Western U.S. tribes are returning to their ancient practice of clearing forest undergrowth with fire; it was long prohibited but is now gaining acceptance to help prevent big wildfires.
“Guide our hands as we bring fire back to the land,” she intoned before crouching and igniting dead leaves and needles carpeting the ground.
Wildfires have blackened nearly 6,000 square miles in California the past two years and more elsewhere amid prolonged drought and rising temperatures linked to climate change. Dozens have died; thousands of homes have been lost.what tribes argued all along: Low-intensity burns on designated parcels, under the right conditions, reduce the risk by consuming dead wood and other fire fuels on forest floors.
“I got mine to represent my commitment to continuing the traditions of our ancestors,” said Robbins, 59, whose jokes and cackling laugh mask a steely resolve. But when George joined the U.S. Forest Service as a tribal relations manager in 2008, western wildfires were growing bigger and more frequent; officials knew something needed to change.
“Weaving is really, really soothing. It’s kind of like medicine for your soul,” she said, displaying finely crafted baskets at a Yurok firehouse near the village of Weitchpec. “It’s really exciting and gives me a lot of hope that the tide is changing,” Robbins said. “We revived our language, our dances, and now, bringing back fire, we’ll restore the land.”To prepare for the one this month in the Klamath region, Yurok leaders studied weather forecasts, scouted mountainous burn areas, positioned water tanks, uncoiled fire hoses, equipped and drilled 30-plus crew members.
There were young and middle-aged, native and non-native, novices and veterans — some from area tribes, others from far away. As shadows lengthened, cheery yips gave way to shrieks: “Log! Log!” A chunk of flaming timber jounced down a sharply angled slope, smacked onto a two-lane road and hurtled into a thicket below, igniting brush along the way.
“We’ve been talking and begging about doing this for so long, just spinning our wheels,” said Blake, 49. “It feels like we’re finally being heard.”But tribes want to go beyond training exercises and “family burns” on small plots. They’re pushing to operate throughout the vast territories their ancestors occupied.
It’s a fair point, said Craig Tolmie, chief deputy director of Cal Fire, which struggles to balance the tribes’ desires for more fire with opposition from a jittery public.state laws enacted this year Ancient wisdom and scientific research show otherwise, said Chad Hanson, forest ecologist with the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute in California. Regulators are “trying to extort tribes” by making cultural burns contingent on logging, he said.
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