Can Fire Save Us?

                                                                                   Jim Bahn via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 2.0

Without question, climate change has turned California into a tinderbox. Wildfire has always been part of the state’s landscape, but never have fires been more intense and, with massive populations living in the urban-wildland interface, fires have never been so destructive and dangerous. The indigenous peoples of what is now California not only lived with wildfire but used fire as a tool and as part of their social fabric. The Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and others routinely set controlled fires to clear land for agriculture, wildlife and ceremonies. The arrival of the European colonists and subsequent suppression of the native tribes included making fire suppression a formal policy of government.

Early National Forest Service officials considered “the Indian way” of “light-burning” to be a primitive, “essentially destructive theory”. Championed by the Forest Service, ecologists and conservationists, new colonial notions of what is “natural” won the day. The valuable timber trees would be protected and burns would be extinguished at all costs. Fire was a killer, and America would make war on this new enemy for most of the next 100 years.

This change in policy and practice has persisted to today despite overwhelming evidence that controlled burns are one of the most effective tools to reduce the risk of wildfires.  California’s giant sequoias are the largest and oldest trees on earth.  They are fire and disease resistant, but it wasn’t until 1968 that Forest Service scientists realized that these mammoth trees require fire to propagate.  Wildfire provides the heat to open their seed bearing cones, the fire burns away undergrowth to allow the seeds to fall into the fertile ash covered soil.  Native American realized that fire in the forest, particularly when controlled was crucial to the health of the forest.   

After suppressing fire in all forms, and the traditional ecological knowledge that went along with it, California’s top politicians and fire officials are now seeking out tribal guidance on fire policy as state agencies gear up to burn more than ever burn before. The state’s air quality managers are tasked with outreach to educate the public on the benefits of fire, as regions hand out more and more burn permits. In one particularly busy month in 2018, the north coast air quality management district permitted over 250 prescribed fires in the region.

Climate change has created this intense fire jeopardy for California and many other parts of the country and, in reality the world, and it’s too late for the traditional ways to salvage the situation, but they can be used to mitigate the problem and save lives and property.