As the fires begin to abate in Southern California, while the danger of high winds and new conflagrations remains high, as the body count rises and we see the blackened trees and ravaged ground in the canyons where I hiked as a teenager and the rubble of destruction in neighborhoods where I had friends, my heart goes out to those who've lost their homes, their neighborhoods, their loved ones. And I consider the lessons of fire.
I spend a surprising amount of my life these days thinking about fire. Living out in the forests of Northern California, the threat of wildfire is always present. I teach and practice permaculture, which includes forestry and planning for disasters. I help to manage the forests and access roads of our 2500 acre homeowners’ association. Our area burned in a significant fire in 1978. Over the last few years, several fires have come close. We were evacuated, or on the edge of evacuation zones, in 2019 and 2020. We were lucky that several large fires, and many small fires, have been stopped before they destroyed our community once again, thanks to the vigilance of our local and state firefighters and some maverick civilians with bulldozers. But the Tubbs Fre in 2017 destroyed whole neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, our nearest big town. And we have inhaled the smoke of wildfires as far away as the Camp Fire of 2018 that destroyed the town of Paradise. So the horror of the massive fires this year in Southern California is both familiar and terrifying. Next time, it could be us.
In the winter, we spend much of our time and thought relearning how to manage the land to live with fire: thinning trees, limbing them up, clearing brush. lighting pile burns and, the last couple of years, now learning to do prescribed burns.
For ten thousand years or more, the Kashia Pomo, the indigenous people of this land, and their ancestors managed it elegantly, using fire as one of their primary tools. They burned the land periodically to keep the forests open, to increase the health of the trees and the plants, to maintain key resource plants in the forms that made them usable for basketry or other crafts, and to reduce the danger of catastrophic wildfire. All of that indigenous knowledge was suppressed by the colonizers, first the Russians--this was the furthest south they got on the West Coast--then later the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Californians, and the Americans. Like so many places, we are suffering from a century of fire suppression that has allowed our forests to grow brushy and overcrowded. It’s estimated that when the Pomo managed the forests, we averaged 45 trees to the acre. Then, the trees were broadly spaced, tall and robust, with full canopies. Today, we average more like 400. Now the woodlands are often thickets of spindly sticks, half-starved for sunlight and easy prey for diseases, insect pests, and catastrophic fire.
I used to pride myself on how many trees I’ve planted in my life. Now I’ve probably cut more than I could ever plant. Small trees, because at this point in my life I'm only capable of wielding a small, electric chainsaw, and because it's primarily the small trees that need to be cleared for forest health and fire safety. It’s hard work, but satisfying, creating a bit more health and safety for the forest, and for us.
In the summer, we park our vehicles facing out for a quick getaway, and are always on the alert. A smoldering cigarette butt, a glass jar of water left out on the grass acting as a magnifying glass, a spark from a metal blade of a weed-whacker striking a stone can all be the beginning of a blaze. One fire was stopped because a neighbor, going out on his deck in the middle of the night to pee, happened to spot the flames in a deep canyon below and sounded the alarm. Another was curbed when a passerby was able to start a bulldozer parked by the side of the road and swiftly cut a fire line. Many have been contained by our Volunteer Fire Department, who devote hours and hours of their time and put their own lives at risk to defend our community.
Fire is a danger. Fire is a comfort. Fire is a teacher.
Here are some lessons I’ve learned from fire.
Lesson #1 Humility
Fre teaches us our limitations. There are many things that we can do and should do to lessen our risks and mitigate our losses in the event of a wildfire. But we must also understand that, should we suffer a climate driven windstorm under drought conditions, as we’ve seen in LA, none of these efforts may succeed in saving our homes or our land. Nature is more powerful than we are. Fire cannot always be controlled.
Lesson #2 Interdependence:
We are all in it together. Fire doesn't stop at the edge of your property, no matter how well you tend it. Fire doesn't respect borders, boundary lines, wealth, reputation, or virtue. To paraphrase a saying, it takes a village to prepare for fire or respond to fire. No one can fight a wildfire alone.
Everything I do to make my place safer makes my neighbors safer. Anything they do, benefits me. Any carelessness on someone else's part, a faulty electric plug, an careless barbecue, a powerline untended by P.G. and E., can take away everything I hold dear, through no fault of my own.
Fire also draws us together as a community, We work together to prepare for fire, to check in on one another, to provide help and shelter, to offer comfort and healing. We need one another, and fire, like so many catastrophes, shows us how much. Communities that are well organized are more resilient, and while nowhere in the West is ultimately safe from fire, tight knit communities are safer.
Lesson Number 3: Fire demands response on many scales:
In our area, we've had one grassroots organization started by a couple of neighbors that gathered people together to work on some of our most endangered access routes. Every winter Saturday, starting in 2021 during COVID, and continuing for three years, we would come together to do the thinning, clearing and limbing that can help stall a fire and keep the roads open for people to evacuate and for First Responders to get in. Another organization got grants from state and local funders to hire crews to work on a scale beyond the capacity of community volunteers. Both are necessary. Both have made an immense difference in how safe our area might be during a wildfire, how likely we might be to be able escape if needed, how easily the Volunteer Fire Department or Cal Fire or emergency services could get in on our narrow dirt roads.
We have great, grassroots participation here—but it is augmented by vital support from state and local government. The state trains and equips our Volunteer Fire Department. County, state and federal programs have given us grants to improve our roads, our water storage, and our emergency equipment. A special shout-out here to Marshall Turbeville, our local Cal-Fire representative, who has offered advice, training and public education, shown up at local meetings and provided us with many resources. Government does not always function well, but when it does, it’s important to acknowledge it, otherwise we become so cynical we may succumb to apathy and despair, and cease demanding that our governments work for us. And we need it to! The scale of climate disaster is so great that we need large-scale organization to address it.
