Fighting fire with fire in California

When the 2021 Dixie Fire barreled toward Jeff Greef’s Northern California cabin, he heeded the mandatory evacuation order, packed his truck and grimly drove away. In the days leading up to his departure, he had watched the sky darken with billowing clouds of smoke that made it feel like night. Greef, a former building inspector in the Bay Area, had recently retired and relocated to the picturesque Sierra Nevada. For the past few years he had vacationed on this land and used that time to gird against potential wildfires. He built his cabin with fire-resistant cement board siding and a metal roof. Following advice from the local fire safe council, he thinned his ten-acre forest. With the support of the landowner-led Plumas Underburn Cooperative, he completed an underburn, a prescribed fire to remove “duff,” a carpet of pine needles and other organic material that naturally accumulates on the forest floor.

A few days after Greef evacuated, the Dixie Fire engulfed nearby Greenville; intense flames reduced the historic gold rush town to ruins. Greef wouldn’t return home for several weeks.

The Plumas Underburn Cooperative and other Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) were founded on the belief that by sharing equipment and labor—and with proper training and experience—neighbors can manage fires together safely and effectively. First formed in the Great Plains in the mid-1990s, this collaborative model has since spread across the United States. In California, the first PBA was established in 2018; now, the state has 22. “Communities are desperate for solutions,” says Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire expert with the University of California Cooperative Extension. “Many of the landowners and people involved want to restore fire to the system. They’re inspired now, because they’re seeing it happen in other places.”

Fire has always played an important role in North American ecosystems. Before the arrival of European settlers, fires were frequent and often intentionally ignited by Indigenous people to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires and to nurture the land. In the eastern United States, these fires improved oak and chestnut tree growth. In the Great Plains, fires set by Native Americans crept across the prairie and maintained healthy grasslands that benefited ground-nesting birds and grazing animals. And in the Mountain West, fire cleared out dead trees and created patchworks of vegetation within the forest to act as natural firebreaks.

But in the early 1900s, U.S. strategy shifted to fire suppression. Federal and state land management agencies prohibited “light burning,” an early term for prescribed fire. From the 1930s to the late 1970s, federal fire policy was guided by the “10 a.m. rule,” which stipulated that fires should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the next day.

Smithsonian