Managing Wildfire Through Cultural Burns

Short Wave

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🗓️ 28 July 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Fire has always been part of California's landscape. But long before the vast blazes of recent years, Native American tribes held controlled burns that cleared out underbrush, encouraged new plant growth, and helped manage wildfires. It's a tradition that disappeared with the arrival of Western settlers. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer explains how tribal leaders are trying to restore the practice by partnering up with state officials who are starting to see cultural burns as a way to help bring extreme wildfires under control. (Encore episode)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey short waivers, Emily Quang here. Last summer we aired an episode on cultural burning,
0:05.7	setting small controlled fires to manage the landscape. It's a practice with a long history
0:11.9	among indigenous communities in the U.S., and could play a role in reducing the risk of extreme
0:17.6	wildfires. And with multiple fires burning now on the West Coast, we thought it would be a good idea
0:24.0	to re-air this episode today. Alright, here's the show. You're listening to Shortwave
0:32.2	from NPR. Hey everybody, Emily Quang here with NPR climate correspondent Lauren Summer.
0:39.0	Hey Lauren. Hey Emily. So in California where you are this week, the states that are record for
0:45.9	the most acres burned in any fire season, more than two million acres so far. And in an average
0:52.7	fire season in California, around 300,000 acres burned. So things are bad. Yeah, it definitely is.
0:58.8	I mean, I'm in the Bay Area and when I woke up this morning, the sky is completely full of smoke
1:04.9	because there's three huge fires burning all around this whole area. But you know, today,
1:11.2	I'm actually not here to talk about those kind of destructive fires. I'm here to talk about
1:16.1	good fire. Good fire. Okay. This kind of fire, it actually has an incredibly long history. And
1:23.1	one that was erased for many decades. And I got to see it in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
1:28.5	Good morning. Good morning. There are around 60 people, you know, gathered in this Oakwood
1:34.0	land. And this was back in February. And everyone was standing in a big circle.
1:38.7	So what we're doing out here is restoring life. That's Ron Good. He's tribal chairman of the North
1:45.9	Fork Mono. He brought this group together from tribes around Northern California for this
1:51.1	two-day ceremony to do what's known as cultural burning, basically setting low grade fires on the
1:58.1	landscape. We don't put fire on the ground and not know how it's going to turn out. That's what makes
2:05.2	it cultural burning because we cultivate. So cultural burning, these aren't like the big wildfires you
2:13.7	see on the news at all. No, these kind of fires, they're controlled and they're low to the ground.
	...

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