Cultural burning in California: Key to prevent deadly wildfires.

On May 20, the U.S. Forest Service announced a 90-day “pause” on prescribed fires. National conversations about fire policy often ignore the fact that millennia-old models of “best available science” and “on-the-ground-implementation” are right before our eyes: Long before U.S. bureaucrats embraced prescribed burns as a forest management tool, Indigenous stewards across the West tended woodlands by routinely removing excess vegetation, pruning trees, and setting “good fires.” This practice, known as cultural burning, should be a key part of fighting what scientists predict will be a mega-wildfire season for 2022—and beyond. While the U.S. Forest Service ban doesn’t directly affect tribes with substantive reservation lands and fire departments like the Yurok or Tule River tribes, which oversee cultural burns on their own tribal lands, it still takes a bite out of this year’s burn plans. “As the USFS aren’t allowed to do prescribed fire, we would be hard-pressed to get USFS resources,” said Rod Mendes, Yurok fire chief. The training, part of a 140-hour workforce development program that combines traditional ecological knowledge with restoration ecology, aims to “cultivate land stewardship, livelihood, and leadership skills that weave collaborative relationships between Tribal members and the community at large for the benefit of all lands and beings.” Graduates will join a new generation of Native Americans, like Reed, returning flames to lands hungry for good fire.