"The Landscape is Hungry for Fire"

A conversation about cultural burning and its potential to combat climate grief.

Dear friends,

When it comes to preparing for and responding to the climate crisis, I often turn toward what Indigenous folks have to teach. I was particularly inspired by a recent article about three Indigenous fire experts using cultural burning to help the next generation transform solastalgia (climate grief, or the experience of “losing your home while staying in one place,”) into soliphilia (“the political affiliation or solidarity needed between us all to be responsible for a place, bioregion, planet, and the unity of interrelated interests within it”).

Dr. Melinda Adams—who wrote the piece alongside Ron Goode, a cultural fire practitioner and chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, and Dr. Erica Tom, an interdisciplinary scholar and educator—belongs to the San Carlos Apache Tribe of Arizona. She recently completed her PhD in Native American Studies and Environmental Science at University of California, Davis, where she spent several years studying the ecological, social and cultural benefits of small-scale Indigenous-led prescribed fires or “cultural burns,” which are conducted using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices in collaboration with Tribal Nations. She has been witnessing vital work to reduce the impacts of catastrophic wildfires (land that has been treated with fire fares much better when wildfire moves over it) and resulting dangerous smoke pollution, as well as the critical evolution of a cultural movement. 

Photo of Melinda Adams by Ameen Lotfi, UC Berkeley.

Adams is now Assistant Professor in Geography and Atmospheric Science and Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas, and her work and partnerships in California continue as she works on kindling relationships with other Indigenous peoples and Tribes across North America.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

You’ve studied tallgrass prairie burning in the Midwest and cultural burns in California. What do these two regions have in common?

Most of the landscape within the United States is fire adapted or fire-dependent—historically as well as now. Native plants, in particular, thrive on fire placement for different stages of their lifecycle; most importantly a lot of them need it to germinate or to begin their lifecycle. Even Tribes in Florida—where they have the Everglades and very water-adapted species—are seeing that historically those species thrived with fire placement. And I have experienced that here in the Midwest. Fire was a keystone stewardship tool that Indigenous peoples and others used to help tallgrass prairie land thrive.

My elders tell me, “The landscape is so hungry for fire right now.” And they mean good fire—small-scale, prescribed and controlled burns versus the scorched destruction that wildfires leave behind on our landscapes.

In your recent article, you talk about watching your students take this path from solastalgia to a more active, engaged, and connected emotional state as it relates to fire and the climate crisis. Can you say more about what you witnessed?

I'm an environmental scientist and ecologist by training, but I lead the work I do as an Indigenous person. So I try to make space for both. As part of my academic journey, I helped with a course on cultural fire in California [at UC Davis], led by Professor Beth Rose Middleton Manning. It really leaned on the collaborations and partnerships that she has with Indigenous practitioners throughout California. [We turned to] the practitioners as the experts and brought students on the land to try to form better relationship to the places where they live, and so they could also learn about the Indigenous peoples in the area.

Two interesting things happened during my time as an instructor of that course. The first is that we had students who were displaced or had lost their family homes to wildfires. So we had students that were trying to rebuild their relationships with and perspectives on fire. You can imagine the healing that those students experienced in taking the class and learning a different perspective on fire as a stewardship tool. That was incredibly meaningful to see and experience.

And then the second thing is: It was 2021, and we had the decision to either hold the class remotely or be socially distanced. The elders and the Native practitioners that we work with insisted that we bring students onto the land, and that we keep the fires burning for cultural and ecological reasons—for those culturally significant plants that reemerge after burning—and more importantly because we were all so isolated.

We all wore masks and we sanitized our tools, but we kept going. And I think that played a big part in a lot of people's healing journey through the pandemic; it certainly did so for me as a Native person needing that connection with the land.

You share some of the student responses in the article, and they did describe a therapeutic shift in their relationship with fire. How can more people begin to make that shift?

I’ve seen more inherent fear of fire in California than in the rest of the country. And that’s because many people here have seen its power as a destructive force. But that's tied to a lot of the no-burn policies that were written during the waves of colonization—especially in California. With the formulation of the federal agencies, there was this ingrained idea that all fire is bad fire.

Some of us believe that a lot of the catastrophic wildfires are present because of the fuel buildup that has taken place over many years and that stems from those no-burn policies. So we're working against generational and inherited perspectives on fire.With the work I do, we're trying to offer a different way of working with fire to mitigate against a lot of what you're seeing in the news, in Canada and elsewhere. There's opportunity to reframe how we're approaching this necessary land stewardship tool and all the benefits that it brings—in mitigating against wildfire and against one of the causes of climate change, because wildfires are also sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

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I was able to observe a prescribed burn in 2022, and it was my first experience seeing fire used as a tool. It was profound to realize something that I had a very culturally ingrained fear of also had so much beauty and healing power.

