Taming wildfires requires burning
Indigenous knowledge kept forests open, less subject to blowout blazes
With the hotter and sometimes drier summers we’re getting with climate change, North Americas forests too often turn to tinder. When they burn, they often destroy homes, torch wilderness areas and pollute large swaths of the continent.
But is climate change the only culprit?
Not at all.
Keeping Indigenous peoples out of our forests and restricting their cultural burns has made our forests more flammable, as has a century of suppressing fires.
I’ve talked about the latter in earlier columns. Here, I’d like to share some perspectives from a report mandated when we had an administration with respect for science—both Indigenous knowledge and western science—and a couple of its co-authors.
The federally mandated March 2024 report, Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science for Climate-Adapted Forests, involved an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scientific researchers, scholars and US Forest Service practitioners. Two co-authors spoke with me about the report in April.
I share this today because the problem hasn’t changed even though the administration has.
“Western science alone is not going to give us the answers we need,” said Cristina Eisenberg, a lead co-author. “We need Indigenous knowledge as well. They’re two separate ways of knowing, and together they’re incredibly powerful.”
Modern-day megafires
Removing Indigenous stewards from the landscape and excluding cultural burns from national forests has made the wildfire problem far worse than it would have been with climate change alone, the report concluded. North America’s forests have grown unnaturally dense with small trees and underbrush.
“The condition that those forests are in right now, combined with climate change—the densification of those forests is a good way to put it—is causing them to burn, and burn with these big high-severity fires that are not so typical,” Eisenberg explained.
Eisenberg is a professor and associate dean at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry with expertise in ecological restoration and the cultural burns conducted by Indigenous peoples around the world. She has Rarámuri and Western Apache roots.
“The forests have never had the structure they have today,” she said. “In these dense forests, there’s a lot of trees that are dying because they don’t have enough resources like moisture or nutrients. Then you get a tiny lightning strike and the whole things goes up in flames and becomes a megafire.”
Having so many trees competing for water, nutrients and sunshine also causes forests to face increased risk of drought, heat stress, invasive species, and insect outbreaks along with more severe large fires. Wildfires remain the biggest concern to most people, though.
Active fire suppression puts out about 97 percent of fires ignited in the United States by abandoned campfires, stray cigarettes, and the biggest source of ignition—lightning strikes—the report notes. However, the few fires that do escape control account for about 90 percent of the area burned.
There’s been an eight-fold increase in areas burned at high severity in western forests, S.A. Parks and J.T. Abatzoglou reported in a 2020 Nature Communications Earth Environment article. Their data on high-severity fires showed tallies rose from 1985’s estimated 64,000 acres to 2017’s 520,000 acres, and they’re still rising.
What’s more, the area of high-severity burns could triple again by 2050, based on a 2021 modeling study by Abatzoglou and others published in Geophysical Research Letters.
That is, wildfires are expected to get worse in the absence of projects to “thin” the forests of the smaller, fire-prone trees and follow up with prescribed burns. As Wildfire Today explained, these policies—not logging the biggest trees out of the forest—could prevent or at least reduce many high-severity wildfires.
An abundance of small trees can make wildfires more severe.
Cultural burning kept forests open
“When fire season rolls around, it’s like we’ve got to put out every fire that starts, where Indigenous people were working with fire as a natural part of the landscape and also using it as a stewarding tool,” said Tom DeLuca, dean of the OSU College of Forestry and another co-author of the report.
Many of the smaller trees that would have died in the low-to-the-ground surface fires of cultural burns, or used by Indigenous dwellers constructing shelters, instead have grown tall enough to serve as “ladders” carrying flames into the canopy of even the tallest trees.
“There’s a lot of ladder fuels, even in those old-growth remnants, because they haven’t been managed the way they were managed for thousands of years,” he said.
DeLuca recalled being at a talk where a researcher compared seasonal fires to spring rains. They’re just a process that’s part of nature, rather than a malevolent force that needs to be controlled at every moment.
Many of the interior western forests—a major source of megafires now—typically burned once a decade or more, tree-ring records show. While lightning likely sparked many fires, others fell outside of the lightning season, providing strong evidence for cultural burning.
Indigenous peoples used fire as a means to keep most forest stands open, allowing for better hunting, improved growth of desired understory species such as bear grass and berries, and easier passage under the tree canopy, Eisenberg said.
“There’s very strong scientific evidence that shows that these forests were a lot more open than they are today,” she said. “They had open canopies.”
Forced removal of forest stewards
Many Indigenous communities were forcibly removed from the landscapes they stewarded, and the report stated forest restoration “requires acknowledging and supporting Indigenous communities to reconcile their removal from landscapes they shaped and maintained for millennia.”
When in the last century the US government created the national forests and national parks systems and other means of protecting public lands, policy called for excluding the Indigenous peoples who had lived in the designated areas and shaped their environment. The government broke treaties to take back land, such as the Black Hills area that now hosts Wind Cave National Park on the location viewed by the Lakota people as their origin.
“In the United States, this was Indigenous land. And it was stolen,” Eisenberg said. “The national parks were created to protect landscapes from exploitation, like clear-cutting. The national forest system was created, those lands were taken from Indigenous people, because they were the most valuable timber-producing lands.”
In some cases, national forests were established directly on top of existing reservations. For instance, in 1902, the US Forest Service confiscated 90 percent of the land reserved for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, located at the headwaters of the Mississippi in modern-day Minnesota.
Ironically, the agency then used the Americanized version of the tribal nation’s name to create Chippewa National Forest, adding 150 summer home and other amenities for non-tribal members while logging the culturally important old-growth jack pines.
Photo courtesy of Tony Webster
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The removal of Indigenous peoples for the creation of parks, wilderness areas and other reserves fits in with the western worldview, which views nature as something for humans to either exploit or protect by completely excluding humans from living there, Eisenberg said.
“Either view is that man is in control of nature,” she said. “The Indigenous view is that humans are embedded in nature. And it’s based on humility.”
Indigenous knowledge means observing nature as part of it and figuring out how to work with it in a way the involves reciprocity—taking care of the land rather than clear-cutting it, Eisenberg said. Similarly, Indigenous knowledge allows for working with fire as a tool rather than viewing it as an enemy.
“You have this forest that since time immemorial, Native people have been stewarding,” she said. “And to steward means to take care of a forest the way one takes care of one’s family—with a lot of care and respect and only taking what one needs, and really being mindful of relationships in that forest.”
The Biden administration directive that led to the development of the report came under Executive order 14072, to conserve and restore old-growth and mature forests. While that directive has been shunted aside by the current administration, the information in the report continues to hold true.
Whether looking at it from the perspective of western science or Indigenous knowledge—or both braided together—the conclusion is the same: We need to learn to live with fire for forests to flourish.
The 102-page March 2024 report, Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science for Climate-Adapted Forests, is available here. This post was adapted from an earlier story that ran in Native Science Report on May 2, 2024. NSR has First Publication Rights on its stories, while authors retain copyright.
