The Great Climate Migration Has Begun

[David Lockmiller]

Today, [the New York Times is] sharing a deeper dive about how Indigenous Californians’ use of fire has long been dismissed. Now, though, as record-breaking wildfires continue to burn in California, there’s growing recognition of their expertise:

When Belinda Brown was a child, she would rise early in the morning every spring and fall to help her father and grandfather light the fields of the XL Ranch Indian reservation outside of Alturas, Calif. She would take a metal rake to the grasses and watch as flames spread.

“Fire was absolutely a part of what we did all the time,” she said. “It wasn’t a fearful thing.”

Long before California was California, Native Americans used fire to keep the lands where they lived healthy. That meant intentionally burning excess vegetation at regular intervals, during times of the year when the weather would keep blazes smaller and cooler than the destructive wildfires burning today.

The work requires a deep understanding of how winds would spread flames down a particular hillside or when lighting a fire in a forest would foster the growth of certain plants, and that knowledge has been passed down through ceremony and practice. But until recently, it has been mostly dismissed as unscientific.

Now, as more Americans are being forced to confront the realities of climate change, firefighting experts and policymakers are increasingly turning to fundamental ecological principles that have long guided Indigenous communities.

[What would President Abraham Lincoln do? He would listen to the wisdom of the Indigenous People. And, now this process would work even better than centuries ago because of accurate weather forecasts.]

More than five million acres have burned on the West Coast this year, including a staggering four million in California, where four of the five largest fires ever recorded here started in August or September.

Officials and experts have coalesced around the need to abandon longstanding policies requiring that every fire be extinguished and to significantly increase the use of prescribed burning. The practice involves determining which areas are overgrown and when conditions like wind direction and air moisture are right to intentionally ignite less intense fires that can be carefully managed.