California needs and grieves its fire
One recent Sunday, I lay alone by my favorite hometown swimming hole, taking in the familiar sensations of the South Fork Trinity River. The hot sun, the light up-canyon wind, the clicking of grasshoppers, the distant sound of trucks passing by on the rural highway above. I hadn’t returned to this remote spot in years, but it still felt like home.
Beyond the river corridor, though, things were stark and unfamiliar.
Last August, fire dramatically changed this place. Called the August Complex, it was then the largest fire in California’s recorded history, burning more than a million acres of forestland and woodland.
This town, Forest Glen, marked the northern edge of the blaze. It’s one of California’s smallest towns — with only 10 permanent residents. When I drove through it that day, taking in the transformation, my eyes welled with tears over the loss.
After sitting by the river that day, I wound over the mountains and dropped into the valley of my hometown, Hayfork. Only slightly bigger than Forest Glen, it sits in a large valley in the Klamath Mountains, framed by signs of past fires: snag patches and dead trees, clusters of thick wildflowers, open oak woodlands and meadows, barren ridgetops.
With each severe fire season, we lose old pumpkin pines, ancient oaks and beloved stands of mixed conifer and hardwood, in addition to the structures and other built features that also define home for us. The loss of familiar landscapes, of specific trees or viewsheds, is the deepest kind of loss — not unlike losing a home or a family member. People are a product of place, and when we lose our sense of place, we lose our identity.
Such losses have manifested over a century-plus of mismanagement, bad politics — and an increasing disconnect between people and place.
Before European settlement in California, scientists estimate that at least 4.5 million acres burned every year across the state. That’s right — California used to see more fire annually than in last year’s “historic” fire season (4.2 million acres).
Native Californians contributed to California’s fire regimes, actively shaping landscapes with fire to sustain their cultures and livelihoods. Scientists estimate that Native Americans may have intentionally burned up to 2 million acres a year.
In the early 1900s, this practice of cultural burning was criminalized when federal and state officials initiated an era of fire suppression. The stated goal was to save trees — to protect forests from the very process that had shaped and maintained them through time. Yet we know now those losses weren’t avoided; rather, by removing fire, the losses were stalled, accentuated. It’s clear that the fires that burn now are making up for generations of missed fire. The more we’ve rejected fire as the natural — and human — process that it is, the more volatile it has become.
In my work, I focus on bringing fire back. As a fire adviser, I work with individual landowners, tribes and cultural practitioners, community groups, and agencies to build capacity for prescribed fire — to set intentional fires that provide ecological and social benefits, reducing fire hazard, restoring biodiversity, eradicating invasive species and restoring landscape and community resilience. One of my biggest priorities is to foster innovation and inclusivity in fire management — to bring new perspectives and ideas to these wicked problems. Diversity begets creativity. Much of my work in this arena is through the Women-in-Fire Training Exchange.
I also work with local communities to bring fire back as a land management tool. I have found that people are desperate for positive connections, both with each other and with fire.
Recent years have seen an uprising around prescribed fire — a movement — as we Californians explore and reclaim our role in this fire-adapted state. Community-based burn cooperatives have sprung up across the state, providing training, resources and inspiration for landowners, volunteer fire departments and community members. Legislators, too, are working to tackle some of the major barriers to prescribed fire, like liability. We are seeing more commitment, both institutional and financial, by our federal and state agencies, as they try to grow and improve their prescribed fire programs. After more than a decade of this work, I am more heartened than ever. We’re finally seeing that we can choose to fight fire, or we can carry it with us.
When I was a kid, my dad talked about a death dream he’d had. He was falling from a cliff, but unlike in most dreams, my dad actually hit the ground and died. He said it was an explosion of color, bright and warm and welcoming. It wasn’t an end, but the beginning of something different. When he died some years later, I was comforted by that story.
As I hiked out of Forest Glen that day, I saw a pool of orange behind a boulder: a thicket of wild tiger lilies. Up the trail, nestled in the blackened logs, were bright red catchflies and clusters of fresh, oily poison oak leaves. In that moment, I knew this place wasn’t dead; it was different than I knew, but it was still alive — growing, changing.
It occurred to me that our landscapes are likely closest to death when we freeze them in time — when our need for the familiar interrupts their need for process, when we inadvertently choose big losses by avoiding all the small ones.