We've Been Fighting Wildfires Wrong for a Century — Here's What Indigenous Fire Stewardship Teaches Us

Every autumn, when plumes of smoke darken skies across the American West, we collectively perform the same ritual of shock and grief. Record-breaking fire seasons are announced. Communities are leveled. Air quality indexes soar into hazardous territory for hundreds of millions of people. And then, as the rains return, we do almost nothing to change the fundamental approach that keeps producing these catastrophes.

The truth that fire ecologists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and a growing number of land managers have been saying for decades is simple but uncomfortable: we created this crisis by trying to eliminate fire from landscapes that evolved to burn.

The Suppression Paradigm: A Century of Compounding Error

The modern era of wildfire suppression in the United States can be traced to a single catalytic event: the Big Blowup of 1910. Over two scorching days in August, fires swept across three million acres of Idaho, Montana, and Washington, killing 85 people — 78 of them firefighters. The newly formed U.S. Forest Service, still fighting for its institutional survival, seized on the disaster to justify an aggressive, zero-tolerance stance toward wildfire.

By 1935, the agency had codified the "10 a.m. policy": every reported fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the following morning. This mandate reflected an industrial-age conviction that nature could and should be controlled. Fire was framed as a destructive force, an enemy to be defeated with manpower, machinery, and eventually aircraft.

For decades, suppression appeared to work. Fewer acres burned annually through the mid-twentieth century. But beneath that reassuring statistic, a slow-motion ecological bomb was being armed. Fire-adapted forests — ponderosa pine savannas, mixed-conifer woodlands, chaparral shrublands — began accumulating fuel at unprecedented rates. Without periodic low-intensity fire to clear understory brush, thin small-diameter trees, and recycle nutrients into the soil, forests became dense, continuous, and primed for the kind of high-severity crown fires that no suppression force can stop.

Dr. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at the University of California, Merced, has documented how the area burned by high-severity fire has increased dramatically since the 1980s. "We didn't prevent fire," she has noted. "We just delayed it and made it worse."

What Indigenous Peoples Have Always Known

Long before European colonization, Indigenous peoples across North America managed vast landscapes with fire. This was not accidental burning or simple land-clearing. It was a sophisticated, place-based practice refined over thousands of years — what many Native practitioners today call cultural burning.

Cultural burning differs from modern prescribed fire in fundamental ways. It is guided by deep ecological knowledge transmitted across generations: which species respond to fire and when, how moisture, wind, and season interact, what the land needs in a given year. Burns are typically small, low-intensity, and precisely timed. They are conducted not by centralized agencies following standardized protocols, but by communities whose livelihoods depend on getting it right.

The objectives of cultural burning extend well beyond fuel reduction. Tribes across California — the Karuk, Yurok, Miwok, and many others — burned to encourage the growth of specific food plants, including acorns, berries, and edible greens. They burned to improve habitat for deer, elk, and salmon. They burned to maintain travel corridors, reduce pest populations, and sustain the open, park-like forests that early European explorers marveled at but wrongly attributed to "wilderness."

Ron Goode, tribal chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, has described cultural burning as "a conversation with the land." That framing is instructive. Where the suppression paradigm treats fire as a monologue of destruction, Indigenous fire stewardship treats it as dialogue — a reciprocal relationship in which humans and fire together maintain ecological health.

The scale of pre-contact burning was enormous. Researchers estimate that between 4.5 and 12 million acres burned annually in California alone before European arrival, much of it intentionally set by Indigenous peoples. Today, despite record-breaking wildfire seasons, California averages roughly 500,000 to 1 million acres burned per year — far less than the historical baseline.

The Science Catches Up

Over the past two decades, Western fire science has increasingly validated what Indigenous practitioners have long known. A growing body of peer-reviewed research confirms that:

• Low-intensity prescribed fire reduces fuel loads by 70-90%, making subsequent wildfires less severe and easier to manage.
• Post-burn landscapes show increased biodiversity, including the return of native grasses, forbs, and fire-dependent species like giant sequoias and longleaf pines.
• Watersheds treated with prescribed fire produce cleaner water, because low-severity burns don't trigger the erosion and sedimentation that follow high-severity wildfires.
• Smoke from prescribed burns is a fraction of what catastrophic wildfires produce. A 2019 study in the journal Fire estimated that proactive burning could reduce total smoke exposure by 50-70% compared to the status quo.

The economic case is equally compelling. The U.S. spends roughly $3-4 billion annually on wildfire suppression — a figure that has tripled in inflation-adjusted terms since the 1990s. Studies from the USDA Forest Service and academic institutions estimate that every dollar spent on prescribed burning saves $3 to $8 in avoided suppression costs and property damage.

Despite this evidence, the pace of prescribed burning in the United States remains stubbornly low. Federal and state agencies treat roughly 3-4 million acres per year with prescribed fire, while scientists estimate that 30-60 million acres need treatment annually to meaningfully reduce wildfire risk.

