Beneath a cerulean sky and a forest of the largest trees on Earth, the chairman of the Tübatulabal Tribe, Robert Gomez, offered a prayer. “I want to tell the spirit on the other side of the sun to give us power for this burn,” he said. “Give us a good burn.”
After songs, prayers and pronouncements, several dozen members of the Tule River, North Fork Mono and Tübatulabal Tribes and others kindled branches into crackling fires. Thick clouds of blue smoke billowed through the canopy of the giant sequoia forest. A plate of food from a barbecue was offered to the flames.
The carefully monitored fire at the Alder Creek Grove in California was aimed at clearing the forest of growth in the understory and, among other things, at helping to prevent out-of-control wildfires.
And it also was only the second “cultural burn” held by these tribes outside their reservations in more than a century. Indigenous people had been barred from conducting ritual, controlled fires in the forest under a 19th-century law that deemed the blazes destructive. But in 2022, in response to some of the most extreme wildfires in California’s history that occurred in 2020 and 2021, the law was reversed.
“As a result of the humongous fires, the narrative really changed in Sacramento,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief of staff for Assembly member Devon Mathis, who attended the burn. “They were more open to talking about forest management and what the tribes were saying.”
The tribes have long seen the sequoias as more than trees. “They are our ancestors,” said Kenneth McDarment, a Tule River Tribe council member.
For generations, tribal members have been deploying controlled burns on the reservations, where certain stands of sequoia groves had been nurtured for their connection to Indigenous origins in these forests.
William Garfield, a member of the Tule River Tribe who works for the U.S. Forest Service as a liaison to the tribe, said that the trees not only hold the scientific records of past droughts and temperatures in their telltale trunk rings, but they also keep a spiritual record.
“They hold the stories of the people because they have been here for thousands of years,” he said. “People come to listen to the trees to find songs not sung in a long time.”
A wake-up call
The ferocious Castle Fire in 2020 was the first of the extreme fires to strike the heart of the sequoia forests at the crest of the Sierra.
It was one of some 650 wildfires started across Southern and Central California by an unusual “lightning siege” — some 15,000 strikes over a few days. (Studies show that the type of lightning strikes that cause wildfires is increasing substantially as the climate warms.)
The fires burned more than four million acres in California, destroying an estimated 7,500 to 10,600 monarch trees — a species of sequoia that measures four feet or more in diameter. In all, 10 percent to 14 percent of the monarchs died.
“That was the devastating wake-up call,” said Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
A second devastating alarm occurred a year later. The Windy and KNP Complex fires, also started by lightning, swept to the south and north of the Castle Fire region. They killed several thousand more monarch trees — 2,200 to 3,600, or as many as 5 percent of all of California’s remaining large sequoias, including trees on the Tule River Reservation.
“After the Windy Fire we said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’” said Harold Santos, a Tule River Tribe elder and an expert in traditional burning. The tribe approached the U.S. Forest Service and a nonprofit, the Save the Redwoods League, to revitalize burns off the reservation.
“Sequoias are elders to us because they have been here forever,” said Shine Nieto, vice chairman of the Tule River Tribe. “If they go away, we go away.”
The oldest known sequoia, one of three species of redwood, dates back 3,200 years. With some soaring to a height of 300 feet, sequoias, or sequoiadendron giganteum, are native only in a 15-mile-wide band for 250 miles along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. About 80 groves of roughly 80,000 monarch sequoias are distributed in the band at altitudes of 5,000 to 8,400 feet.
Until recently, sequoias were considered virtually impervious to fire, with their spongy, reddish bark about a foot and a half thick and their broccoli-like crowns high above the ground.
The big trees, in fact, evolved with frequent low- or moderate-intensity fires that swept through the groves periodically. Those fires cleared out thick brush and younger trees that would have provided a “fire ladder” threatening the trees’ crowns. The fires offer another benefit; the trees’ cones release their seeds in response to a fire’s heat.
But the practice of intentional fire suppression by the state and the U.S. government over the last 100 years generated a dense tangle of smaller sequoia trees and other vegetation that flourished beneath the monarchs. One recent study found that the amount of vegetation in California’s Klamath Mountains is twice what it was when cultural burning was practiced before colonization.
On top of that, many of the smaller trees beneath the giants were killed by bark beetles and a severe drought with intense heat from 2012 to 2016.
This thick undergrowth helped to transform the recent fires into high-intensity blazes that reached the forest canopy and raced from tree to tree.
