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HOPLAND, Calif. – On a sun-drenched hillside in Northern California, I watched in awe as a crackling fire I’d helped ignite engulfed a hillside covered in tall, golden grass.
Within seconds, I was blind and coughing. The intense heat threatened to sear the skin on my face. Flames inched closer, and I was trapped against a tall fence with nowhere to go.
Luckily, I was with Len Nielson, chief of prescribed burns for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He calmly suggested I use my fire-resistant “shroud” to cover my face and take a few steps to the left.
And, just like that, we were out of the smoke and into the sunlight. The temperature dropped noticeably.
“It became uncomfortable,but it was tolerable,right?” Nielson asked with a reassuring grin.”Prescribed fires are a lot about trust.”
Deliberately setting fire to dry grass in the California countryside felt risky, but “good fire,” as Nielson called it, is essential for reducing fuel for the dangerous kind. The principle is simple: controlled burns help prevent catastrophic wildfires.
Fire’s Role in the Ecosystem
Before European settlers arrived and suppressed all fires, the landscape burned regularly, about once a decade. This reduced the amount of fuel available and prevented the build-up of dangerous amounts of dry vegetation.
“So it was relatively calm,” Nielson said, as the flames danced a few feet away. “There wasn’t this big fuel load, so there wasn’t a chance of it becoming really intense.”
California’s Prescribed Burn Goals
in the early 2020s, California set a goal to burn at least 400,000 acres of wilderness each year. the majority of this would be managed by federal agencies, which own nearly half of the state’s total land and more than half of its forests.
But in 2023,the state managed to burn onyl about one-tenth of that amount. experts say that a lack of resources, personnel, and risk aversion are to blame.
“We’re not keeping up,” said Michael Jones, a researcher at UC Cooperative Extension who studies prescribed burns. “We’re falling behind every year.”
Jones said that the state needs to invest more in prescribed burns and make it easier for landowners to conduct them.
“We need to change the way we think about fire,” he said. “Fire is not always bad.In fact, it’s essential for the health of our forests.”
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