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2024 is shaping up to be another bad year for wildfires. As we scan the headlines each morning for news of the latest blaze, it’s important to focus on what we can do to increase the resistance of our forests to catastrophic wildfires.
How did we get here?
Prior to the colonial era, Indigenous tribes used fire to promote healthy forests for thousands of years. For example, studies have shown that the amount of forest biomass in the Klamath region used to be half of what it is now due to regular burning practices by the Karuk and Yurok tribes. What we often think of as untouched wilderness was in fact actively managed by Indigenous tribes, and the suppression of those cultural burns is largely what has caused the unhealthy conditions in Western forests today. If European colonists had not been so certain that they knew more about how to manage conditions on this continent than the people who had been living here for thousands of years, things might have been different.
The result of these decades of fire suppression is that massive amounts of dead wood and dense underbrush that dries out in the summer heat have built up in our forests. This flammable vegetation is called “fuel” by forest management professionals. Once, regular low-intensity fires would clear out these fuel loads before they could reach the densities we see today. But after what has been, in some cases, over a hundred years of fire suppression, the fuel loads are massive enough to create high-intensity catastrophic wildfires such as the Camp Fire that decimated the town of Paradise or the CZU Fire here in the Santa Cruz Mountains that devastated Big Basin Redwoods State Park. These fires are not only bigger and more uncontrollable than historically, but they burn at much hotter temperatures that may be significantly harder for forests to recover from.
Beyond the risk of catastrophic wildfire to our communities, the buildup of fuel in our forests has impaired the health of the forest ecosystem. Dense, overcrowded plant communities struggle to get adequate sunlight, rain and nutrients. This has had a cascading effect on the entire ecosystem, including the animals that depend on a healthy forest to thrive.
What can we do about it?
We can restore our forests to health by using techniques like controlled burning and mechanical thinning to clear out fuels. Controlled burns are conducted very carefully, as you can imagine – the weather conditions must be just right, and a firebreak must be constructed to ensure the fire cannot get out of control. Low-intensity fires like this can even help to rebalance the forest ecosystem since native species that evolved to resist fire (and even benefit from it) may survive and regrow more quickly than invasive species.
The exact nature of mechanical thinning techniques will vary according to the conditions in a particular area, but it may involve removing underbrush and the lower limbs of trees that can act as “ladder fuels” to allow a wildfire to climb into the tree canopy and spread faster, or removing skinny, struggling trees so that larger, healthier trees can grow bigger canopies that will shade the ground and keep it moist and cool (i.e. less likely to dry out and turn into fuel). These techniques can also be used to construct shaded fuel breaks – long strips of forest where ladder fuels have been cleared out, strategically placed along ridgelines or access roads to allow firefighters a foothold from which to fight a fire.
Indigenous Cultural Burning: Reviving Traditional Practices
After so many years of ignoring Indigenous knowledge when it comes to fire, we are finally starting to recognize the wisdom of “bringing fire back to the land.” Tribes are conducting cultural burns with support from state and local fire management agencies. Cultural burns can not only manage fire risk but also help native plants thrive, especially species that are culturally important to tribes for food, medicine, basketweaving materials, etc. Tribal members are training to become fire practitioners and passing on traditional knowledge that has been suppressed for too long.
The conservation movement in the United States has, since the time of John Muir, been predicated on the idea that the way to protect wilderness was to keep people out of it. What this movement failed to recognize was that this “wilderness” had always been inhabited and that Indigenous land stewardship practices were actually necessary for our ecosystems to thrive. This should not be surprising since, by most estimates, Indigenous peoples have lived on the North American continent for at least 15,000 and, more likely, 30,000 years or longer. The California landscape that Spanish explorers described as a “garden” was, in fact, carefully tended, and when that stewardship was prohibited and Indigenous people displaced, forcibly moved to missions, and in many cases simply killed, the landscape suffered the consequences, including the massive wildfires that we see today.
By restoring Indigenous cultural burning and other controlled burning practices and reducing fuel loads in forests, we can increase our forests’ resistance to wildfires and improve their health.
