tree, for example, is a species that evolved with fire and requires regular burnings to maintain its health by removing brush competition. Native to the Southeastern United States, the longleaf pine’s range had collapsed from about one million acres in Virginia before 17th-century European settlement to only 200 individual trees by the 1990s. With careful ecological management, including regular prescribed burns, the longleaf pine range has been brought back to about 8,000 acres in Southeastern Virginia.
Clontz gravitated toward nature and the outdoors since his childhood on the Days Point peninsula near Smithfield, Virginia. His father and uncle were both outdoorsmen who showed him the beauty of nature. Clontz accompanied his uncle, a biologist for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, on adventures that once included taking measurements of a wild bear the department was studying. And his father, a watercolor painter, focused his art on waterfowl and marsh scenes.
“Between the two of them, I got to see the landscape through the eyes of a biologist and the eyes of an artist,” Clontz says.
When he arrived at William & Mary, Clontz was unsure of his direction, thinking that he’d perhaps pursue a major in business. But after a few semesters, he followed his passion for the outdoors toward an environmental science degree. Mitchell Byrd, director emeritus of the Center for Conservation Biology and Chancellor Professor Emeritus of Biology, and the late biology professor Ruth Beck were two of his most influential professors.
Clontz joined Beck’s group that traveled each spring to Grandview Nature Preserve in Hampton, Virginia, to post signs protecting the nesting areas of shorebirds. During the summer after graduation, he worked for Byrd as a hack site attendant, protecting and releasing peregrine falcon chicks.
Clontz enjoyed the ornithology work but knew his true interests were in the wetlands he had grown up around. He enrolled in a master’s program at Duke University, home of the renowned Wetland Center, and soon visited wetlands that recently had been burned.
“That was my introduction to fire ecology and the incredible diversity of plants that exist at this intersection of fire and wetlands,” he says.
After working in various consulting roles across North and South Carolina, Clontz joined The Nature Conservancy for a short-term internship in 2003 and as a full-time employee in 2007.
“When I came to the Conservancy, I was hired as a land steward to manage a site with red-cockaded woodpeckers that I had first learned about in Dr. Byrd’s class,” Clontz says.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers, an unusual species that excavates its cavities in live pine trees, had hit rock bottom in Virginia in 2002, with only two breeding pairs left in the state. Revitalizing the Virginia ecosystem, including bringing fire back to the landscape, has increased the number of red-cockaded woodpeckers to 94 as of December 2024.
While fires burned across the Laynes’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood in January, nine W&M students started training to acquire Wildland Firefighter Type 2 certification as part of an internship program in land management and prescribed fire. The internship is led by Associate Professor of Biology Harmony Dalgleish, who also teaches a fire ecology class.
To attain wildland firefighter certification and credit for the internship, students must complete coursework, training, a fitness test and at least 40 hours of volunteering on burn crews — including Clontz’s crew at The Nature Conservancy.
“Uncontrolled fires cause loss of property and loss of life, as we’re seeing in places like California,” says Dalgleish. “If we do not change how we manage our ecosystems, then we’ll have more fire and will need more people to know how to manage it.”
The program she leads is therefore crucial to preparing for the types of environmental changes that scientists anticipate in the coming years.
Olivia Cunningham ’25, a biology and environmental science major, was drawn to the internship program because she wanted an opportunity to help maintain ecosystems and habitats. This fall, she will begin a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota in ecology, evolution and behavior.
“Burning seems like a really destructive thing, but it’s necessary to maintain habitats that would otherwise not exist,” Cunningham says.
Fellow biology major Haytham Alsayed ’25 also took part in the internship. Unlike most of the other students in the program, however, he is not new to firefighting. As preparation for medical school, he’s been volunteering as an emergency medical technician (EMT) and structural firefighter (combating fires in buildings) for the City of Williamsburg since the spring of his first year at W&M.
Alsayed has already noticed differences between wildland versus structural firefighting. “Structural firefighting is like a sprint. A structural incident usually doesn’t go more than a few hours in a normal single-family house. And maybe only a few minutes before the fire is under control,” he says. “Wildland firefighting is like a marathon. Those incidents can go for weeks or months, as we’ve seen in LA.”
