Let’s Use Fire to Protect Our Forests

The Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation’s Forest Futures Salon on Feb. 27 promoted local commitment to land stewardship. However, the stated aspiration to return the Tahoe area landscape to pre-European contact conditions begs a follow-up.

What might a stewardship ethic look like among people who aren’t agency or nonprofit representatives? Can we achieve the aspirations modeled by what we suppose the health of our landscape was pre-contact without the citizens of this place having a commitment to stewardship demonstrated by a reciprocal relationship to the land?

The Tahoe area is a tourist must-visit. The aesthetic properties of this place have a sublime reputation that is marketed as a commodity. I would argue that the essential character of this place is meanwhile misunderstood and neglected; i.e., desiring the property of a place and loving the character of a place are different states of awareness. One indicates passive consumption, the other reciprocal engagement.

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We need to understand our historical legacy to speak coherently of pre-contact forest health. The Wilderness Act Era (the bill became law in 1967) of environmental awareness was an understandable backlash to exploitation, but it is also informed by a myth of wilderness. The first European immigrants were enchanted by the diversity of life and the beauty of California, unaware that it was sculpted by humans using prescribed fire. They assumed that indigenous inhabitants lighting fire were ignorant vandals without historical agency, staggering from one lucky gift of an abundant “wilderness” to the next. The truth is those people had no concept of wilderness. California was their deeply loved and intentionally cared-for home.

The idea of wilderness is an abstract artifact of the modern mind that has manifested in landscapes coveted and owned but not loved. The forests’ long-term neglect has made them a threat to life, human and animal. It doesn’t need to be this way. Fire is an essential characteristic of this land and fundamental to the human project. We can reintroduce reciprocal relationships with the land, whereby where we give the land as much as we take by embracing prescribed fire.

What if every landowner regularly burned piles of raked forest litter? Better yet, what if every landowner cut, piled, and burned excess fuels? And ultimately maintained fuel levels by introducing periodic low, slow fire to the land? I guess that over time, water tables might rise and fire insurance rates might diminish toward zero.

I began using fire to reduce fuels on my Floriston property in 1993. I was evacuated in the face of the Martis Fire in 2001, but returned to find my house safe since the defensible space I’d created using fire worked.

Our fire protection infrastructure is extraordinary. Those who keep that infrastructure functioning are some of the best of us. But relying on firefighting heroes and a war on fire to protect us from catastrophe is to live under siege. Under the current fire regime many of us will likely lose everything we have.

Let’s honor the true character of this place. Both Nevada and Placer counties support robust Prescribed Burn Associations — groups of landowners and others who form partnerships to pool their knowledge, equipment, and other resources to conduct prescribed fires. Let’s reach out to the Truckee Fire Department and CalFire to familiarize ourselves with burning and permitting protocols, and the good people of those institutions who are here to facilitate a better relationship with the land.

~ Darin Bue grew up in the Reno/Truckee area and lives in Floriston. Now retired, he helps coordinate the Eastern Regional Firewise Coalition to make our community more fire resilient. Visit erfwc.org for more information.