The substantial loss of sequoias from fire was unheard-of in forest history. Earlier wildfires were known to have destroyed perhaps 100 or so at most in 2015 and 2017.
“Things changed by an order of magnitude,” said Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration for the Save the Redwoods League. “We realized the big trees were facing an existential crisis.”
In 2022, the National Park Service and the Forest Service declared an emergency, which allowed them to forgo environmental assessments and immediately begin thinning the understory of 11 of the most vulnerable groves by hand and using prescribed fire to keep the growth from creating crown fires.
Such hot fires kill seeds in the soil, and experts are planting a new generation of sequoias, studying genes that may be able to survive a drier, warmer future.
Cultural burning has joined the government’s move toward prescribed fires to reduce vegetation in many places.
But the return to burns off the reservation by Indigenous people has been allowed only the last two years, when California lifted a ban from 1850.
The return of “good” fire is viewed as restorative on several levels. “There’s a lot of cultural burning practice and projects happening now,” said Beth Rose Middleton Manning, a professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Davis. She leads Keepers of the Flame, a group of graduate students and faculty members who research and teach about cultural burning. “It’s helping improve forest resilience, especially in the face of climate change.
“It’s also really important to the community,” she added. “There’s a multigenerational presence at the burns. Elders are sharing knowledge, and children are participating.”
That was the case at the recent burn in the Alder Creek Grove, which is privately owned by the Save the Redwoods League. It is home to the Stagg Tree, believed to be the fifth largest sequoia. The league bought the property in 2019 from a private owner to protect it from development. Six months later, the Castle Fire burned virtually all of it in varying degrees of severity, though the Stagg Tree survived. The league plans to eventually transfer the grove to the Forest Service to be part of the Giant Sequoia National Monument.
In mid-June, the tribes conducted a cultural burn at the private grove, part of lands that have been their traditional homeland for centuries.
“There’s many different types of burns,” said Jesse Valdez, a member of the North Fork Mono Tribe and an expert in traditional burning who led the recent controlled fire. “There’s one for baskets, one for wildlife and one for the health of the trees.”
The ash from the burn sends nitrogen and phosphorus into the roots, and kills insects and insect habitat. After the burn, the tribes rake the ash into the ground to help speed the release of natural fertilizers. “They call it the Mono massage,” Mr. Valdez joked.
More water becomes available as brush and undergrowth are removed from competition. The fires also promote the growth of berries, including the elderberry — which is used for food and medicine. The wood from elderberry bushes is made into a musical instrument.
One important type of burn creates optimal growth for basket making — a traditional craft the tribe has fought for years to preserve.
“After everything is used up and picked over, that’s when they’ll burn,” Mr. Santos said. “In a month it will start sprouting back up,” providing fresh shoots of sour berry and western red bud. A study at Stanford found support for claims that fires increased the density of hickory, used by Yurok and Karuk people.
The size of the flames for these burns should be about hip height, Mr. Santos said as we watched the flames dance, “so it doesn’t burn the roots of the plant.”
The heat from the fires sometimes wakes up plants not seen for a long time. A type of coveted wild tobacco often grows in the aftermath of a fire. “It likes fire,” Mr. Valdez said. “Other tribes will give you a truckload of fish for a little bag of that tobacco.”
Another benefit of a controlled burn is the destruction of a habitat encouraging beetles that have been attacking sequoias, which were long thought to be immune from insect infestations.
Controlled fires are not without risk. Last year, two giant sequoias called the orphans were badly damaged by a prescribed burn in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
Beyond stewardship of the forest, tribal members view the burns as a way to renew a familial relationship with the trees. “The trees to us are like human beings,” Mr. Santos said. “We talk to them and they tell us if they’re sick, and we do things for them they can’t do on their own.”
In addition to burning, efforts are afoot to enlist the help of the beaver to enhance the vigor of the big trees. Biologists recently restored beaver families to meadows near one of the three groves on the Tule River Reservation. As beavers add to a human-made dam — a Beaver Dam Analog — it will cause the water table to rise to provide more water for the trees’ roots.
Tribal members say there is an urgency to restoring what is called “good fire” to the landscape — for the sake of the land as well as for the sake of the first inhabitants here.
“We’re at that point in history where if the knowledge doesn’t get passed down, it gets lost,” Mr. Valdez said.
The post To Protect Giant Sequioas, They Lit a Fire appeared first on New York Times.
