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The Native American Way of Fighting Wildfires

The Native American Way of Fighting Wildfires

The wildfires that have engulfed millions of acres of forest in the American West in the last few years have brought environmental politics in the region to an unfamiliar place. In Oregon and California, forests are no longer just wondrous cathedrals of nature. They inspire fear as well as awe.

They’ve gotten denser, they’ve gotten more hazardous and, when they burn, they can burn with ferocious high intensity,” said Scott Stephens, a wildfire researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. That has led to “a pivot” in the public’s thinking about wildfires, he said. “People are asking the question: ‘What can we do?’”

Curiously, as partisan and ideological divisions deepen in America, something that looks an awful lot like consensus has been forming around wildfire policy in the West. Government agencies, academic researchers, Native American tribes, rural dwellers and environmentalists have all been reaching a similar conclusion: The 20th century approach to forest management was a long, tangled, disastrous mistake.

A national commitment to preserving a dwindling (and mostly mythical) “wilderness,” promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt among others in the early 20th century, led to a century of aggressive fire suppression in American forests. The unfettered, overgrown forests that resulted are not only far denser and more hazardous than those of a century ago, they are a radical departure from thousands of years of forest maintenance by indigenous Americans who employed fire to keep local forests healthy and productive before Europeans arrived.

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Tribal burning in the West was punished by Spanish authorities and outlawed in 19th-century California by the U.S. government. But it’s been making a comeback. Not only are researchers verifying its widespread use in the past, but tribes, their ancient practices newly validated by science, are sharing their expertise. “Many tribes in Oregon and California have evolved fire-dependent cultures and continue to use fire to this day,” said Belinda Brown, a member of the Kosealekte Band of the Ajumawi-Atsuge Nation, in testimony before the Oregon legislature earlier this year.

Brown is the tribal partnership manager at Lomakatsi Restoration Project, an ecological organization based in Ashland, Oregon, which was one of the most volatile battlefields in the “Timber Wars” between logging interests and environmentalists during the 1980s and 1990s. Lomakatsi has been working for more than a quarter century to develop consensus around forestry initiatives, with a goal of restoring “balance” to the environment.

Much of their work is spent seeking a different kind of balance — among competing environmental and economic interests. In written testimony to Congress in 2019, Marko Bey, executive director of Lomakatsi, said:

Through science-based risk assessments and land management strategies, there is a middle way between a complete hands-off approach (do nothing) and outdated forest management practices of extensive timber harvest that have created homogenized landscapes, making them prone to burning hotter. This middle road strategy protects large trees and wildlife habitat, conducts ecologically-based commercial thinning of trees as the by-products of restorative work, and reduces the risk to communities by returning beneficial fire to the landscape.

Tribes have been instrumental in advancing this “middle way” between denuded and overly dense forests. (In addition to creating fuel for wildfire, a high density of trees and brush consumes more water, which has been dangerously scarce in much of the West in recent years.)

The emerging history of thousands of years of indigenous forestry has undermined arguments that forests should be untended and preserved from fire. In the Rogue River basin in Oregon, research published in 2018 found that fire scars were “frequent and regular” until the mid-19th century, when European settlement displaced Native Americans. When natives were in charge, “fire return intervals” in the region ranged from five to 14 years. There is evidence that Native Americans in California used fire for such mundane tasks as keeping trails clear.

Dozens of tribes have treaty rights in various U.S. forests. Meanwhile, the moral authority that Indian tribes command in matters of land use and nature inevitably exerts a special gravity. America is a land rife with dispute and disinformation, but there is no argument about who the continent’s first property managers were. “If it comes down to a wrestling match,” said Brown in a Zoom interview, “tribes are going to trump environmentalists.”

After half a decade of cataclysmic flames, with some forest fires burning so intensely that they essentially kill the soil, mainstream environmentalists aren’t putting up a fight. Instead, many have joined the consensus for intervention.

The Nature Conservancy issued a lengthy report last summer calling for $5 billion to $6 billion in annual investment in “wildfire resilience” to manage wildfires and protect communities near the wilderness. “For many western landscapes, an integrated restoration approach, using a combination of mechanical and fire treatments, has been shown to be effective,” the report states. Mechanical treatments are mostly forest thinning. Fire treatments are prescribed burns designed to reduce forest density and bolster native, fire-resilient plants.

The Nature Conservancy, which employs a “prescribed fire director,” refers to prescribed burns almost three dozen times in its report. “Prescribed fire and indigenous cultural burning have become widely advocated for use in management practices to restore and maintain fire regimes, yet their application has been inadequate in the Western United States,” it states. “Accelerating the use of prescribed fire will be critical to drive down program costs and maintain resilience over time.”

