WHILE HUMANS HAVE in many instances worsened fire danger, humans have in many cases also been able to successfully engage with fire in ways that benefited themselves as well as the ecosystems in which they live. In Australia, for example, indiginous burning has been an integral part of Aboriginal life for thousands of years. Low-intensity burns close to the ground help clear the underbrush, while leaving the native eucalyptus trees intact. Fire ecologists have found that compared to regions that have been uninhabited since the time of European colonization, regions where Aborigine people actively practice burning are more biologically diverse and significantly more resilient when faced with intense fires.

Indiginous people elsewhere in the world also have long histories of using fire to cleanse and enrich local ecosystems. For over 13,000 years, indiginous people throughout California—including the Chumash people of the southern coastal regions of California, the Hupa and Karuk tribes of northwestern California, the Miwok people of the Sierra Nevada mountains, central valley, and central California coast, and the Yurok people of the far northern California coastal region—utilized small, low-intensity fires to renew regional food sources and medicinal resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the likelihood of more severe wildfires. These low-intensity burns helped maintain healthy acorns—a staple of many local people’s diets—by killing invading weevils, and renewed meadow grasses that local deer and elk rely on. Fires in these areas are also necessary for various plants and trees to germinate. Some species of pine found in California, for example, have developed hard, thick cones—called serotinous cones—that are sealed shut by a glue-like resin. Serotinous cones can remain on their trees for years, long after the seeds inside have reached maturity, and require hot, fast-moving fires to melt the resin and release the enclosed seeds. 

While many indigenous people still practice restorative burning to promote the health of local people and ecosystems, a wealth of knowledge on effective fire management techniques that indigenous people have accumulated over thousands of years is in danger of being lost in some regions, due to so many decades of fire-suppression policies and a perception among many euro-american people—including those who created some of the original fire-suppression policies—that indigenous people’s approach to fire is primitive and destructive. In places like the US, trying to resist these policies could be dangerous, even deadly. From the late 1800s until 1916, the US Army—which carried out the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and waged relentless and brutal war on Native Americans throughout the 1800s—played a dominant role in enforcing fire prevention and fire suppression efforts in National Parks. To practice cultural burning techniques was to risk the safety of entire communities. Even today, indigenous Americans like Elizabeth Azzuz, a Yurok tribe member and the secretary of the Cultural Fire Management Council, told the Pacific Standard Magazine that “we grew up knowing we could be killed for setting fire on the land.” 

Though many fire-fighting groups in the US still follow the approach of preventing and aggressively suppressing all wildfires as quickly as possible, paradoxically causing heightened danger of hazardous fires and less resilient forests, significant efforts are underway to return to a practice of welcoming fires in our ecosystems. In 2018, California created plans to triple the amount of prescribed burns in the state. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), the US Forest Service, and fire ecologists at UC Berkeley and other institutions have begun partnering with and learning from indigenous groups of fire-lighters and knowledge-holders like Cultural Fire Management Council and Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, who utilize cultural burning practices in order to facilitate the return to healthier and more fire-resilient ecosystems and safer communities.  Community-lead cooperative learning opportunities—such as the annual Klamath River Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (KTREX) in northern California, a joint effort between the Cultural Fire Management Council, the Karuk Tribe, the Northern California Prescribed Burn Council, and various other groups—allow people from around the world to gather in order to share best practices and knowledge about how to implement controlled burned, with the goal of empowering individuals and communities around the world to engage with fire in ways that benefit our ecosystems and our communities. In the words of Will Harling, the director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council which co-organizes KTREX: 

“Communities play a critical role in restoring fire process in their landscapes. We are building a model to show how diverse partners can bring good fire back, even in very challenging conditions. By engaging all affected parties, we share responsibility, the liability and the cost, but also the success of creating fire resilient communities, and restoring life to our forests and rivers.”

Elsewhere in the world, other productive partnerships are forming. In Australia, Banbai nation people at Wattleridge Indigenous Protected Area in New South Wales have partnered with a researcher at the University of New England to develop a first-of-its-kind fire and seasons calendar that combines millennia of traditional indigenous fire practices and ecological knowledge with western science. The calendar uses biocultural indicators—observable, predictable, seasonal events that may or may not hold cultural significance—to help people to better decide when (and how) to utilize fire to benefit the ecosystem and avoid hazardous wildfires.

MANY GROUPS OF PEOPLE around the world and throughout history have been able to effectively utilize prescribed burns and wildfire as a tool for promoting stronger environments and human communities, while other groups of people have shunned wildfire and attempted to exclude it from natural environments—with sometimes devastating consequences, as in the case of the United States.

