This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Shannon Burman, and I'm Sarah Goodwin.

You're listening to the sound of a redwood forest after a wildfire. It's eerily quiet,

save for the sound of our own footsteps. We recorded those sounds in the spring of 2021.

That was nine months after a devastating fire swept through California's Big Basin Redwood State Park.

The flames left the redwood trees charred, but still mostly alive. The rest of the life that

usually animates the forest was gone. You can hear it in the silence. There's always been a

fire season in California in the late summer and fall, but recently it's gotten longer and worse,

much worse. There's no denying climate change here. 2022 has been another year of drought for the

American West, and that means that until the winter rains come in force, there's still a risk

for fire. California forests burned frequently until about a hundred years ago when across the

West a new approach to fire emerged in the name of conservation, suppression, as in fire was bad,

a destructive force to be avoided at all costs. But research into thousands of years of climate

history has shown that fire has always been a part of this landscape. We see it in the tree rings

of the ancient redwoods. Fire keeps these forests healthy and vibrant. The native peoples who lived

in these forests before colonization seem to understand this intuitively. From an indigenous cultural

perspective, we think about the frequencies of fire and the stewardship of those landscapes.

Don Hankins is a scientist who studies the intersection of fire, nature, and people. He's also a

member of the Plains Mewok tribe. The history of the removal of fire from California's at least

coastal landscapes began pretty early on with early Spanish settlement when we think about some

of the first policies within the state that limited the extent of where indigenous people could engage

with fire. That policy initially came out around 1793 from a proclamation from the Spanish

governor of California that forbid indigenous people from using fire. And so that spread from

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