I'm so glad to hear that! It really helps with that relationship that we have, not just with the fire, but with the landscape and the plants, the effects of fire. It also builds togetherness, that's another message that we're trying to get across. Caring about the place you live, and the people you live there with, are key to shifting to soliphilia and combating climate anxiety.

Can you say a little about the barriers that prevent Indigenous communities from practicing cultural burns and what you would like to see in terms of the expansion of rights and access?

We have a lot more restrictions and barriers when we're trying to get fire in the ground out in the West. There, if you’re going to practice cultural burning you have to get an air quality permit. You have to look at the fuel loads, the landscape that you're working with, and the endangered species that are there. Those are all written into the prescription to hold a prescribed burn, and then it needs to be approved through different official channels.

But on top of that, federally recognized Tribes are able to work with federal agencies and the U.S. government and it’s easier for them to obtain permits, or rights and access to burns. California has the greatest number of Tribes as a state, and large number number of unrecognized Tribes. It gets really complicated when you don't have that status to try to defend or steward your homelands. There are also many “landless Tribes,” and they don't even have access to their own homelands or power to make the decisions for those homelands. It's purposely complicated, and that complication makes it difficult to navigate policy at the Tribal, local, and federal level, and to educate others to build allyships.

There were two new bills that passed in California and will be going into effect this year, and they both, in a way, attempt to leverage some power back to Native cultural fire practitioners. They were written by a handful of Native cultural practitioners themselves. And they tried to use language that will provide as many opportunities to get good fire—culture fire—onto the ground as possible.

It has only been a few months since those policies were enacted, so we're just starting to see how they’ll play out on the landscape. The practitioners themselves are hopeful, but they understand that there are still barriers in place. And that's where we need allyship; we need people who are not Native to stand with us to advocate for [more good fire]. “Come heal with us,” is the story that we tell and there's room for all of us to heal.

Academia can move slowly, and yet we are at this moment of climate urgency; I wonder how you balance those things for yourself?

I'm away from my homelands, and I have been throughout my educational journey, but I also went to a Tribal college where I learned from other Tribes, and other Tribal members and community members. So I feel like I stand with many Tribes, in addition to my own. Only 100 out of 58,000 people with PhDs are Native American. That's less than half a percent, so we still have a long way to go. And the elders in the various communities that I've built partnerships and relationships with keep me humble. They remind me of the responsibilities that I carry as a Native person and also as a community member, a niece, and a granddaughter. I never do this work alone; it is always with, by, and for our Peoples.

Can you speak about how the experience of climate grief or solastalgia looks different for Indigenous folks than it does to non-Indigenous folks?

As someone teaching undergrad and graduate students, I try to allow them the space to recognize that the homes and the places where they live are being impacted by climate change, in addition to the economic stress that they have already been under; they may not be envisioning a future for themselves. So when we write about solastalgia, we're recognizing that people, including our Native communities, are experiencing the change in ecosystems and the catastrophic weather.

Dr. Daniel Wildcat, my professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, where I earned my undergraduate degree and taught for several years, has been a mentor of mine for quite some time now. In his book, Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, he mentions that climate change is a fourth removal for Indigenous peoples. The first was with physical removal of our homelands. The second removal of our culture, and the third was taking native children away from their homes and putting them in residential schools or boarding schools, removal of family. He says climate change is the fourth removal that Native peoples have experienced. So, when you frame it in the sense of resiliency, that is our lived experiences. .

There's also this fantastic book called Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being by Lawrence Gross. And he frames our experiences with the change in environment to post-apocalyptic stress syndrome (PASS). He says as Native peoples, we've survived an apocalypse, the end of our worlds, when we were displaced, removed, erased, and had our children taken away. And if anybody knows how to problem solve through catastrophic events, its Native peoples, because we've survived that PASS, and we are still here, we are still hopeful.

Again, that’s where we rely on the power of allyship and others using their power of positionality to tell these stories, to acknowledge these experiences, so we don't keep repeating history by not bringing Indigenous and Native voices into the conversation or to the decision-making table. There's room for everyone, and [allies are necessary to] help us amplify the story of cultural fire, of our presence, of our resilience, and of the intelligence that we have to sustainably live with our environments—through and beyond some of the effects of climate change.

