Vox By Umair Irfan Updated Jul 13, 2021
How an ancient American Indian practice can reduce the risk of massive wildfires.To live in the American West today is to live with wildfires. And to suppress those fires is only to delay, and worsen, the inevitable.
The massive fire seasons in recent years are vivid reminders of this fact. Record heat and an expansive drought across much of the region have laid the groundwork for another massive fire season this summer. It’s not clear yet whether it will be as severe as the unprecedented fires of 2020, but already, more fires have ignited and more acres have burned. In California alone, more than twice as many acres have burned so far this year compared to the same time period last year.
A number of unique factors in recent seasons combined with long-term trends and created the devastating blazes. But a major reason for the massive scale of the destruction is that natural fires and burning practices first developed by Indigenous people have been suppressed for generations.
Wildfires are essential to many Western ecosystems in the US, restoring nutrients to the soil, clearing decaying brush, and helping plants germinate. Without these fires, vegetation in woodlands, grasslands, and chaparral shrublands accumulates, so more fuel is available to burn, especially when a megadrought keeps drying out the fuel, year after year. A debt to the landscape starts to mount, and when it comes due, there is hell to pay.
“If we’re not using fire in the same way that this landscape evolved with over millennia, then we could be creating a situation where we’re creating a further imbalance,” said Don Hankins, an environmental geographer at California State University Chico and a Plains Miwok Indigenous fire practitioner.
So a key part of the strategy to reduce the growing threat from wildfires is to burn parts of the landscape on purpose.
This is much easier said than done. It’s costly, it can be dangerous, and it demands a sophisticated and granular understanding of the land. But American Indians have used burning practices across much of the West for thousands of years, building up a vast reservoir of knowledge of when and how to start fires to protect themselves and to increase the bounty of the land.
Much of this burning stopped when European settlers arrived, driving American Indians away from their ancestral homes and depriving those who remained of their culture. Now there’s a growing movement to bring these practices back to the landscape, with Indigenous practitioners in the lead in places like California. But it requires confronting an ugly past and facing a future of growing wildfire risk.
Why Indigenous burning practices are a powerful way to mitigate wildfire risk
To understand how we arrived in this era of extreme wildfires across the western United States, scientists have studied patterns like those in tree rings to get a sense of the history of fires across the West.
“It shows that a lot of these areas burned a lot, anywhere from every two years to every 15 years,” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist at the United States Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station. “If you haven’t burned in a long time — some of these places haven’t seen fire in recorded history, or since 1910 — that’s a lot of fire debt.”
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https://www.vox.com/21507802/wildfire-2020-california-indigenous-native-american-indian-controlled-burn-fire:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21978056/DSC_0006.jpg)
tree ring cross-section collected near Redding, California, shows regular fire burn scars that became much less frequent
after 1855. Eric Knapp/USFS