Firefighters, both structural and wildland, undergo extensive training and education to minimize the risks to themselves and their colleagues while fighting fires.
There is an urgent need for trained wildland firefighters with hands-on experience, according to Steven Hubner, a retired forester from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who serves as the expert supervisor for the internship.
The public is generally unaware of the benefits of prescribed burning. “People drive by the public road and see us doing a prescribed burn and call the fire department because they think there’s a wildfire,” Hubner says.
Dalgleish says that many people who push back against prescribed burning worry about the fires getting out of control (a rare occurrence) and are unaware of the beneficial environmental impacts.
She hopes that students emerge from the internship with both practical, employable skills and a broader understanding that humans are not outside of the ecosystem but critical to its maintenance.
Hubner says that the internship program will give students a leg up in the job market: “If applications from students like these come in, and they already have fire training and they’ve already been out on some burns, those resumes go straight to the top.”
See additional images from William & Mary students' participation in a prescribed burn as part of an internship program.
ViewIf there is a need to change the narrative around fire, then there is also a need to change the narrative around fire recovery.
Haisu Huang, a Mellon Environmental Postdoctoral Scholar at William & Mary, studies the process of rebuilding and recovery in the wake of uncontrolled wildfires. Her approach from a sociological perspective, with an expertise in environmental sociology, enables her to think critically about the inequities involved in rebuilding, such as people’s access to resources and their needs for longterm recovery.
Huang’s dissertation research, conducted at the University of Oregon, focused on the community response to the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River in Oregon, about 50 miles east of Eugene. The wildfire started from a combination of downed power lines, extreme wind and dry weather close to the Holiday Farm RV Resort. It burned over 170,000 acres and destroyed more than 500 homes.
As a sociologist, Huang became especially interested in how the idea of “home” influenced the McKenzie residents’ decisions to rebuild.
The concept of home is subjective, but it has structures, Huang says: “There’s a physical dwelling, of course, but there are nonmaterial aspects as well, like social support and employment.”
Huang’s research focused on eight communities along the McKenzie River that were destroyed in the 2020 fire, including the town of Blue River. “It was very heartbreaking for the locals because there are a lot of historical and community landmarks in that town,” says Huang.
One landmark was the liquor store, a place that held more than alcohol. “It’s a place full of memories, full of connections,” she says.
Huang found that two groups emerged from ther ethnographic fieldwork on the McKenzie. She called them the “old-timers” and the “newcomers.”
The old-timers often had strong generational ties to the place: They had either been born in the area or had moved there when they were young, with parents who worked in natural resource projects such as gold mining, timber logging and dam construction. In contrast, the newcomer community was drawn to the recreational nature of the area, a place popular for fishing and hiking, with mineral hot springs and resorts.
The two groups’ responses to the fires differed based on their understandings of the place.
“For the old-timers,” Huang says, “McKenzie was their one and only home. And because this place is home, they wanted to go back and rebuild.” Those residents’ identities were firmly tied to the place. Even though it had become a burn area, and even though there might be more fires in the future, they felt a familiarity and stability there.
In contrast, the newcomer group had a more tenuous connection to the place. Huang found that they prioritized economic factors, such as insurance, in their recovery efforts in addition to emotional factors.
Insurance was the first issue that newcomers raised in their conversations with Huang when they discussed rebuilding, for example, while it was less of a focus in conversations with old-timers.
The topic of insurance in fire recovery efforts is complex and plays a major role in rebuilding efforts.
“The fire survivors reported some insurance policies dictating that to get the maximum insurance benefits they would have to rebuild on exactly the same spot,” Huang says. “And if they don’t rebuild exactly where they were, they won’t get as much money.”
It’s a topic that has caused chaos and confusion in the wake of this year’s LA fires, too. Several major commercial insurance carriers pulled out of the market in recent years, including Allstate, Nationwide and State Farm.
Jon Layne has experienced the pressures and headaches of dealing with fire insurance in his own rebuilding efforts. “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not dealing with insurance issues,” he says.