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Cultural burning is distinct from prescribed burning, though they both use fire to reshape landscape. In an email, Berkeley archaeologist Kent Lightfoot writes:

Prescribed Burning tends to describe burning undertaken to reduce fuel loads as a proactive method to prevent major firestorms. It tends to be fairly broadscale (indigenous scholars describe it as industrial-scale burning). Cultural burning tends to be much more nuanced, small-scale and focused primarily on the enhancement of specific resources that have cultural meaning to local tribes. For example, tribes will undertake cultural burning to improve the productivity of berry patches or oak groves, enhance crafting material used for making baskets and cordage, facilitate the growth of plants used for ceremonies, etc.

The gospel of fighting fire with fire has many believers. When I spoke to winery owners in Northern California earlier this year, support for prescribed burns was vigorous and seemingly universal. Cal Fire, the state’s forest fire fighting brigade, is fully on board.

“Cal Fire is very supportive of prescribed fire (controlled burn) by both public and private endeavors,” said Cal Fire Chief Tom Knecht of the Sonoma Lake Napa division in an email. “There is no debate within Cal Fire.” Cal Fire has an annual goal of treating 30,000 acres per year with prescribed fire, and another 20,000 acres with mechanical thinning treatments. Last fiscal year, Knecht said, Cal Fire treated just over 21,000 acres with fire.

Some 4 million acres of forest burned in California in 2020, so Cal Fire’s enthusiasm for prescribed burns is vastly overmatched by the terrain. But both political winds and appropriations are blowing in the agency’s direction.

The turn toward fighting fire with fire has been endorsed by a growing body of wildfire researchers, many of whom have studied indigenous practices.

“This idea of indigenous knowledge as a true source of knowledge and time-tested learning is just flooding into the scientific space right now,” said Paul Hessburg, a scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest research station. “Increasingly, as I’m getting into the last season of my career, I’m working with tribes and indigenous burning methods, and sometimes the knowledge that I’m learning blows my mind.”

For example: The Karuk tribe, which lives in and near the Klamath River Valley in Northern California, has historically relied on salmon for their livelihood. The tribe timed burns to increase the salmon harvest.

The Karuk, said Hessburg, would exploit temperature inversions, which is when a mass of warm air slips over a colder air mass (air temperature usually cools as elevation rises). A temperature inversion creates a “low ceiling,” and they would know that smoke from any fire they lit under an inversion would be trapped under that inversion, Hessburg said in a phone interview. The resulting “cloud cover” would encourage cooler stream temperatures more conducive to salmon.

Hessburg also recalled a hike he took with members of the tribe. His guides pointed out sugar and ponderosa pine that the tribe had planted and tended on a ridge. To help the trees grow strong and tall, they would burn the undesirable growth around them, cultivating “intentionally grown lightning rods,” Hessburg said.

The goal was to attract lightning, which could then ignite fire from the top of the ridge. The resulting fire would work its way back downhill. Since fire is less voracious going downhill than uphill, the tribe essentially cultivated the kind of burn intensity that would clear out fuel and competing conifers in the areas surrounding their oak woodlands.

“Think of that,” Hessburg said. “Their practices are integrating meteorology, site climate, fire ecology, fire behavior and how to create agreement between these — a confluence. And they knew how to do that on mountaintop ridge after ridge.”

Hessburg is one of a group of researchers who were asked to weigh in on forest management and wildfire by the academic journal “Ecological Applications,” which Berkeley scientist Scott Stephens calls “the top-ranked journal for this kind of information in North America.”

In three research papers published by the journal this year, researchers sought not to extend the debate on fire regimes in Western forests but to close it. A paper by Susan J. Prichard and 19 other experts surveyed a broad range of research, and their conclusion is unequivocal:

Based on our review of the scientific evidence, a range of proactive management actions are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes and declining forest heterogeneity after severe wildfires. Science-based adaptation options include the use of managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and coupled mechanical thinning and prescribed burning as is consistent with land management allocations and forest conditions.

The “Ecological Applications” papers, authored by leading experts in the field, repeatedly cite Native American knowledge and practices, advocating an end to fire suppression and a resumption of management practices that predate the arrival of Europeans.

“Indigenous fire stewardship practices can inform active management that achieves shared values,” states a paper for which University of Washington researcher Keala Hagmann was the lead author. When tribes collaborate and help lead forest management, it says, the results “benefit tribes, local communities, and the broader society.”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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