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California Today

Native Solutions to Big Fires

Cultural burning practices are working to reduce wildfires in northern Australia. Can they work in California, too?

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Violet Lawson, a landowner near Cooinda, Northern Territory, Australia, burns an area of her land using dead palm fronds that she lights as she walks along the fires’ edge.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Good morning.

(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)

Today’s newsletter is a special dispatch from the San Francisco bureau chief, Thomas Fuller, who spent time covering the fires in Australia.

Bill Tripp learned to burn when he was 4 years old.

In an Indian community along a bend in the Salmon River in the northwest corner of California, Mr. Tripp absorbed traditional burning techniques from his great-grandmother, who was born in the late 1800s and was a repository of knowledge on where and when to burn. He learned the difference between good fire and bad fire.

“We’ve being doing it for millennia,” Mr. Tripp said.

In listening to Mr. Tripp, a member of the Karuk tribe, I was struck by the parallels with Aboriginal burning traditions in northern Australia, which I wrote about during a two-week trip covering the fires.

Native burning techniques have come into the spotlight as many parts of the world grapple with how to reduce destructive, out-of-control wildfires.

The experience in northern Australia has been critical. Researchers have used satellite data to calculate that an Aboriginal burning program started seven years ago has cut hot and destructive wildfires in half and reduced carbon emissions by more than 40 percent.

Could something similar be done in California?

Margo Robbins, a member of the Yurok, California’s largest Indian tribe, traveled to Australia two years ago and saw many similarities with her own cultural burning practices.

In 2014, Ms. Robbins helped organize a burn of seven acres on the Yurok reservation. A crew of 20 prison inmates brought by Cal Fire worked with the tribe to conduct the burn.

“The No. 1 priority for our community was to bring fire back to the land,” she said.

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The Nature Conservancy assists with a yearly controlled burn on the Yurok reservation in Northern California.Credit...Alexandra Hootnick for The New York Times

The 2014 burn rekindled the tradition and has been repeated every year with help from the Nature Conservancy, a charity.

“The land needs fire in order to be healthy,” said Ms. Robbins, a basket weaver who relies on the long and pliable shoots that emerge from burned hazelnut bushes.

Don Hankins, a fire expert at Cal State, Chico, estimates that, at most, a few thousand acres are burned in California every year using traditional cultural burning techniques. This is tiny compared with the Australian program, which covers close to 90 million acres, about the size of Montana.

But Mr. Hankins and tribal fire experts say there seems to be an appetite in California to better understand and expand tribal burning practices. This week he gave a presentation on Indigenous practices to federal officials who visited Butte County to discuss the strategies on dealing with wildfires.

“If we are going to make our landscapes resilient, and thus our communities resilient, we have to follow these practices that are tried and true,” Mr. Hankins said. “There’s definitely opportunity for it.”

Native American burning traditions are similar to Aboriginal ones in the way that they look to nature for signals on when to burn.

Mr. Tripp says it is crucial not to interrupt natural reproductive cycles with fire — nesting birds, flowering plants — but to burn in ways that encourage growth of critical plants like hazelnut bushes and acorn-bearing oaks.

As in Australia, fire was a crucial tool in managing the land before the arrival of Europeans.

Mr. Hankins says researchers are realizing that some of California’s most scenic vistas were shaped by fire — more than they previously appreciated. John Muir’s celebrated paeans to the beauty of the Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy Valleys ignored the Indigenous role in fires, Mr. Hankins said.

“The landscape that he fell in love with was a product of that burning and he completely missed it,” he said.

Scholars have noted parallel experiences of Indigenous groups when they came into contact with European conquerors. Bans on burning came into force in both Australia and California after colonization, and natives were punished if they persisted in burning.

This attitude toward fire was later manifested in public admonitions such as the Smokey Bear campaigns warning against setting wildfires.

For more than a century, the policy of the United States has been to “eliminate every fire,” said Leaf Hillman, a member of the Karuk tribe who is active in fire activities. “It’s catching up with us now and we are paying the price for it.”

There is tension between Native groups in California and state and federal authorities who require that tribes obtain permits before burning, and sometimes ban the activities citing concerns over air quality, liability and fires spreading out of control. Indeed, fire specialists say some forests in California would need to be thinned out before they undergo cultural burning.

As with other Native fire experts, Mr. Tripp, who is deputy director of the Karuk tribe’s Natural Resources Department, says he is working with the National Forest Service, Cal Fire and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to obtain more sovereignty over fire.

“It’s starting to turn the corner,” Mr. Tripp said. “We just want to take the handcuffs off.”

“We view this as our right, a right that we never ceded.”


California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

Thomas Fuller is the San Francisco bureau chief. Before moving to California he reported from more than 40 countries for The Times and International Herald Tribune, mainly in Europe and Southeast Asia. More about Thomas Fuller

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Cultivating Age-Old Native Traditions: Good Fire, to Prevent Bad Fire. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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