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The Residents Setting California on Fire in Order to Save It
To live with fire, locals are learning to wield it for good
Sasha Berleman, PhD, grew up in Southern California, and for most of her early life, fire meant ash falling from the sky like snow, or “smoke days” home from school and stuck inside. She was off to college before anyone mentioned the beneficial role of fire in the state’s ecosystems.
“I learned for the first time ever as an adult that fire is necessary in these landscapes, that it has been used by Native peoples for thousands and thousands of years, and that there’s an option for living with fire that doesn’t have to be tragedy,” she tells Future Human. “That really captivated me, after all of those more negative experiences growing up.”
Now, as a fire ecologist, she directs Fire Forward, a program of the conservation nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch that’s working to teach Californians about the ecological benefits of fire. People enrolled in the program gain the skills, experience, and equipment they need to bring those benefits back to the landscape with controlled burns, transforming their relationship to fire in the process.
Californians have always lived with fire. Just not like this. Five of the six largest fires in the state’s history occurred this year, and fire season isn’t over yet. It’s no mystery why: Climate change is the match that lit the flames, and decades of forest mismanagement provided the fuel.
There’s no easy or quick solution for either of those problems. In the coming years, experts expect California’s climate to become even more extreme, oscillating between more intense winter storms and punishing droughts, setting the stage for longer, more destructive fire seasons. Now, more than ever before, Californians need to adapt to live alongside fire. And for a small but growing number of people, that means learning the skills to work with fire, instead of against it.
“There’s an option for living with fire that doesn’t have to be tragedy.”
For thousands of years, Indigenous people in the state used low-intensity, controlled — or prescribed — fires to manage the landscape. The frequent fires nourished the…
