Into The Fire

The time has come for me to engage in the fire dialogue. I need to speak personal truths and not be burdened with representing Redbird, because my own thought evolution might be important. I also may call out the work of well known, educated and respected individuals whose voices carry a lot of weight in the discussion. I need to take personal responsibility for doing so because I am going to question the notions of people who have invested a lifetime in their work and who, in all cases, will have letters in front of and behind their names that I do not. And in that same breath let me assure you that the big picture points, again and again, to a truth that I had to be taught, and that more people are now learning.

Indigenous land management practices gave us the beautiful landscapes that europeans fell in love with when they arrived here.

But see, I had to be taught that.

I came out of the womb connected to the natural world in a powerful spiritual way. Not that there was any reason for it. I was conceived here, in the Hollywood area, born in Germany and raised for the first critical years of my conscious existence in an apartment in Sherman Oaks. I was nine before I encountered an open space area with no concrete, eleven or twelve before I saw snow. I did not like people and thought from early on that we were the cause for everything bad and out of balance on this planet.

I was a hard core environmentalist by the age of ten, writing letters to my representatives regularly, and by my teens I had developed a taste for educating, and began creating library exhibits about everything but humans. And then came Earth Day.

I was past my teens now. I had to incorporate humans into the scenario because humans made this Earth Day thing. And somewhere in that same time frame I started meeting people in the local Native American community. It was life changing on many levels. Fairly quickly I had to come to grips with hating humans and cross the bridge back to self. Self hatred. Generational guilt. Generational trauma. Genetic memory from multiple gene pools. Being the direct biological by-product of World War II. It would be a few decades still before I would know what an empath is, but I was already pretty busy blocking that information with drugs and alcohol. And I had been since I was about fourteen.

And that’s important because why? Because much of the environmental movement has its roots in a kind of separation from self and nature and a desire to do on a physical level what is impossible. To archive nature. To save in an unchanging, static way, to preserve, to enshrine, the natural world at a certain point in its process that we cherish. It is much like the desire to maintain our youthful state. It cannot be done forever.

I have only recently evolved to this understanding. Prior to which, as far as I was concerned, everything, every thing should just be left alone because people somehow don’t fit in the ecological world.

But we are here by the billions, aren’t we? So just leaving everything alone isn’t going to work unless all people everywhere vanish. Then it will work. Because we are the only beings on this planet that are capable of this level of thought, and creation, and destruction, and without us, yes, the world will be fine. Specifically with regard to fire, we are the ones who build shelters that cannot withstand fire and place them in the path of large-scale, regularly occurring fire events.

When I moved to the Angeles National Forest I had to come to grips with some forestry concepts. Kat High of the Hupa nation was instrumental in explaining the pre-history portion of land management. The part that’s a little harder to decipher is what happened after that - a lot of lumber was harvested from the forest, the high quality lumber, followed by a preservation movement that stopped all lumber taking. Leaving dense stands of trees, many of them less valuable to humans, too thick to walk through, now fiercely protected from harvest. That was the reality Kat and a few old timers from the Forest Service helped me see in 2007. In 2009 a quarter of that reality was converted to ash by the Station fire. And no one should have been surprised. I certainly wasn’t. You could see it. You could see the forest had come to a growth climax in many places where something had to release it.

If you couldn’t see it, it was because no one had taught you how to see. What you were looking at. The long, long history of human involvement, and then disengagement.

Humans are not somehow the ecological misfits. We have chosen to separate ourselves from nature. We have chosen to lose our knowledge of the planet that sustains everything about us. Our egos allow us to have this separation. And hating the human race and thereby yourself will solve absolutely nothing, ever. It will only make you and others suffer even more.

We should absolutely cherish and conserve this amazing planet. We should never pollute environments; our waste should be converted, with the help of the planet, back into resources that can be utilized by the natural world and then eventually, by us again.

Now my second evolution was born out of the Station fire. There is a lot of fire science out there and I chose to limit how much of it I learned because I wanted to have an authentic, organic learning experience from the fire. I had expectations that nature would heal itself and those were wildly surpassed by what I saw in front of me. Yes, there were some burn areas that were very severe and took longer to begin recovering. “Longer” in human terms. In a geological nano-second, really.

In this new incarnation I came to truly resent the tree planters, but I did not fully understand why. There is nothing really wrong with planting trees. In fact I love trees, love planting trees, love the thought and reality of creating environments and have never understood why people are so afraid to create. We destroy on a monumental scale but we are suddenly afraid to create and re-create habitat? But somehow the whole tree planting thing rubbed me in a bad way. I would try to get over it, even partner with those entities whom I loathed in an effort to heal that loathing. I tried. I really did.

