Inhabiting a fire-adapted land

The land used to be inhabited. People lived some or all of the year in almost every place in California, with exceptions of extreme high elevations and extreme desert. This made tending the land feasible--over 4 million acres could be burned each year easily, in areas where people were intimately familiar with the vegetation and weather, around people's homes, without traveling long distances to conduct the burns. Networks of trails--dense in inhabited places--would have been natural fire breaks under these conditions.

Today, much of the land is uninhabited, except temporarily by rangers and recreationists. The inhabited landscape has shrunk to a small fraction of California, and even there, outside of Southern California chaparral ecosystems where fire frequency has increased, most burning has been suppressed. So we have a build up of fuels in forests, a takeover of grasslands by non-native invasive weeds, and general ecosystem degradation.

Simply increasing the acreage burned each year would be a feasible approach to solving this problem if the land was still inhabited. But it is not. So people unfamiliar with the land (topography, vegetation, weather) must travel long distances to conduct controlled burns. This model is expensive, inefficient, and not scalable to the acreages that need to be burned each year--estimated to be over 4 million acres that burned in pre-European times and that is a sustainable level for maintaining California's ecosystems with a natural fire regime, and lessening the likelihood of catastrophic fires.

In addition, large areas of federal public land, formerly inhabited by Indians or patrolled by rangers, have been defunded by Congress year after year to the point where it is rare to see a ranger. The uninformed and uneducated public trashes these lands without guidance or oversight. And the neglected lands have a fire recurrence and intensity that is out of whack and getting wackier.

Hiring more rangers who actually manage and live and camp on the land is one way to solve this problem. Inviting indigenous people to live on and manage land is another. Both approaches should be used to get our public--and private--lands back in balance.