Buring grass in the foreground, then several people stacked front to back. From front man in plaid shirt and green stocking cap bent over working, woman with long dark hair holding buring sticks, behind her man with black hair reaching down. Several more people in the background.
UC Davis students, academics and members of the local Native American community take part in a collaborative cultural burn at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Woodland, California. (Alysha Beck/UC Davis)

How the Indigenous Practice of 'Good Fire' Can Help Our Forests Thrive

In the past several years, California has endured the most extreme fires in its recorded history.

2018’s Camp Fire grew into the state’s deadliest and most destructive fire on record, devastating the towns of Paradise and Concow. Last year the state suffered the Dixie Fire, raging for months through five Northern California counties on its way to becoming the single-largest blaze in state history.

These deadly infernos are stark evidence of how vulnerable California’s communities and forests have become in the era of climate change. But warmer, dryer forests aren’t the only factor behind these so-called mega fires. Ironically, it is a lack of fire that is also playing a major role.

Two hundred years ago, someone walking through Yosemite would not have seen the densely packed forests we now associate with the Sierra Nevada.

They would have passed through broad meadows and perhaps have even been drawn to comment, as the Spanish did, on how the land appeared like a “well-tended garden.”

In fact, that is exactly what Spaniards were seeing: Indigenous people native to Yosemite and other parts of the world for millennia have used fire to promote healthy forests. Today, the wisdom of that approach is seen as one of the keys to unraveling the deadly cycle of California wildfires.

UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning’s classes have worked alongside tribes to help carry out traditional Indigenous burns. 

Read the rest of this article at the University of California News. 

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