From Suppression to Stewardship: Bringing Cultural and Prescribed Burning Back to the Land

In honor of Indigenous Peoples' day we're sharing this episode about how Indigenous communities are bringing good fire back to the land and heralding in a new era of landscape and wildfire management. 

In recent years a new season has cemented itself into the western calendar: Wildfire Season.  Research shows that wildfires are three times more frequent and four times larger than they were in the 80's and 90's. A big reason for this is the fire suppression policies that have been in place for the last century to encourage the growth of timber production. Indigenous communities used to tend to the landscape by conducting controlled burns but since the government made it illegal for them to do so, forests in the West have grown unchecked make it easy for wildfires to spread with unprecedented speed and ferocity. 

And the Klamath Basin is no exception. The McKinney Fire consumed more than 50,000 acres the Klamath National Forest in less than 36 hours in 2022. The heavy rains which followed and fell onto the burn scar caused flooding and debris flow and killed tens of thousands of fish in the Klamath River and its tributaries. 

But things are changing. There is increasing appreciation for the necessity of prescribed and controlled burns and Indigenous communities are reclaiming the ability to tend to their lands with fire. And some of the most exciting progress in this area is happening in the Klamath basin. In this episode I talk with Lenya Quinn-Davidson and Margo Robbins about what fire has to do with river health, and how they're working to bring good fire back to the landscape and to the Yurok people. 

This podcast was made possible by support from American Rivers and was produced by Blue Canoe Studios with invaluable guidance from Kerry Donahue.