David Goldman/AP Photo
Margo Robbins, a member of the Yurok Tribe, watches as fire is set to commence a cultural training burn on the Yurok reservation in Weitchpec, California, October 7, 2021. Robbins would become a leading voice in the struggle to return the use of fire to her people’s historical territory.
Since July, the arson-sparked Park Fire has consumed roughly 430,000 acres in the Northern California counties of Butte, Plumas, Shasta, and Tehama. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE) estimates they have contained more than 50 percent of the blaze, now the fourth-largest in California’s recorded history. For many residents, the devastation is an uncomfortable reminder of the 2020 burn season—the worst in state history—when 8,648 blazes torched roughly 4 percent of the state’s 100 million acres, killed 33 people, and stained the Bay Area skies an apocalyptic shade of crimson.
Serious wildfires torment California, yet the state does not have a fire problem; if anything, the environment is missing the intentional blazes humans ignited for millennia. For thousands of years, indigenous people have set “cultural burns” to improve habitats for creatures like deer, turkey, and quail; eliminate pests, diseases, and invasive species; and help germinate fire-dependent plants like the iconic giant sequoia—the heat from fire causes the seed coat to expand and rupture, allowing the plant to absorb water and oxygen.
The lush forests and grasslands European colonists called “untouched” and “pristine” were actually the results of careful land management. Tribes, climate activists, and private landowners have also conducted “prescribed burns”: controlled, low-intensity fires set specifically to discourage disastrous blazes by purging flammable underbrush. But federal environmental policies may actually hamper the efforts of states like California that have moved to utilize traditional fire prevention measures.
Beginning in the early 19th century, genocidal settlers took control of indigenous territories and established governments that criminalized traditional land stewardship practices. Today, much of America’s bedrock environmental policy is rooted in the assumption that all fires are harmful and need to be extinguished as quickly as possible. For example, The Clean Air Act, which limits the amount of pollution communities are allowed to release into the air, was enacted in 1963, in the wake of two major smog events, the first in Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948, and the second in London, England, in 1952. In both cases, smokestack discharges combined with unusually cold weather to produce several days of deadly polluted air. The five-day smog in London resulted in 12,000 deaths and caused over 100,000 people to develop serious respiratory illnesses.
In February of 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency updated the law to tighten regulations on fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot. Health officials praised the change because soot inhalation can result in heart failure, premature death, and lung diseases like asthma. In California, places like the San Joaquin Valley—which is blanketed by some of the nation’s densest soot and smog—welcomed the decision. The region has the state’s highest rates of childhood asthma, with 25 percent of kids suffering from the disease.
Public pressure after the devastating fires of 2016 and 2017 forced California legislators to create training opportunities for state residents and circulate models for prescribed burns.
However, fire experts believe that these limits might discourage cultural and prescribed burns. Because the act makes no distinction between smog and fire smoke, fire advocates compete with factories and automobiles to use “good fire” on the ground. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of the University of California’s Fire Network, a group of researchers and advisers who provide information and guidance about good fire practices to California communities, calls stigmas against fire “really problematic, especially in a place like California, where a lot of our ecosystems evolved with fire every five years.” She adds, “We need to be burning on some level of frequency to be a resilient landscape, and yet we’re dealing with out-of-touch environmental laws that don’t recognize the value of fire.”
When Quinn-Davidson began her career in fire management 15 years ago, the only groups empowered to use fire were the people who knew how to put them out. Fire as a tool for conservation was only accessible through National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service programs. The stigma is a huge reason why it takes an average of 4.7 years to start a prescribed burn program after the Forest Service begins reviewing its potential impact on the environment, according to a 2022 report by the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving the environment.
These stringent state and federal regulations prevent indigenous Americans from caring for the land according to their beneficial ancestral traditions. “We see fire as a sacred gift, given to us by the Creator,” Chairman Valentin Lopez of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band says. “Fire gives us light when it’s dark, warms us when it’s cold, cooks our food, and is central to all our ceremonies and prayers.”
The ancestors of the Amah Mutsun were taken to missions in Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista between 1791 and 1834 by Spanish colonizers for forcible conversions to Christianity. They conducted their first burn in modern times in Pinnacles National Park in 2011 to help cultivate plants used for basketry like valley sedge and deergrass. The chairman says the burn “did wonders” to restore the plants by encouraging growth, recycling nutrients, and clearing a layer of invasive grasses. After years of neglect, the land slowly began to resemble its healthy, precolonial self.
