Cambria Barlett: Fire Debt
“Many of these people make these management decisions that are short-sighted. They're thinking about 5-10 years. We're talking about in perpetuity, generations after us.” Nakia Williamson's voice cut through the thick air, each word spoken with slow, steady intention. He faced east, the direction of his tribe’s buildings, the Nez Perce direction of insight and wisdom. He stood in the center of a circle of students sitting in sun-bleached camp chairs. We looked at him intently, not breaking our attention for a moment despite the smoke that filled our lungs, forming a heavy oppressive veil swallowing the landscape in all directions. The polluted air hung around us, perfectly illustrating the short-sighted land management decisions he referred to. The next day we left the reservation, relieved to escape the smoke.
We sat in a small clearing, a few miles down a trail in the San Juan National Forest. In our hands, we hold round slabs of tree trunks. Each cut of wood is cold and smooth, polished by the many fingers of students who learned from them before us. The tree’s life is documented in each concentric circle. Looking back at a collection of tree rings from a forest, one can discover that they tell decades-long stories about the forest's health. Small scars run through the wood, memorializing times when wildfire flames and smoke had licked up the tree trunks. The scars reveal a rhythm of small, frequent wildfires. These fires are necessary to the health of the ecosystem, shaping the landscape, clearing undergrowth, and making room for new life. The quiet consistency of fire documented in the rings continues up until a moment when everything stops. Halted by relentless fire suppression strategies established by the United States Forest Service. In the early 1900s, the Forest Service created their friendly mascot: Smoky Bear. His fuzzy face and yellow fedora, impress a narrative of fear to the general public surrounding fire. Those efforts to suppress fire are demonstrated clearly in the tree rings, that is until the forest eventually demanded an intense reckoning. Fueled by years of neglect, fires began growing in scale and intensity, burning hot as a reminder that we must repay our debt.
Across the West more intense fires spread through forests and communities, leaving them to suffer the consequences of suppression. From a small dirt road outside of Winthrop, Washington we look out at a canyon, the aftermath of the Cub Creek 2 fire that had burned over 70,000 acres in 2021, lies below us. Only a few green trees survived amongst the trunks of standing dead that blanketed the land in every direction. Dr. Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist from the University of Washington, stands with us. She had greeted us with a friendly smile, a happy floppy-eared dog running circles around her feet. But now she is solemn as she describes the burn site with deep familiarity and knowledge. As we talked to Susan about her research the wind howled through the valley. We could hear the crashing of trees, breaking clean in half and falling to the ground below. The snapping became so frequent and loud that we all fell into a motionless silence. In that moment it felt as though the urgency of addressing the issue of unnaturally catastrophic burns echoed, quite literally, through the landscape. Susan looked out at the forest with genuine concern. “I worry also about the future of some forests…When you have this much tree mortality, you have to worry a little bit about where the seeds are coming from.” She explains that the Ponderosa pine forest is in danger because fires, as big as this one, sweep through entire watersheds burning their seeds and undergrowth. Even huge ancient trees which used to be able to survive smaller fires, are now falling to the ground, losing their opportunity to replenish the forest and leaving soils to erosion. High severity fires are pushing ecosystem to the brink of ecological collapse.
It’s not just the forest at risk. Susan asked our group how many of us had been impacted by wildfires. We looked around at each other to find that more than half of us were raising our hands. Susan paused for a moment, she was saddened by our answer but not even the slightest bit surprised. Her voice wobbled with emotion as she talked about a particularly grim fire that swept through her community in 2014. “So many people lost homes,” she said “We lost power for eight days, as well as any communication, like the cell tower. And so we literally got to the point where we were all going to the post office and looking at whose house burned down like there were just lists.” In the wake of such tragedies, there is a growing awareness of the necessity to manage our forests more effectively, to repay the debt we owe.
The solution to catastrophic wildfires is tantalizingly obvious. We must bring back more frequent, less detrimental fires. Susan’s research reflected this necessity; she found that reintroducing fire through prescribed burns worked like “a magic wand.” She exclaimed that it was “actually the most satisfying study I've ever done because the results were just so clear.” Her study was about this area but similar conclusions are being drawn across the West. The reintroduction of fire is connected to a long history of burning. It's about becoming part of the ecosystem again instead of working against it. Susan emphasizes this countless times, “there's been a big busting of the myth that fire ecology is not just about Western science, it's also about indigenous knowledge.” Understanding indigenous knowledge is a crucial part of introducing prescribed burns. However, this knowledge has been forced away by colonizers for so long that many ancient land stewardship practices are lost. Nakia echos the challenge, “So this is the type of knowledge [oral histories] that we still carry forth, and we still try to hold on for the benefit of our children, and to also try to communicate it to people that are making decisions without the same history that we have, and some knowledge of how this land works and how it has changed over time.” Now starts the long journey of rediscovering our relationship with land. Susan said, “I think that there's actually quite a bit that we can do, and it's also very disrespectful to indigenous people to say that we're not part of these ecosystems and we don't have a responsibility to act.”
There is of course resistance to the reintroducing fire, especially in communities that have experienced a great deal of fire trauma. We are attempting to apply old methods in a new context, but luckily people have found methods that work effectively and safely. We are up against a 100-year narrative of fear that has been ingrained into us by Smokey Bear. We are slowly learning how to undo this mistaken belief and come back to an understanding where fire is seen positively again. Susan thinks that people will start to understand the solution through education. She distinctly recalls a moment when she was teaching a group of young kids, some of whom had lost their homes to fire. When asked if the fire was good or bad, they all wrote similar answers in their notebooks: “Nature needs fire and sometimes it's bad for humans.” The shift in understanding is well underway.
The issue is clear, it is written in the rings of trees, the forests of standing dead trunks, and the emotion on the faces of affected communities. The solution is clear too, the forest has asked us to repay the debt that we have created through fire suppression. And, most importantly we know how to do it, indigenous knowledge and research have given us the answers. We must once again be in a relationship with nature where we can take care of the forests just as they take care of us.