Lesson #4 Reality Matters:
In this world of social media influencers, optics, disinformation, and outright lies, it’s easy to forget that one of our human flaws is our tendency to believe what we want to believe. Yet there is an actual reality, and nothing brings it home quite like a wall of flames advancing toward your house.
In the face of wildfire, wishful thinking kills. So preparing for a fire means grappling with the potential reality of immense loss. It’s not fun to do all those things they tell us to do: prepare a go-bag, know where your important papers are, photograph your house and belongings, upload key documents and store copies with someone in a faraway location, make an evacuation plan before you need one. All of these can help mitigate loss, although they cannot wholly prevent it.
But to do them we need to face reality. The Australians encourage people to either stay and defend your home: for which you need some training, some basic equipment, at minimum clothing made of natural fibers, (not plastics which tend to melt in the heat and fuse to your skin), and the physical capacity to move and respond quickly and stay calm in the face of fear. Lacking those qualifications, they say, evacuate early. Decide ahead of time which you will do, because in the panic of an evacuation warning or an advancing fire, we don’t make our best decisions.
In the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018, in the Palisades and in Topanga Canyon we saw just how dire a crisis can arise when everyone tries to evacuate at once through narrow streets and roadways. Cars stall and are trapped, First Responders can't get through, and people die. Watch the Frontline documentary Fire in Paradise: you'll hear a young woman describe how she begged her mother to evacuate, but her mother kept saying, “No, if we need to go the authorities will tell us.”. The authorities were overwhelmed, lines of communication were cut, and while the young woman eventually left, her mother stayed and died. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/fire-in-paradise/
The Tubbs fire of 2017 moved so quickly into the town of Santa Rosa that firefighters and police could only do their best to evacuate people out of its path, without being able to stop and fight the blaze. Many people were saved by neighbors who knocked on doors and warned people to get out long before the authorities arrived. But 22 people died, and twice that number died overall in the fires that October, 85 in the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, 101 in Lahaina. Wondering whether or not you should evacuate is a bit like wondering if you’re an alcoholic: if you’re asking the question, you should probably answer ‘yes’. Know your limitations, and if you aren’t truly prepared to wait out a fire storm in place, go early, so that you don’t become a problem for emergency services who will already be stressed.
Besides our tendency to think what we want to think and believe what we want to believe, there's also our human inclination to want to blame someone when something bad happens. Sometimes blame is appropriate: PG&E has been fined 1.93 billion dollars for negligence regarding their equipment which started the fires of 2017 and 18. But fire should teach us to be cautious with blame, to take the time to actually find out the facts. In today’s toxic media environment, Trump and MAGA pundits are directing a fire-hose of lies at California politicians in order to attack people and policies they don’t like. Trump invents a non-existent water project so he can blame Governor Newsome for purportedly vetoing it. Elon Musk and Fox News commentators, in racist, misogynist posts, blame efforts at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Falsely blaming your political enemies, fabricating charges that have no basis in reality, randomly assigning blame in order to rile up your base and shore up your political power will not help the people who have lost their homes or their loved ones. It will keep us from doing the important work of understanding what did happen, what could have been done better and what we might do better the next time. I don’t believe in hell, but if I did, I’d consign a special hot spot in it to those who lie about disasters to further their own partisan benefit.
False blame also distracts us from looking squarely at where the real blame lies: Climate change. Let me say it again: climate change. Climate change. Say it as many times as we need to finally get it into public awareness that the intensity of these fires is a direct result of the increased drought and accelerated winds of our changing climate. We are no longer talking about hypothetical threats of what might happen—the disasters are happening, whether they are devastating wildfires in Hawaii or hurricane floods in North Carolina.
Lesson #5: Climate Change
if there is any final lesson we all must take from this horrific firestorm, let it be this: that it's time to face climate change and take action. The most devastating consequences of Trump's reelection may be his efforts to undo the progress we’ve made in the last few years around the climate crisis. Nonetheless, we must ally ourselves with reality and continue to push for meaningful action.
There are two big lies about climate change—the first, that’s it’s not happening, but is some kind of conspiracy or hoax, and the second, that there’s nothing we can do about it. It is happening, as fire and flood remind us. And there is much that we can do, at every scale from the personal to the global, to shift toward renewable energy, to regenerate ecosystems and mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis. We cannot return the world to what it was, but we can still secure a viable and vibrant future. Join us at Earth Activist Training on Inauguration Day, January 20, at 1 pm Pacific Time to learn more about resilient solutions: https://earthactivisttraining.org/webinar/#festival.
May these horrific fires ignite our will to confront this great crisis of our time and create a world of greater resilience.
A Final Lesson:
There's one final lesson from fire, that resilience is possible. Some losses are irrecoverable, especially the loss of life, but also the loss of a home, of treasured possessions, mementos and heirlooms, of neighborhoods and community gathering places and favorite routines. And yet, out of the devastation, people do recover and rebuild with the help of neighbors, of community, of circles of support. Life goes on. It will never be the same as it was, but it can and will be good again.
And what makes it good are those common values we share across lines of political difference: generosity, compassion, and human decency. Let us hold the line against the firestorms of hate and lies, stand for truth, practice mutual care, and face our challenging realities with humility and hope. Out of the ashes shall rise a world more just, more balanced, and more resilient than before.
Lots to think about, and put together with such elegant coherence! This will give me great talking points. Our neighborhood has become very chummy and organize around fire!
Thank you, Starhawk, for your clear-headed, community minded perspective. You remind me how important it is to learn from the wise practices of our indigenous forbears and to collaborate with our friends and neighbors, including plant and animal kin, for all our sakes, and the sake of our earthly home.