Why Progress Is So Slow

If the science is clear and the economics favorable, why aren't we burning more? The barriers are institutional, legal, and cultural.

Liability and litigation. In most U.S. states, practitioners who conduct prescribed burns face strict liability if fire escapes and damages property. A single escaped burn can result in millions of dollars in lawsuits, career-ending consequences for land managers, and political backlash that sets prescribed fire programs back years. Several states, including Florida, have adopted "gross negligence" liability standards that offer more protection, but the patchwork of state laws remains a major deterrent.

Air quality regulations. The Clean Air Act and state air quality laws were not designed with fire-adapted ecosystems in mind. Prescribed burn windows are often narrow — constrained by weather, fuel moisture, and air quality permits — and regulators sometimes deny permits even when conditions are favorable, because the resulting smoke may temporarily push particulate matter readings above legal thresholds. The irony is stark: by preventing small amounts of controlled smoke, we guarantee vastly larger amounts of uncontrolled smoke from wildfires.

Workforce and funding. Federal agencies face chronic staffing shortages. Wildland firefighters earn poverty-level wages, and the seasonal workforce structure makes it difficult to build and retain the skilled burn crews needed for year-round prescribed fire programs. Funding remains overwhelmingly skewed toward suppression rather than prevention.

Cultural resistance. Perhaps the deepest barrier is psychological. After a century of Smokey Bear messaging — "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" — the American public has internalized the idea that all fire is bad. Convincing homeowners, elected officials, and agency leaders that we need more fire, not less, requires a fundamental shift in how our society relates to the natural world.

Promising Developments

Despite these obstacles, the landscape is shifting. The catastrophic fire seasons of 2020 and 2021 — which burned more than 15 million acres combined and blanketed cities from San Francisco to New York in smoke — created political urgency that decades of scientific advocacy had not.

Federal investment. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (2021) and Inflation Reduction Act (2022) together allocated over $7 billion for wildfire risk reduction, including significant funding for prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, and post-fire restoration. The USDA Forest Service has committed to treating an additional 20 million acres over ten years through its Wildfire Crisis Strategy.

Indigenous-led partnerships. Tribal prescribed fire programs are expanding, often in collaboration with federal and state agencies. The Karuk and Yurok Tribes in northern California have established formal agreements with the U.S. Forest Service to conduct cultural burns on ancestral lands. The Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, supported by The Nature Conservancy, facilitates knowledge exchange between tribal practitioners and agency personnel.

State-level reform. California, Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico have all passed legislation in recent years to reduce liability barriers, streamline permitting, and fund prescribed fire programs. California's SB 332 (2021) shifted the liability standard for certified burn bosses from strict liability to gross negligence, a landmark change that practitioners had sought for years.

Community-based burning. Prescribed burn associations — grassroots cooperatives in which private landowners pool labor, equipment, and expertise to conduct burns on their own property — have exploded in popularity. Originating in the Great Plains, these associations now operate in more than 30 states and have treated hundreds of thousands of acres that government agencies lack the capacity to reach.

The Path Forward

The question is no longer whether fire belongs on the landscape. The science, the economics, and thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge all point to the same conclusion. The question is whether our institutions can adapt fast enough.

This means dramatically scaling up prescribed fire and managed wildfire — letting naturally ignited fires burn under appropriate conditions rather than reflexively suppressing them. It means reforming liability laws, air quality regulations, and funding structures that currently penalize proactive burning. It means investing in the workforce: raising firefighter pay, creating year-round prescribed fire positions, and building career pathways that treat fire management as skilled, essential work.

Most fundamentally, it means listening to the people who have been tending these landscapes with fire since time immemorial. Indigenous fire stewardship is not a quaint historical footnote — it is a living body of knowledge that offers practical, tested solutions to one of the defining environmental challenges of our time.

The forests are telling us what they need. We just have to stop fighting fire and start working with it.

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References:

• Kolden, C.A. (2019). "We're Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk." Fire, 2(2), 30.
• Marks-Block, T., & Tripp, W. (2021). "Facilitating Prescribed Fire in Northern California through Indigenous Governance and Interagency Partnerships." Fire, 4(3), 48.
• North, M.P., et al. (2021). "Pyrosilviculture Needed for Landscape Resilience of Dry Western United States Forests." Journal of Forestry, 119(5), 520-544.
• Stephens, S.L., et al. (2020). "Fire and Climate Change: Conserving Seasonally Dry Forests Is Still Possible." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 18(6), 354-360.
• Lake, F.K., & Christianson, A.C. (2019). "Indigenous Fire Stewardship." In Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface Fires. Springer.
• USDA Forest Service. (2022). "Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America's Forests."
• Prescribed Fire Training Center. (2023). "National Prescribed Fire Use Survey Report."