![]() They fear it will destroy lush, natural forests and turn them into barren shrubland that it is a tool of timber companies and a friend of clearcutting old growth that it will produce oppressive, toxic smoke and emissions year-round. The south-east leads the way: in Florida, landowners and government agents burn more than 2m acres a year.īut many in California, where millions of homes have sprawled into the mountainous and flammable wildlands, still fear fire in all forms. Since then, some state agencies have made prescribed burning a central part of their land and wildfire management strategies. In 1968, after realizing that no new giant sequoias had grown in California’s unburned forests, the National Park Service changed its prescribed fire policy. “And we did – we had so much great new forest that we created a problem.” “They said if we suppress all these fires, we end light burning, we will have great new forests,” said the fire historian Stephen Pyne. Fire was a killer, and America would make war on this new enemy for most of the next 100 years. ![]() The valuable timber trees would be protected and burns would be extinguished at all costs. Championed by the Forest Service, ecologists and conservationists, new colonial notions of what is “natural” won the day. In 1850, the US government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning in California even before it was a state.Įarly National Forest Service officials considered “the Indian way” of “light-burning” to be a primitive, “essentially destructive theory”. The Spanish were the first California colonizers to prevent indigenous people from burning the land. “It was taken away from us, and now we’re trying to reclaim it.” How the US waged war on fire ![]() “Our first agreement with our creator was to tend the land,” says O’Rourke, 52, resting for a moment on a log in the green, lit drip torch still in hand. These native people are trying to revitalize their right to indigenous cultural burning, a practice that was criminalized long before California became a state, before their culture dies out. But who gets to decide where that fire goes, what it burns, why it burns – who is the steward of a natural element – remains contentious. Alongside huge expenditures on firefighting staff and gear, the state is making new investments in prescribed burning. It was taken away from us, and now we’re trying to reclaim it Rick O'Rourke, Yurok fire managerĪfter decades suppressing small and gigantic fires alike, California is slowly embarking on a course correction. Our first agreement with our creator was to tend the land. As the climate crisis creates hotter, drier, more volatile weather, that fuel has helped drive larger wildfires faster and further across the west. Traditional ecological knowledge and landscape stewardship were sidelined in favor of wholesale firefighting, and a kind of land management that looked like natural conservation but left the ground choked with vegetation ready to burn. This is “good fire”, traditional practitioners and firefighters would say.įor most of the last 100 years in California, however, government agencies have considered fire the enemy – a dangerous, destructive element to suppress and exclude from the land. Even sooner, animals will flock here to roll in the ash, a California dust bath.įor more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and hundreds of other tribes across California and the world used small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires.Ī view of the Klamath River from the town of Weitchpec, California. Soon all that black will be dotted with bear grass and huckleberries pushing up for the sunlight and down for the water they couldn’t reach when they were crowded out by tall scotch broom and dense twists of blackberries and the ever-encroaching fir trees. It will burn the invasive plants that suck up the rain, letting more clean, cool water flow through the black, into the watershed and down the Klamath river for the salmon. It will blister the hazel stalks and coax strong new shoots that will be gathered and woven into baskets for babies and caps for traditional dancers, and it will tease the tan oak acorns to drop. This fire will chew out the underbrush and lick the moss off the trees. The lines of little flames creep along the forest floor, ebbing and growing with the contours of the land. He draws the can back and forth across the green, turning it red and then black. ![]() Rick O’Rourke, Yurok fire practitioner, with his dog Puppers during the prescribed burn in Weitchpec, California. ![]()
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