Intro: The Freeway Complex Fire
The joy of campfire
the horror of wild
coming over the hills
dried by summer droughts
blurring to a baked autumn
another frontier to burn.
The riverbed on fire
beside La Palma's two lanes
jammed going one way
because the other is a dead end
where we used to live.
AC vents pump what's outside in
choking each sealed chamber
And combustion engines flee by explosions
the same power we depend on,
uncontained.
My Journey: Only You Can Resume Forest Fires
When I was 16, my childhood home in Orange County burned down in a wildfire. Two years earlier, my aunt and uncle's house in San Diego County burned down in a wildfire. Fourteen years later, in 2022, my other aunt and uncle's house in Mariposa County burned down in a wildfire. This year, my sister bought a new house in Riverside County that no insurance company will cover, because of the risk of — you guessed it — wildfire.
I grew up with the image of Smokey the Bear warning, "Only you can prevent forest fires." Turns out, I can't. Smokey was just the cartoon mascot for a federal policy of fire suppression that's only left forests and grasslands drier, older, more homogenized and susceptible to uncontrollable burns, like those that continue to ravage landscapes across the continent for lengthening periods every late summer to fall. Before their forced evacuation by the European-American settlements that instituted these policies, indigenous peoples worked with fire throughout the West Coast by using cultural practices based on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which renewed forests and soils by clearing away the dead, stimulating new growth in their wake.
I didn't know any of this before stumbling upon the regenerative agriculture and permaculture communities trying to bring cultural burning back. My first permaculture teacher, Brian Byers of Lost Valley Ecovillage, Brian Byers, taught that working with fire was one of humans' most important and irreplaceable functions in the ecosystem. He also complained how government-enforced restrictions prevented him from executing controlled pile burns to clear brush from the lands he stewarded and make biochar. A form of charcoal, biochar acts like a sponge for plant nutrients that can then be fixed into the soil to grow food and add fertility for decades, if not centuries, to come. When I proposed to write an article about his work restoring fire to the land, he pointed me to his permaculture teacher, Hazel Vaarde of Siskiyou Permaculture in southern Oregon.
This winter, I enrolled in Hazel's weeklong Social Forestry course, aware this could be my last chance to learn from them. A gender-nonbinary Quaker originally from the Adironddack Mountains, Hazel has been educating about forestry and wild plants on the West Coast since the early '70s, as well as advocating and agitating for environmentally sane policies in less official ways too. (“How much eco sabotage do you want to know about?”) In the endorsement section of Hazel's book, Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place, executive director of the Permaculture Institute of North America Peter Bane says they “walk with wisdom between the settler and indigenous world.” And Hazel certainly has the storytelling chops to prove it, which are worth more as social currency in traditional oral cultures as social currency than any amount of money or certifications. They also speak in phrases, rather than the atomized words of most modern English, each representing a cultural memory with a story as well as a scientific truth behind it. Thus, every lesson from them is about building a vocabulary of the land as much as it is about working with it directly.
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