Fight Fire with Fire
Written by Aimee Ascano
California is on fire.
Anyone who lives in California is unfortunately familiar with this kind of event. Anyone who lives in the US is just as used to reading headlines about the American West burning. Yet the American West is far from the only landscape in the US vulnerable to wildfires, but why are we the ones who experience them so often it has become normal?
The answer to that question sounds counter-intuitive: controlled burns.
Native American fire practitioners hold a training session in Chico, California, to teach community members how to conduct cultural burnings. - CNN
It is a solution that is being brought up in conversation increasingly often. California is producing more and more community organizations whose purpose is to recommend and manage burns on private property. And in fall 2021, Gov. Newsom passed a new law to offer protection for people performing prescribed burns.
But how on earth did we reach the conclusion that we should literally fight fire with fire? A combination of looking back at America’s history, and many ecology experts supporting indigenous traditions.
Before the colonization of the Americas, many tribes were already actively managing the land with traditions passed down through generations. When European settlers claimed the land for themselves, these teachings and practices were ignored for European methods of managing property. Meaning, we as a country intentionally stopped fires and prevented anyone from starting fires for any kind of reason.
The problem is, fire is vital part of how many ecosystems run.
Sequoia
Which, honestly just sounds crazy. We always hear about bacteria and weird sea creatures that require extremely hot or cold temperatures, but needing fire? Well, it’s true. Some trees like our huge sequoias, Bishop pine, and Sargent cypress need the heat from fires for their cones to release seeds and reproduce. While other trees such as red and white pine need fire to literally burn away the competition and prevent them from accumulating into one giant tinder ball in the forest underbrush. This is probably the most understandable reason for frequent burns. The smaller frees and various shrubs that grow along the ground are a fire hazard during dry spells. They’re the perfect tinder for a camp fire, and also uncontrolled wild fires, but if they’re burned away regularly, the chances of them causing an truly dangerous fire is greatly decreased.
Now, after decades upon decades of tinder collecting, both in forests and out, we are experiencing the consequences of ignoring natures need for a fires cleaning. This “litter” filling the land combined with increased temperature and droughts are a recipe for fire. Hence, we are seeing record setting forest fires in both size and frequency, and we’re scrambling to prevent any more record setting years like 2020.
So now, we’re playing catch up, but at least we have an example to follow.
The American south has a much more comprehensive fire prevention program. Meaning, they still have controlled burns, and have Southern states 11 certification programs to become burn managers: a special training program to learn how to safely conduct controlled burns. Private land owners in Southern states learn how conduct burns, have legal protection unless they are “grossly negligent” in their burns, and most importantly, recognize the importance of fire in both prevention of wild fires and maintaining the land itself.
Native American fire practioners teach members of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection how to conduct a prescribed burn at the Tending and Gathering Garden in Woodland, California.
California is now implementing such practices, with Gov. Newsom’s burn law, and his plan includes covering 100 million acres of land by 2025. However, due to the amount of litter built up over the years, the progress of these burns are slow going. To help this progress, more neighborhood groups that help perform burns on private land are cropping up, such as Plumas Underburn Cooperative or PUC, who provide local support to private land owners, and CAL FIRE, who provide support on a wider scale.
In addition to this, laws have loosened up to allow indigenous groups to resume cultural burning. Ever since Native Americans lost control of the land, and many of their practices were outlawed, cultural burns have been forced to stop. These teachings provide knowledge on how and where to burn safely, and while the American government has historically shut out their voices, many institutions including Forest Services are now turning to indigenous populations to learn how to manage the land.
So now that the era of fire suppression is ending, we can look to controlled burns to lessen the dangers of wildfires in the future.
References
https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2021/11/ask-an-expert-why-is-prescribed-fire-important/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/communities-are-embracing-controlled-burns-to-protect-themselves
https://www.readyforwildfire.org/forest-health/prescribed-fires/