Ep 250 - Fires in a Heatwave?

<p>This week Wem and I get into something that&#39;s been rumbling through forest school Facebook groups all summer: fires, heatwaves, drought, and where individual choice ends and collective responsibility begins.</p><p>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&#39;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 &quot;I&#39;ve done my RBA&quot; is really enough justification right now. We try to pull that apart properly rather than picking a side.</p><p>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&#39;s practice and controlling it.</p><p>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&#39;s practice without it turning into a pile-on.</p><ul><li><p>Forest School Association, the UK&#39;s professional body for Forest School, which runs the Recognised Provider and Endorsed Trainer schemes we talk about: <a href="https://forestschoolassociation.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">forestschoolassociation.org</a></p></li><li><p>The Met Office Fire Severity Index, the tool fire services use to rate wildfire risk and which prompted our &quot;what should Level 3 training actually cover&quot; tangent: <a href="https://metoffice.gov.uk/services/government/environmental-hazard-resilience/fire-severity-index" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">metoffice.gov.uk/services/government/environmental-hazard-resilience/fire-severity-index</a></p></li><li><p>The Beaufort scale, referenced as the wind equivalent of the fire index conversation<br><a href="https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/beaufort-wind-scale" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/beaufort-wind-scale</a></p></li></ul><p><br></p><p>Links and references mentioned</p>