Ultimately, Huang argues, the choice to rebuild depends on a multitude of factors that center upon how the residents’ notions of home are embedded in the places where they live. Since the rebuilding effort takes years, residents must be deeply invested in the process.
The Laynes are determined to help rebuild their community. But they’re also focused on broader efforts to ensure a safe and healthy future for us all.
In late December 2024, the Laynes made a $100,000 gift to William & Mary’s Institute for Integrative Conservation (IIC) to fund research for a regenerative agriculture project.
Regenerative agriculture focuses on sustainable farming practices that emphasize restoring and enhancing soil health. Healthy soil (also a byproduct of fire) creates healthy ecosystems, healthy people and even a cleaner atmosphere through its carbon sequestration abilities.
Jon Layne believes improving soil health will be the key to solving a multitude of problems, including cancer — a cause to which he’s become deeply devoted. “There’s not a family I know without someone affected by that disease,” he says. “My own father died of cancer, and my sister-in-law died of cancer.” He currently serves on the Tower Cancer Research Foundation Board of Directors, chairing the board’s development committee.
Layne’s philanthropic interests — cancer research and agricultural health — are related, since a healthy environment yields healthy communities, he says. A documentary on regenerative agriculture opened his eyes to the importance of how food production influences both human and environmental health, and he’s become interested in the links between food consumption and health.
“Sustainable food systems are central to effective conservation,” says John Swaddle, faculty director of the IIC and professor of biology at W&M, who will be the faculty lead on the regenerative agriculture research project. “The production, distribution, consumption and waste generated from traditional food systems account for a large proportion of humanity’s negative impacts on the planet — yet we obviously need to feed our growing human population with nutritious and healthy foods.”
These are major issues that will require enormous effort. But Layne is undaunted. Recently retired from a corporate law career, he has no interest in a mundane retirement.
“I have a passion for solving grand challenges,” he says.
His drive to solve these grand challenges stems in part from his background at W&M: “My William & Mary education gave me the analytical skills and ways of thinking that make me intellectually curious.”
The IIC project’s team will be particularly interested in the perspectives of farmers, the group that would implement regenerative agriculture practices but that is often left out of national conversations on the subject. Interviews, focus groups and shadowing the farmers will provide insights for the researchers to develop a roadmap for adopting and scaling regenerative practices.
“Through the generous support of the Layne family, a multidisciplinary team of students and faculty from the IIC will investigate the barriers and incentives to scale regenerative agriculture practices in the mid-Atlantic region of the Coastal Plain, covering the Carolinas, through Virginia and up to Maryland,” says Swaddle.
Layne, who served as a member of the Class of 1975’s 50th reunion committee leading up to its celebration in late April, is enthusiastic about his collaboration with the IIC, calling its work “quite impressive.” He is also impressed by the university’s recent developments.
Two historic gifts to the university in the past year have shown Layne that W&M is in an electrifying time of growth: $100 million from Jane Batten HON ’17, L.H.D. ’19 to establish the Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS and $50 million from Dr. R. Todd Stravitz ’82 and the Brunckhorst Foundations to establish the Stravitz Scholars Program, which will provide full tuition support for students seeking a bachelor’s degree in coastal and marine sciences at the Batten School.
“William & Mary is on a roll. It’s exciting to see,” Layne says.
Fire can be a terrible force of destruction, and it can be a beautiful herald of growth.
In the wake of the LA wildfires, the Laynes grieved the loss of their childrens’ homes and neighborhood. At the same time, they celebrated new life: Their daughter gave birth to a son at the University of California, Los Angeles hospital as the fires were burning out.
“That beautiful baby boy is a phoenix out of the ashes — literally,” says Layne.
New life brings hope, a reminder of the beauty of the world and the need to take care of it.
As the Laynes and all of Los Angeles rebuild their lives and their homes, William & Mary is working beside them, proactive in the prevention of uncontrolled fire and the promotion of prescribed burning and sustainable land management practices. And through these efforts, the communities in which we live will continue to be resilient, rising anew from the ashes.