I have come to understand there are a lot of reasons why tree planting efforts fail or do not represent the best interaction we could have with the forest. I have come all the way around to the conclusion that in the wake of the fire we should should have sold salvage lumber and I even think I know the time frame we should have done it in. Salvage lumber removal should have occurred roughly six months after the fire and ceased before the second post fire spring. And now I ingest the science behind fire because I want to be able to say these things with some science behind me.

Trees communicate amongst each other underground. A “mother tree” which has burned in a fire and is dead or will die is still communicating underground and can send energy and information to its offspring trees through the communication network that exists below the soil. You want to let that happen before you remove the part of the tree that is above ground. But you don’t want to wait so long that you disturb the new growth that will follow in the lumber gathering process.

Lumber salvage does not need to occur everywhere. The key word both environmentalists and land managers need to embrace is mosaic.

Leave some forest untouched. Manage your timber so fires are not as catastrophic. Choose some areas for public enjoyment that are maintained in a fashion which allows engagement. Manage the human interface regions.

Get over the idea that you are doing anyone a favor trying to make nature fit into your desire to have consistency and unchanging comfort and sameness in your life because that is not what life is, on any level…not spiritually and not physically. Even what is dead does not stay the same. It decomposes. Feeds the next generation. We cannot escape the law of impermanence.

Everybody with a stake in this discussion has some things right. Everyone. What no one has is a one size fits all solution because we are dealing with living, changing dynamics and, because we are human, we get emotionally attached to our ideas, and to being right, and preserving what we love and to the experiences that fire itself has brought us…sometimes terrible beyond description. Every time I read a new paper or opinion piece I learn something new, and I have to subordinate my own ego to that learning process.

My ideas may evolve. I hope they do. Right here, right now, this is where I stand, educational pedigree lacking, and unwilling to let that silence me.

One of the most amazing plant communities on earth is chaparral. It is a fire climax plant community meaning that fire is what renews it; but if it gets too much fire, even one time, you can lose that plant community forever to invasive species. No amount of words can convey how incredible true chaparral is. How much life it supports. How intricately interwoven the plants are on every level. How open and clean the ground is beneath the plants. And how fast it becomes degraded once you mess with it.

Some plants need at least twenty years between fire intervals to complete their reproductive cycle. Multiple fires occurring too close together are devastating for chaparral.

I live surrounded by it, I have for seven years, and I have come to love it first hand. I have also seen cheat grass take over the areas where it has been reduced for fire safety, and then all the burn piles that we couldn’t burn because of the weather and the Air Quality Management District…and as I presumed, when it is masticated and then it burns, it creates an intense heat at ground level that can destroy plant and animal life below the soil. So slash and burn and mastication have negative side effects. Controlled burning is probably the best way to deal with creating defensible space around populated areas…but the big and obvious danger is, if that burn gets out of control. So slash and immediate burn and doing very small scale burn areas that can be contained seems, at present, to be the best solution for managing emergency access and defensible space areas. Otherwise, the best thing to do with chaparral plant communities is leave them alone. With two exceptions.

If you are concerned about losing a community of plants through too-frequent fire, start a seed bank. Partner with local tribal people. Be the local tribal person who initiates a seed bank/restoration effort. Get out into your chaparral and connect with it, harvest some seed, rekindle a relationship…get covered in that wonderful scent and lose yourself in its presence.

Maintain fire roads, fire breaks, trails, transportation infrastructure. Don’t let them “go back to nature.” I’m passionate about this.

The current argument against fire roads and fire breaks and trails into the wilderness is that they can’t stop a huge fire, particularly not a wind driven fire. That is true. But they provide ingress and egress to open space. They provide access for humans…that bizarre species who wants to preserve nature to the extent of not allowing other humans to enjoy it by letting trails “go back to nature” so that only the healthiest hikers can use them. That bizarre species which would put their own kind at risk to preserve plants.

First responders need escape routes. Ingress. Egress. A fire break may or may not stop a fire, but it can save lives. It gives first responders access to remote areas. It allows for controlled burns to take place. In appropriate locations it offers recreational opportunities. That comes with, I hate to admit it, trash dumping, illegal camp fires, potential misuse of natural resources. Why does all of that happen? Because we are a society uneducated about and removed from the natural world. We write grants for programs that address “nature deficit” and give us money to “connect people with nature” but we scream bloody murder if a fire road gets created or maintained.