Fire has existed on earth for hundreds of millions of years—during which time life across most of the earth has evolved to survive best in the occasional presence of fire—and wildfires will continue to exist as long as there is oxygen, heat, and fuel. (These are also, incidentally, necessary components for human life. We cannot exist without the very conditions that support fire.) Attempts to suppress and exclude fire—driven perhaps by fear of powers beyond our control; by fear of change, particularly when perceived as destructive; by belief that humans and nature are two entirely separate and sometimes competing entities; by perception that humans can “conquer” nature—have failed. And furthermore, these efforts at eliminating fire have actually created the very environments that are especially susceptible to the uncontrollable, catastrophic infernos that proponents of fire suppression and elimination fear the most.

People who recognize that fire is a normal part of nature—like humans, like trees and grasses—can work with the ecosystems that sustain us, rather than futilely fighting against them.

After accepting that fire is natural and necessary, it is important to pay attention to and understand our environments and the way fires act in them. We need to understand the historic patterns of fire—called fire regimes—in the many areas where humans live and spend time. This informs us of most effective wildfire strategies in the area. Regions that have historically had frequent low-intensity fires have developed ecosystems that depend on these regularly occurring low-intensity fires, so an effective fire strategy in these areas is to employ a combination of allowing naturally occurring low-intensity fires to burn and conducting low-intensity prescribed burns. Areas that have historically had occasional hot, fast-moving fires similarly require intense, quickly-moving fires—whether naturally occurring or prescribed—to remain in balance. In those areas, utilizing a fire strategy of low-intensity, slower fires—which might work for other regions—would fail to adequately reduce fuel build-up and maintain biodiversity. For example, Black-backed Woodpeckers are found almost exclusively in post-burn habitats, most often in habitats that form after severe-intensity wildfires. Without occasional severe-intensity wildfires, Black-backed Woodpeckers and other organisms that have adapted to live in severe-intensity wildfire burn scars may die out.

Understanding historic fire regimes also gives us valuable information about the level of risk when making choices about building, or living in, housing developments and other human-made structures in fire-prone areas, particularly in the wildland-urban interface. In California, for example, over 2 million homes are currently rated as being at high- to extreme- wildfire risk. Large proportions of homes are at similar levels of risk throughout the western United States, with nearly a third of all homes in Montana and over a quarter of all homes in Idaho ranking as high to extreme wildfire risk. Knowing local historic fire regimes—not just the likelihood of fire, but also the likelihood of different types of fires—may influence people’s decisions to live in these areas. Areas where low-intensity, slow-moving fires are the norm may be more appealing and viable in the long-term compared to areas where intense, fast-moving fires are common.

Another component to building a functional philosophical model for engaging with wildfire is a sense of responsibility. This sense of responsibility is common among groups of people who have interacted successfully with fire for centuries. In a 2018 Mongabay article, Bill Tripp, deputy director of the Karuk Department of Natural Resources in California, said “there’s no reason for us to exist if we can’t fulfill our responsibility to take care of this place,” and described how maintaining healthy ecosystems “embodies a sacred commitment integral to [Karuk] social fabric...ceremonies, and most deeply held beliefs.” In a 2019 article in the Guardian, Rick O’Rourke, Yurok fire manager shared that “our first agreement with our creator was to tend the land. It was taken away from us, and now we’re trying to reclaim it.” In Brazil, Chief Tashka of the Yawanawá tribe told CBS News during a conversation about destructive slash-and-burn practices:

“Each one of us needs to be responsible economically, environmentally, culturally, because otherwise the humanity is just going to disappear like dinosaurs. We need to think about that.”

This sense of responsibility to our environment is one that has been scarce for much of the United States history. In Euro-American culture, nature is often valued to the extent that people can get something out of it. Forests have historically been appreciated for their valuable timber, and fire suppression policies were created so that lucrative assets were not lost to flames. Forests were also valued for their ability to provide enjoyment to hunters and vacationists, and many fire suppression campaigns focused on preventing fires because they posed a threat to people’s outdoor hobbies. 

Rather than focusing solely on what nature can provide for us—which may not seem problematic in the short-term, but over the long-term leads to the breakdown of the ecosystems that sustain us—we must expand our world-views to consider what we can do to sustain our environment.

 To the Next Section:

PRACTICAL ADVICE: HOW TO PREPARE FOR WILDFIRE