"For thousands of years, North American tribes carefully burned forests to manage the land. The future may lie in a return to that past."
"In Margo Robbins’s home, the first thing you notice is family: portraits of children and grandchildren in a crowded display on the wall. The second thing you notice is accomplishment: lines of academic and athletic trophies from those children and grandchildren. 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.
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. 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. It’s focused on a single goal: setting forests on fire.
In Robbins’s part of the forest, the ancestral homeland of the Yurok, she has been training teams of fire-lighters. They wear bright yellow flame-retardant Nomex suits and carry torches that drip burning petroleum. Under her watchful eye, they spread lines of flame beneath the trees.
Her message is simple: You can too fight fire with fire. “There’s good fire and bad fire,” she told me during a recent visit. “And the good fire prevents the bad.”"
Charles C. Mann reports for National Geographic with photographs by Kiliii Yüyan December 17, 2020.
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