Wildfire in the West has been, by historical standards, very rare. For more than a century, western land managers have fought forest fires to the last ember. ( How will California prevent more mega-wildfire disasters?) Cities a hundred miles from the flames were filled with smoke so thick that the sun turned into a faint orange smear. Conflagrations in the northern part of the state turned almost 10,000 buildings to ash. Containing those fires cost $3.6 billion and required tens of thousands of firefighters to be flown in from as far away as Australia.įive of California’s six biggest known wildfires occurred in 2020. This year has been worse: 16,654 square miles, an area twice the size of New Jersey. In 2017 burns blackened a record 15,666 square miles. Almost every year for the past decade, wildfire has roared through western lands, consuming forests, incinerating homes, drowning huge areas in choking smoke, often for weeks on end. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īs the world knows, the North American West-and especially California-has a fire problem. “There’s good fire and bad fire,” she told me during a recent visit. Her message is simple: You can too fight fire with fire. Under her watchful eye, they spread lines of flame beneath the trees. They wear bright yellow flame-retardant Nomex suits and carry torches that drip burning petroleum. In Robbins’s part of the forest, the ancestral homeland of the Yurok, she has been training teams of fire-lighters. It’s focused on a single goal: setting forests on fire. Her living room is where she co-founded the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, a growing collaboration of Native nations, partnered with nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and government agencies. What you don’t see is that her home is one of the nerve centers of a cultural and political struggle that has been slowly changing the North American West. The third thing is baskets-Robbins is a Yurok basket-weaver, part of a tradition in her northern Californian nation that stretches back centuries upon centuries. The second thing you notice is accomplishment: lines of academic and athletic trophies from those children and grandchildren. In Margo Robbins’s home, the first thing you notice is family: portraits of children and grandchildren in a crowded display on the wall.
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