‘Good Fire And Bad Fire.’ Indigenous Practice May Be Key To Prevention

"For thousands of years, North American tribes carefully burned forests to manage the land. The future may lie in a return to that past."

"In Margo Robbins’s home, the first thing you notice is family: portraits of children and grandchildren in a crowded display on the wall. The second thing you notice is accomplishment: lines of academic and athletic trophies from those children and grandchildren. The third thing is baskets—Robbins is a Yurok basket-weaver, part of a tradition in her northern Californian nation that stretches back centuries upon centuries.

What you don’t see is that her home is one of the nerve centers of a cultural and political struggle that has been slowly changing the North American West. Her living room is where she co-founded the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, a growing collaboration of Native nations, partnered with nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and government agencies. It’s focused on a single goal: setting forests on fire.

In Robbins’s part of the forest, the ancestral homeland of the Yurok, she has been training teams of fire-lighters. They wear bright yellow flame-retardant Nomex suits and carry torches that drip burning petroleum. Under her watchful eye, they spread lines of flame beneath the trees.

Her message is simple: You can too fight fire with fire. “There’s good fire and bad fire,” she told me during a recent visit. “And the good fire prevents the bad.”"

Charles C. Mann reports for National Geographic with photographs by Kiliii Yüyan December 17, 2020.

Source: National Geographic, 12/28/2020