The loss of trails, roads, OHV areas, fire breaks and transportation infrastructure is catastrophically wrong. Limiting access to specific environmentally sensitive, threatened or critically degraded regions makes perfect sense. Slowly but surely squeezing humans out of the wilderness in an effort to archive it does not. It creates the separation that makes us evermore ignorant about the world we live in. But most of all, it’s dangerous.

My biggest problem with the environmental movement at this point in my evolution comes down to this one thing. Working from the house out is the right way to go as regards fire safety. It is where we should be focusing our energy…on taking care of ourselves and not expecting someone else to do it for us. But when you tell me there’s no need for fire roads and fire breaks, I sense that old self-hatred, that anti-human sentiment I carried for most of my youth. I sense the desire to covet nature exclusively for our own emotional, mental, physical satisfaction; to keep people out, to archive it, to take on an ownership that excludes others.

We need to grow up, stop hoarding the sand box, and put the lives of first responders first. Roads are good. Maintain them.

Most recently I read an article by a slew of experts that even ten years years ago I would have written a rebuttal to. It was pro-logging. Although it never used the word archiving it clearly spelled out the science and the obvious. Overgrown, un-maintained forests are giant match boxes. It referred repeatedly to the fact that indigenous people not only used fire as a maintenance tool but - and this gets overlooked often - they utilized the deadfall. They had cooking fires and fires for warmth all the time. Ever notice how little deadfall there is around a campground where wood collection is allowed?

One of those experts suggested climate change has nothing to do with these big fires. And they are sort of correct in saying so. We have gone from clear-cutting to complete preservation. The pendulum has swung from utter destruction through harvest to utter destruction from non-harvest. But I think it’s not entirely correct to be a climate denier in this (or any) scenario. Climate affects how ready fuels are to burn. Climate affects what lives and what dies. Climate affects where things grow and over the last 100 years, we have seen the tree line retreat at least one thousand elevational feet across most of southern California.

Everything we do or do not do has an impact on the environment. On ourselves. On others. Every thing. So to blame policy alone for catastrophic fires and ignore climate change is not entirely accurate. Because while we’ve been preserving the forests to the point of letting them choke themselves to death, we’ve also been building all around them, and affecting the larger environment in all kinds of ways.

What makes a wildfire a catastrophe isn’t when it burns forests. It’s when it affects people. It’s just a wildfire until there’s human loss.

While the goal of the lumber industry is financial gain through the production of timber products, it must be noted that the survival of non profit environmental protection groups is also dependent on a product, and that product is the financial support of an emotionally engaged audience. There is the potential for both entities to manipulate information in the way that best suits their interests. Ideally, we can come to a point of balance that truly benefits the environment by engaging both industries in exchanges that are less about emotion and more about long term environmental and human sustainability; exchanges that involve honesty, science, partnership…less lawsuits and many more partnerships.

So there is a solution…or more accurately, many solutions. First we must recognize that all of us have some of the answers. Then to look at each scenario individually. The land and its inhabitants, all of them, plant, animal and human. The condition of the natural environment. Its state of health. The level of need for management. The areas that will be left alone. The areas that will receive care. The incorporation of indigenous wisdom in the management of plant communities. The cooperation across very diverse groups to insure that what happens to the land is what is best for the land and all of its inhabitants, excluding no one.

To think in terms of mosaics. Keeping some nature completely wild. Engaging other areas with varying levels of human management. Keeping wilderness areas connected for the long term survival of animals species. Examining how we build and where we build. Retrofitting what is already in the way of fire that we hope to save. Completely rethinking our living choices based on the fact of climate change that has already occurred. Being open to new information. Communicating across what have long been enemy lines. Honoring the wisdom of elders, both in the forestry profession and in the native community. It can be done. We are moving in that direction now, and it is my goal to be a humble but present part of the conversation.

Corina Roberts

(I am the founder of Redbird, a Native American and environmental non profit organization founded in 1994. We have a land base, Chilao School, in the heart of the Angeles National Forest. Ironically, it is a complex of all-wood structures, single pane windows and other known fire hazards. We are currently engaged in a fundraising campaign to paint the caretaker residence and school in a fire retardant paint by FireFree Coatings. All donations will be matched dollar for dollar by an anonymous donor through September 15. You can find our GoFundMe campaign and learn about FireFree Coatings at the links below. We also accept direct donations via mail - Redbird, P.O. Box 702, Simi Valley, CA 93062)

https://www.gofundme.com/fire-safe-at-chilao-school

https://www.firefree.com

(Special thanks to Robin Woolner for invaluable contextual reference to the human- environmental relationship dynamic)