In Fire’s Footprint
Flames spread slowly along the side of a pile of dry vegetation. I watched the man lighting the pile pull the metal torch’s wick away, satisfied that the fire had caught sufficiently. Watching fire lick up dried branches was strange—somewhat like watching the tinder catch in a campfire, but fundamentally different: this pile of branches was heaped on the slope of a hill with seeming unconcern for the other large piles nearby, or the dry grass underfoot, or the poison oak stems and coast redwood saplings growing around us.
Despite the sunglasses protecting my eyes, despite my leather boots and gloves, and cotton long-sleeved shirt (synthetic fibers are prohibited, as they could melt and cause injury), as the pile was more fully engulfed, I felt its shocking heat and resisted the urge to recoil. Although I trusted the expertise of the small group of people I was with, this went against my very limited wildfire safety knowledge. I imagined Smokey Bear freaking out at the fire, uncontained, and—as we left it to follow someone burning a second pile nearby—unattended.
This was my first in-person experience, in January 2025, with the practice of controlled burning, or prescribed fire. I had joined a small event hosted by a nonprofit based in the North Bay Area of California to learn about and volunteer on the application of fire to a piece of land. I was beginning to research what some proponents call “good fire,” a range of practices intended to advance ecological stewardship, decrease wildfire risk, or revitalize Indigenous cultural traditions that had been criminalized under 20th-century U.S. and California law. Controlled burning of piles, fields, and forests already takes place in rural North America, but in California, eligible area has increased in size and practitioners have increased in number, advanced by a cascade of laws over the last decade or so that have done things like lower the legal liability for land stewards who follow proper procedures.
As a cultural anthropologist, I have come to research the people, groups, and scenarios that have responded to this lowered barrier to entry. I am conducting ethnography among community-based groups that have sprung up and the people who have joined the groups’ opportunities to learn about fire, (re)introduce fire to the lands that they own or tend to, or work in fire-related careers.
California’s good fire revitalization is taking place both in response to, and in spite of, the massive wildfires that have become a horrifyingly habitual presence in the 21st century.
The land where we worked on that day in January, the property’s forester explained to us, had been a redwood forest before burning in a wildfire about half a decade ago. Scattered mature redwood trees that had survived the crown fire towered above us. Their branches, having burnt up, were replaced by new, shorter branches, giving the trees that day the appearance of green pipe cleaners.
The sight depressed me, and I guiltily imagined how the forester felt looking at the land, which had been in his family for decades. Fire ecologists and researchers of historical tree growth note that California forests, prior to Euro-American expansion, had more frequent, low-severity fires that left many old and healthy trees alive. Fire, in addition to a “natural” presence in the landscape, was used deliberately by Indigenous land stewards.
You could say that fire ecology is catching up to Indigenous science, and land management policy in some Western states is slowly catching up, as well. Happily, there is attention being paid to this, with some fire experts both Native and non-Native enjoying a prominent public stage. What I am interested in researching as an ethnographer is the way these policy changes move through organizations and landscapes.
Since January, I have spent the subsequent months volunteering on good fire events, becoming trained in the basics of wildland fire, and eventually working as a wildland firefighter over the summer. I have met people whose towns, lands, and houses have gone up in smoke. I have just scratched the surface of fire, of its terrible and beautiful potential alike. As a researcher, I hope to learn from people who have been impacted by fire, people who both use and choose not to use fire.
In that first burn event, early-succession plants proliferated in the past wildfire’s footprint, along with “slash” from trees logged in the wake of the wildfire. The debris risked accumulating in a way that, in the next few years, would become fuel for another all-consuming wildfire.
What does it take to bring fire back into an area where it has been recently reviled? How does fire go from a force that haunts people’s memories, to one that prepares them for the future?
In order to prevent the big fire, a prescribed burn had been planned. The forester had built the piles of brush and left them for months to dry out. He and a state-certified “burn boss” had made a plan to burn on a winter day. That day, they measured the atmospheric conditions—not too windy, the right level of humidity—and invited us volunteers to burn the many piles located in a large hilly area between two wide gravel roads. We were to allow “creep” of fire from the piles into the surrounding vegetation, which would help combat invasive species and decrease accumulation of flammable material.
What could possibly motivate people to volunteer on a difficult, dirty, risky activity? It turns out that many people want to learn to use fire so that they can use it in their own careers and lands. So if policy enables the conditions for ecological change, then hard manual labor is the way that change is enacted. My own methods of participant-observation and interviews me to work side-by-side with people who use fire, learning their stories extensively and experiencing along with them the promises and limitations of how fire can be used right now. What infrastructure, equipment, material resources, and interpersonal interactions allow good fire networks and the people in them to flourish? As a new firefighter and fire practitioner as well as a student, I see that with sufficient freedom and support, my supervisors and colleagues can make choices about wildfires and prescribed fires to leave lasting impacts on the lives and landscapes of the North American West.
But back in January, I was just a person who had never come face-to-face with an uncontained fire. A flame seemed, then and now, like a great and undeserved responsibility. Still—“You want to try?” someone asked, and pressed a drip torch into my hand.