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The day after the November election, Frank Lake wanted to burn some of his land. Not as a political statement—he just wanted to take advantage of good weather to protect his home from wildfire and kill the conifer seedlings that compete with the black oak trees from which he harvests acorns—a type of burn he has done three times in the past six years. He intended to clear a protective buffer about 350 feet long and 80 feet wide: two-thirds of an acre. Because Lake had burned the area before, the fuel load was light: a thin scatter of leaves and twigs.
Lake had waited till the forecast predicted favorable conditions: cool and windless, dry enough for the leaves to catch fire but with rain coming soon. He made some phone calls and tried to obtain the necessary permit from Cal Fire, the California state fire agency.
The permit came with a kicker. For all burns under 15 acres, Lake told me, Cal Fire required “twelve Firefighter Type 2 personnel, a Burn Boss Type 2, a certain kind of water truck—a small fire truck, essentially—and one to two thousand gallons of extra water capacity.”
A member of both the Yurok and Karuk communities, Lake is a Forest Service ecologist who has taught firefighting for 20-plus years. His Ph.D. research involved tracking the results of forest thinning, fuel reduction, and experimental burns in different settings. He knows how to hire certified firefighters and burn bosses. But the going rate for a private burn boss is as much as $1,500 per day, and there are only a few of them in the state. (California is about to launch a program to increase their number.) But even if he could find a burn boss, Lake couldn’t imagine asking all these people to supervise an hour-long fire. He could have tried to negotiate with Cal Fire for conditions he considered more reasonable, but that would take him past the good weather. “So I just gave up,” Lake said. “I didn’t protect my land.” It was, in his view, a missed opportunity to do a small, good thing.
To burn safely, fire-lighters must be able to react nimbly to changing weather conditions. Yet fire decisions are made by a bureaucracy ruled by what Lake dryly calls “liability aversion.” Officials believe, with some justification, that they will be blamed, fired, or sued if a burn goes wrong and not rewarded if it goes right. Unsurprisingly, they require elaborate precautions that create bottlenecks and drive up costs.
If a raging wildfire threatens a neighborhood, Lake said, firefighters can burn a hundred-acre patch to create a protective firewall. No authorization needed—they just go to work. Even if the preventive burn damages houses, or causes harmful smoke, there’s no litigation.
But if people want to burn that same area preventively, an entire regulatory apparatus swings into motion, according to Lenya Quinn-Davidson, fire advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council. On U.S. government land such as national forests, burns must follow federal standards. For every planned fire, those standards require an extensive environmental compliance process and many specific documents outlining the burn plan. Burn crews must be certified. For a Firefighter Type 2, that takes 32 hours of coursework; for a Burn Boss Type 2, it’s usually 10 years of experience.
“The bureaucracy is daunting,” she said. “Everyone wrestles with it.”
In California, would-be burners on private land must have an annual air-quality permit and a smoke-management plan. “You have to outline desired burning conditions, wind directions, and map sensitive receptors—schools, hospitals, airports—within a 20-mile radius,” Quinn-Davidson said. “You also have to estimate emissions. Your average person doesn’t know how to figure that out. They come to me and say, ‘How in the world will I know how many emissions will be released?’ ” And if the burn is between May 1 and the day the fire season is officially declared to be over, she said, “you have to get a whole other permit from Cal Fire.” (This was the permit that Frank Lake was trying to obtain.) Cal Fire, Quinn-Davidson said, “essentially makes you go back up to federal standards.” Little wonder so little burning takes place.
The contrast with the Southeast is stark. From 1998 to 2018, according to figures compiled by University of Idaho forester Crystal Kolden, the South treated twice as much land with prescribed fire as the rest of the nation. In the South, Quinn-Davidson told me, attitudes toward fire are different. “Burning is recognized as something ordinary people can do with experience,” she said. “It is not a professionalized task for people with certificates but a local property right.” And instead of making burners liable for any problems, no matter their cause, some Southern states have laws holding burners liable only if they are grossly negligent. In these more favorable situations, local fire crews have the authority and incentive to quickly take advantage of preventive-burn opportunities. As a result, Twitter is not filled with scary photographs of catastrophic fires in Alabama.
“It may sound strange coming from somebody in California,” Quinn-Davidson said, laughing, “but they’re way ahead of us in the Southeast.” Public understanding and acceptance of prescribed fire generally is growing in the West, she and others believe. But there is not yet a mechanism to translate this increased understanding into more actual burning.
In much of the West, Native societies—the largest reservoir of fire-savvy people in the region—could take over this role. The U.S. pays billions of dollars each year to fly tens of thousands of firefighters from as far away as Canada and Australia to fight fires in the West. Why not pay Indigenous communities a fraction of that to create preventive and cultural fire? They already are doing it when allowed—the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kolden found, is the sole federal agency “to substantially increase prescribed fire use” on land within its purview. Why not put Margo Robbins and Elizabeth Azzuz in charge of their area? Why not give significant authority over other areas to community groups who have learned from Indigenous burners? “My thought is, why don’t we focus on local job opportunities that restore fire instead of hiring more firefighter crews from out of state to fight them?” Quinn-Davidson asked.
Prescribed burns can cause damage, because these are human endeavors, and humans make mistakes. In 2000, a preventive fire in New Mexico consumed 235 houses. But intentionally set fires have a remarkably good record. A study of 6,373 prescribed burns published this past February found that just 112 spread beyond their boundaries, and that almost all of these “escapes” were confined to a few acres. For vaccines, the government has established a fund that helps people who suffer the rare bad reactions. Quinn-Davidson suggests a similar compensatory mechanism could be set up for prescribed burns.
“There is a tremendous body of expertise here, and it should be used,” Tripp told me. Like Azzuz, he had been burning since he was a toddler. As the wildfires in the West have increased, so has his anger and exasperation. From his point of view, Native people with deep knowledge of place have been struggling to persuade unwieldy bureaucracies to allow them to do something that would benefit all.
“Beyond that,” Tripp said, “this is our land. We’ve never given it up. We want to take care of it. And as far as I am concerned, it’s our right to do that.”
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