Climate news you might have missed

Fungi is key

Mycorrhizal fungi used to connect plants to the nutrients in soil before plants developed their own roots, helping them gain access to nutrients. That relationship shifted long ago, but it’s still a key form of symbiosis that cycles a great deal of carbon into (and out of) the world’s soils. (This video, narrated by mushroom evangelist Merlin Sheldrake, provides a great breakdown of the ancient relationship between plants and fungi.)

Scientists just released a study that found that the quantity of carbon that mycorrhizal fungi move into the soil every year is equivalent to 36 percent of the current annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That’s especially impressive to me knowing how many millions of acres of today’s farmland is lacking in healthy mycorrhizal fungi—due to pesticide use, tillage, deforestation, and other practices that have long ignored soil health. It’s also, dare I say, a little encouraging. It means that our vast soils could be playing a much more robust role in moving carbon out of our atmosphere and our oceans (the two places where we have dangerous surpluses) if we protect our forests and start taking soil health on farms seriously.

McKinsey in the hot seat

When the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome sent temperatures up to 120° F in some parts, farmers lost crops; mussels, clams and other sea creatures were cooked in British Columbia’s tidal waters; and hundreds of people died. The heat wave was referred to as a once-in-a-millennium event, and scientists agreed that such a phenomenon wouldn’t have occurred in that part of the world were it not for anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change.

Now Multnomah County, Oregon, is waging a high-profile lawsuit against the nation’s biggest fossil fuel producers and their lobbying groups. The lawsuit is just the latest in a series of others like it, but it’s drawing attention because of the inclusion of McKinsey and Company, the powerful global management consulting company that brings in an estimated $10 billion in revenue every year and has advised 43 of the 100 biggest polluters. McKinsey is known for working with oil and gas producers (Chevron is one of their biggest clients) to project a narrative about those companies “leading the clean-energy transition.”

Just four months after the PNW heat dome hit, a group of McKinsey employees sent their bosses an open letter urging them to disclose their clients’ carbon footprints. It’s very possible some of those employees work in the company’s Portland office.

Iowa meteorologist harassed out of his job

I’ll always remember the first time I stepped off a plane in Iowa. After years of writing about the food system, I was there to gain a more nuanced understanding of what I saw as ground zero for industrial farming. As I walked through the Des Moines airport, I passed a giant sign that read, “Koch Industries Welcomes You to Iowa.”

In other words, it’s a state where the quiet part often gets said out loud—and where it can feel dangerous to speak your mind if it goes against the mainstream. In one recent example, Chris Jones, a smart and prolific critic of the agriculture industry’s impact on Iowa’s extremely polluted waterways, says he retired earlier this year after state senators threatened to cut funding to his employers at the University of Iowa.

Chris Gloninger had a similarly chilling experience working as the chief meteorologist for a local television station in Des Moines, where he was harassed for reporting on climate change. Gloninger, who says he suffered from PTSD after receiving death threats, announced he was leaving the position last week to take a role as a climate scientist at Woods Hole Group. And just to make his point extra clear, the meteorologist made the announcement on air on Climate Stripes Day and wore a red and blue tie that bore the stripes visualizing the dramatic change in global temperature over the past 100 years.

On the brighter side

Speaking of Iowa, I wanted to share this story I edited for Civil Eats about farms there integrating oats back into their rotations. Farmers grew oats in Iowa for generations, but they stopped when corn and soybeans took over the market, and the vast majority of oat production moved to Canada. Now, thanks in part to the popularity of oat milk, there is an ongoing effort to rebuild the market for oats, which might get some farmers to consider diversifying—which could add more life to the soil and, potentially, boost the presence of myccorhizal fungi.

Mary Heglar, one of our best minds writing on climate justice and climate grief, has written a children’s book called The World is Ours to Cherish. According to publisher Random House, “This hopeful picture book—written in the style of a letter—gives kids an honest take on climate change and urges them to band together to help the planet.”

And finally, a perseverant and very lucky cat named Ozzie was reunited with his family after spending six years on the street following the 2017 firestorm in Sonoma, Country, California.

The Visuals

1. This video from NASA enacts recent sealevel rise as if seen through a porthole.

2. A baby red-billed blue magpie gets released into the wild, photo by Jessica Hightower, PhD.

3. Insect eggs on grass, photo by Moira O'Donnell.

4. The removal of the Klamath damns has begun. Photo via Wild Salmon Center.

Top Banner by Mara Greenaway.

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