Learning to Fight Fire with Fire: Turning to Native Burning Practices for Help in Fire Season

Four weeks ago, I was living in rural Northern California when I received an Emergency Alert: “A wildfire is in the area and is a possible threat to your location”. I immediately drove home, 20 minutes up a one lane road into dense forest with no service, and talked to my two sets of neighbors. One was staying with his home until he “had to leave”. The others were already on their way out. My aunt packed up her two dogs and asked how long I’d be. I told her I had to close up the house and get gas on the way out of town. “You don’t have gas?” She asked, “Never come up here with an empty tank, you never know how fast you’ll need to leave.”

Being from California, I’d been through this before. Growing up with this hyper-awareness around fire, especially in late summer, I’ve learned to take extra precautions in the latter half of the year. We have always been encouraged to have no trees or brush within 30 feet of the house, to keep our birth certificates and family photos in the trunk of the car.  But why is this the case? Why did I grow up knowing that July through November is “Fire Season” in California? 

Wildfires ravage California yearly. Up until this year, 2018 was the worst fire year to date, with 7,571 fires, and 1.67 million acres burned. In 2020 however, 3 million acres have burned across the state, nearly doubling 2018’s record. And it’s only September.  

Could this yearly tradition of destruction have been, or perhaps more importantly, can it now be avoided? Was it always like this?

The answer is no, it wasn’t always like this. 

The obvious, and expected answer for how we got here is climate change. The earth is getting warmer, causing our summers to be hotter, vegetation to be drier and wildfires to be bigger. But there are cultural layers to wildfires that go mostly unmentioned. 

For years and years, Native American tribes in California have executed controlled burnings. These fires cull invasive plants, allowing suppressed plants access to more water and air. For centuries, this progress bolstered local ecosystems. Animals were given access to certain plants that would otherwise be choked by invasive species such as blackberries or the French Broom bush. These invaders take over landscapes and hinder reforestation drastically. With controlled, also known as prescribed, burnings, indigenous people were not only able to clear land for farming and facilitate movement around dense forests, but helped the larger ecosystem in a yearly cycle of regeneration. 

When European settlers expanded their reach to the American west, they naturally brought their cultures, traditions and conceptions with them. Western cultures associated fire with death, extinction, chaos and hell. Meanwhile, local people viewed fire as a tool for rebirth. Fire can be a staggering power for good: a device for positive, necessary change and evolution, but when states like California, Oregon and Washington were colonized, this belief was overshadowed by fear. 

In an NPR article interviewing a variety of different native people and scholars, it is explained that colonizers so intensely criminalized fire that burnings were banned and eventually deemed arson. This is how the cycle of fire suppression began. With no controlled fires, forests grew out of control, suffocated with invasive species and more and more brush. In recent years, with temperatures rising, these forests have become incredibly dry, and are virtually tinderboxes awaiting the smallest spark. 

So what can be done?

Fundamentally, we need to come to a consensus. The U.S government, U.S Fire Administration, landowners, and native people need to have a platform within which to work together to use fire for good. An ideal example of this is the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership: a group made up of Tribal, Federal and Non-Governmental “stakeholders” committed to “restoring fire resilience at the landscape scale” in the Western Klamath Mountains of California. 

This group is made up of over 20 different organizations, ranging from tribes, to conservation councils, to federal agencies such as CalFire and the EPA. As detailed on their website, a few of their goals are to create fire adapted communities, restore fire regimes and healthy river systems, while simultaneously supporting local economies and communities. This is a model example of what could be done to reverse the effects of fire suppression. However, this partnership only covers the Western Klamath mountains, about 1.2 million acres of land. California, one of the biggest states in the U.S, sprawls at a bit over 100 million acres. It would take a lot of cooperation, funding and organization to return to the proper fire regimes, but would mitigate destructive, uncontrolled wildfires immensely. 

Is there a world in which we could live without a “Fire Season”?

It would take a lot. With so many years of fire suppression, we are faced with a “fire deficit”. So much of California has not been burned in years, so millions of acres of land would have to be burned in order to return to a proper cycle. Also, there’s the question of private land. The more California acreage is sold to private owners, the harder it is to burn properly. People would have to consent to having their land burned, something nearly unimaginable. 

The most important thing would be a shift in culture. If our society was able to alter its perception on fire, we could come a long way. Yes, it is important to fear fire, respect it, and understand its immense capability of destruction, but perhaps even more importantly it is vital that we embrace it, learn from it, and ultimately use it. 

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book on indigenous culture, Braiding Sweetgrass, she explains the vital role we have in our environments. Yes, she says, there are natural places that are best left untouched, but we are also “given the responsibility to care for land”. Put succinctly, she says: “You have to be involved. You have to contribute to the well-being of the world.” 

I believe that many people, myself included, are often under the impression that we as humans live outside of nature. We are an anomaly, we have created our own ecosystems and our own function on the planet. But I argue that this is dangerously incorrect. We exist within nature, not next to it, on top of it, or outside of it, and we need to learn the ways in which to take care of it not only to maintain our own well-being, but to help cultivate a space where others can thrive as well.

To Read and Watch:

Watch: Tending the Wild – Episode One: “Cultural Burning” 

Read: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer