Native tribes once set fires to help keep forests in balance. After banning the practice, authorities are returning to it

See Fighting Wildfires With Fire by Richard Schiffman. He is a freelance health and environment journalist based in New York. Excerpts:

"Traditionally, indigenous groups throughout North America and much of the rest of the world set fires to encourage the growth of edibles like berries and tubers and to kill off insect pests. Hunters used fire to drive buffalo herds on the Great Plains, and tribes in the Eastern Woodlands burned vegetation to trigger the sprouting of oak and chestnut trees, which were prized for their nuts.

Human-set fires reduced the tangle of small trees and underbrush that make many forests today tinder boxes waiting to explode. Native American fire culture in California and the Pacific Northwest created a biodiverse mosaic of forests and woodlands interspersed with open meadows that served as natural fire breaks—a far safer landscape than the uniform conifer stands that exist now."

"That relative permissiveness ended with “The Big Blowup” wildfire in 1910 that incinerated 3 million acres, leveling towns in Montana and Idaho. Thereafter, the Forest Service trained crews to put out all fires, a policy championed in the mid-20th century by its mascot, Smokey Bear. We’ve been paying dearly for that mistake for years now, Mr. Tripp argues. [Bill Tripp, the Karuks’ director of natural resources.]

“We don’t think climate change is the cause of these big fires. It is a stressor, a significant stressor,” he said. “But we view fire exclusion as the cause because it allows all of that dead, burnable material to accumulate.”

During the 1960s, scientists began warning presciently that excluding fire from forests was setting the stage for the kind of disastrous blazes that we’re seeing today, and federal programs began to encourage allowing lightning fires to run their course. A spate of big blazes in the 1990s convinced some fire managers to take a more proactive approach, implementing mechanical thinning along with controlled burns to reduce dangerous fuel loads.

The pace and scale of these efforts has lately been accelerating. In 2019 over six million acres were treated by federal agencies with prescribed fires, nearly three times the total of a decade earlier, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. Recently, the Forest Service also began partnering with native fire experts like Ron W. Goode, the chairman of California’s North Fork Mono Tribe.

Still, Mr. Tripp says that progress has been far too slow. “The Karuk are given permission to burn about 400 acres a year on private lands,” he said. “We need to be burning at least 4,000 acres a year—and on public lands as well.” He blames bureaucratic hurdles like the difficulty in getting environmental clearance for fires, due to liability issues and a shortage of people properly trained to do the work."

"fire management experts argue that small-scale controlled burns produce far less smoke for shorter durations than the megafires that are darkening skies for weeks throughout the West Coast today.

Can these ancient practices work in the radically different climate and environment that exists today? Mr. Lake, the forest service ecologist, thinks they can. [a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist whose family is of Karuk and Yurok ancestry] He points to Florida, one of a handful of “right to burn” states in the Southeast with strong traditions of rural burning. Landowners there are permitted to set fires on their own property, and forestry agencies also use controlled fire a lot more freely than they do out West.

Florida’s unique fire culture grew out of the contact between early Scottish and Irish settlers, who were already accustomed to burning to manage forage for cattle and wildlife in their homelands, and Native American tribes with a robust tradition of maintaining their landscape of grassy prairies, wetlands and open woodlands with well-timed fires. The tribes schooled Florida’s early settlers on the best times of year to burn based on the natural cycles of plants and the seasonal rising and falling of water on the land.

Unlike in the West, where wildfire frequently spelled disaster, Florida’s history of frequent low-intensity burns was far more benign, creating a more fire-tolerant culture in the state, according to Rick Anderson, the former fire management officer at Everglades National Park. “Florida burns two to three million acres a year to manage its fuels,” Mr. Anderson said. “If California did even a percentage of that, they’d have a lot less catastrophic fire there.”

Another place with a long tradition of safe fire is the wilderness of Arnhem Land in northern Australia, where aboriginal peoples light frequent bush fires, as their ancestors have done since the Pleistocene era, according to David Bowman, a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Mr. Bowman published an influential study on the subject in 1999 that describes the remarkable survival of what he considers one of the world’s last intact fire cultures."