Good Fire

In 2017, the Thomas Fire raged through Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. At the time, it was the largest, most devastating wildfire in history. At the time, it was the largest, most devastating wildfire in history; burning more than 285K acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, destroying over 1,000 buildings, resulting in over $2.2B worth of damages and causing over 100K people to evacuate their homes. 

Our Central Coast ecosystem is primarily grassland and Chaparral and is fire adapted, having evolved with wildfires for thousands of years. Now mega drought and heat as a result of climate change are exacerbating factors and we know that wildfires will continue. The question of how we learn to live with this new wildfire regime is at the forefront of our minds. 

Our friend and partner, Teresa Romero, serves as Environmental Director for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and studies the ancient relationship between Indigenous people and fire. She has been teaching us that Indigenous people traditionally used low intensity fire to shape landscapes, ensure the abundance of culturally important plants, create clearings for wildlife and open understories for access to foraging areas. This skilled and controlled use of low intensity fire is known as “Good Fire”, differentiating it from the “bad fire” of catastrophic incidents like the Thomas Fire. 

Today Good Fire has functionally been removed from our landscape due to the loss of cultural burning traditions combined with more than 100 years of aggressive fire suppression. As a result, high fuel loads build up and, as Teresa has shared, the prevalence and health of a range of culturally important native plants decline. With the climate crisis intensifying heat events and driving the worst droughts in more than a thousand years, we are facing nearly year round conditions primed for bad fire events that are devastating to our communities and ecosystems.

It’s All About Balance
Teresa counsels that today’s challenges with fire stem from a relationship with the land that is out of balance. She says, “You can’t separate us from nature; it is integral. If something is out of balance, we are out of balance. Our larger community is really out of balance because things haven't been carried out in a way that is in balance with our entire ecosystem. It’s all one big circle.”  

The exciting news is that Native American communities with cultural burning programs in northern California are restoring their traditional knowledge and revitalizing their ancestral relationship with fire, helping to regain this balance. Teresa’s hope is to build a coalition to educate our Santa Barbara community about the benefits of Good Fire. The coalition would advance understanding of our ecosystems’ relationship with fire, invite conversations about Good Fire, actively engage the community in re-establishing “right relationship with and respect of fire,” and ultimately restore Chumash cultural burning traditions. 

What We Are Doing
Teresa, the LegacyWorks team and Sharyn Main of the Community Environmental Council started making Teresa’s vision a reality with seed funding from the Santa Barbara Foundation. Together we interviewed land managers, fire safety experts, ecologists, cultural burn practitioners, prescribed fire trainers, and community leaders to find pathways to restore cultural burning. Like Teresa, the people we have interviewed are inspired and excited about getting Good Fire on the ground when and where it makes sense for the ecosystem and for our community. We shared the result of this process with Chumash community members to get their reaction and begin plotting a course of action for launching a Good Fire Program.

Next Steps
Restoring balance and building resilience is a big challenge and will require a wide range of projects and initiatives. Bringing Good Fire back to the landscape has the potential to reduce wildfire risk and restore culturally important plants while rebuilding connections and relationships between communities, individuals and nature. Next steps include getting Good Fire on the ground in conjunction with a celebration/feast as a way to begin getting members of the broader Chumash community engaged as well as getting support for workforce development to engage tribal youth.