A number of factors had to align for the burn to occur. Several early plans were canceled at the last minute due to high winds, the unavailability of firefighters, or poor air quality. In addition, Lopez says the Amah Mutsun “were very lucky that we had the national park support our desire to burn.” He attributes their strong relationship with park staff to a professional connection he made with the park’s superintendent in 2006. Without that meeting, the Amah Mutsun might not have been able to access the highly protected federal land.
David Goldman/AP Photo
Robert McConnell Jr., a prescribed fire specialist with Six Rivers National Forest and a member of the Yurok Tribe, shovels dirt to put out a fire that climbed the bark of a tree during a cultural training burn on the Yurok reservation in Weitchpec, California, October 7, 2021.
The Amah Mutsun endeavor to educate the public about the benefits of cultural fire. The public sees “fire as a huge danger that needs to be extinguished as soon as possible. They don’t see it as beneficial or good for the environment,” says Lopez. In 2023, before their burn at a ranch in San Juan Bautista, the tribal band met with town representatives to educate them about what the burn would accomplish. The face-to-face dialogue as well as the presence of CAL FIRE officials put the community at ease.
The tribal band is equally committed to recovering their ancestral knowledge. Once a year, members of the Amah Mutsun spend two weeks in Northern California, with tribes like the Yurok, Tolowa, and others, who continued burning even after the arrival of the Europeans. They learn how to burn different types of seed plants, basketry plants, nuts, trees, and scrub brushes and study the life cycles of creatures like honeybees, which begin to nest and breed in late winter, to ensure their burns only help, not hurt, the environment.
“Traditional land stewardship means developing and maintaining a relationship with the land, plants, insects, fungi, and wildlife,” says Lopez. “It means recognizing the environment as sacred and treating it with love and respect and patience.”
Increasingly frequent and severe wildfires might provide the jolt the public needs to accept prescribed burns. After the CZU Complex Fire, which consumed 85,000 acres and 1,500 buildings in Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties in 2020, “people recognized that the forests have to be managed differently. They started looking at the ways indigenous people would do it with frequent burns,” says Lopez. Before that fire, it was “nearly impossible” to coordinate a burn because of resistance from the public and hesitancy from CAL FIRE, he adds.
The public pressure after the devastating Thomas, Carr, Camp, and Wine Country Fires of 2016 and 2017 had already forced California legislators to create training opportunities for state residents and circulate models for prescribed burns. The most important development has been an increase in the number of prescribed burn associations (PBAs): community-led organizations dedicated to training people to use fire responsibly and help prescribed burners draft plans for CAL FIRE’s approval.
Twenty-four PBAs now serve the state’s 58 counties. PBAs organize “wildfire preparation brigades” of volunteers to practice protecting homes in sensitive fire areas. The movement has been “organic and grassroots,” says Quinn-Davidson of UC’s Fire Network, who notes that PBAs can be established by the local resource conservation districts, a set of landowners, or cultural practitioners. She predicts most California counties will have PBAs in the next few years.
In the last ten years, the California state Senate has also passed several bills to facilitate the work of PBAs. Historically, when CAL FIRE extinguished a prescribed burn that burned out of control, the department could hold the burner liable for fire suppression costs incurred in fighting the fire. In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure that protects burners from liability, provided that a state-certified burn boss approved their plans and that they did not act with “gross negligence.” The law incentivized private landowners and cultural practitioners to conduct prescribed burns by eliminating penalties that discouraged burners in the past.
In 2022, another bill established a $20 million prescribed fire claims fund, a pilot program to cover the cost of those fires. To access the fund, one must be either a state-certified burn boss or a cultural practitioner. The program defines cultural practitioners as any person “associated with a Native American tribe or tribal organization with experience in burning to meet cultural goals or objectives.” According to Quinn-Davidson, the program was designed, with input from the Karuk Tribe, to ensure burning remained accessible for indigenous peoples.
Though prescribed fires involve some risk, the seriousness of California’s wildfire crisis demands alternative solutions. The planet is warming at rates not seen in 10,000 years. Each year, the Sierra Nevada snowpack melts sooner, which exposes vegetation to spring heat longer, drying plants and making them better tinder for wildfire. As precipitation becomes less dependable, increasingly severe droughts aggravate arid conditions by sapping moisture from the air. Californians must remain constantly alert to dry, hot weather, because the next lightning strike, generator malfunction, or dropped cigarette could spark a historic blaze. Embracing proven ancient practices and incorporating modern methods can help mitigate wildfires that might otherwise prove disastrous.
