Fire season has become a common term used in California. Blazing fires burning acres of land, leaving many people displaced and disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities, whose ancestral lands often lie in wildfire-prone areas. As climate conditions continue to change, many wonder what should be done to embrace indigenous stewardship to safeguard these communities.
Illustrated by Aleena Gao
Written by Padma Balaji & Cham Yu
Edited by Yash Sunkesula
On July 24th, the Park Fire began in Chico, California, and quickly exploded into the fourth-largest fire in Californian history—burning through more than 430,000 acres of land across multiple counties. It burned through northern California, a region with a prolific history of devastating wildfires, for more than two months before it was put out in early October. Authorities suspect the fire was a result of arson, and was started when a Butte County man pushed a flaming car down an embankment in Upper Bidwell Park.
A similar event occurred in Paradise, California in 2018, where the Camp Fire killed more than 80 people and the Dixie Fire in 2021—which tore through more than a million acres of Butte County. The Park Fire, however, differed in its scale and malicious intent. Although arson was the primary cause of the fire, experts say it was exacerbated by current weather conditions. High temperatures, strong winds, low humidity, and dry vegetation all contributed to its rapid spread. “The state of California experienced a hotter than normal June, combined with an excess of fine fuels from unusually wet winter and spring seasons. This has resulted in the vegetation being more susceptible to ignition and fire spread than has been observed in previous years,” said Cal Fire.
A propagator of many of these conditions is climate change, leading to dryer deserts and less vegetation, which causes more frequent and intense wildfires. According to a study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, human-caused climate change has led to a 320% increase in burned areas from 1996 to 2021. From January to July of 2024, wildfire activity in California was already 2,816% higher than the previous year, seeing more than 4,000 wildfires that burned 29 times the amount of area as in 2023.
Leading up to the wildfire, regions across California experienced record-breaking temperatures. The city of Red Bluff, situated west of the fire, recorded its all-time hottest 21-day stretch from July 3 to July 23, according to the National Weather Service. Although the winds weren’t extreme, “they [were] ‘just right’ to produce the high-intensity spread,” said Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno. Additionally, Cal Fire officials note that the Park Fire had numerous plumes that when combined with a strong wind, created erratic winds which threw fire-spreading embers in its path.
The unprecedented intensity and spread of the fire were undoubtedly caused by climate change, but it was also due to a dangerous lack of systemic unpreparedness by local governments. According to the Sacramento Bee, Chico city authorities had planned to do a prescribed burn for a highly flammable patch of land north of where the fire started. Prescribed burning, or controlled burning, is a fire mitigation method that stems from indigenous cultural burning practices that involve setting carefully planned and controlled fires to clear overgrown, flammable bush. Although Chico authorities had intended to light a controlled fire, it never happened, mostly due to a lack of city resources. According to the reporting from the Washington Post, much of where the fire burned had never been burned in modern history, meaning the fire spread through densely accumulated fuels that were not prepared for a fire of that scale.
Unfortunately, the failure of local governments to implement prescribed burning may have exacerbated the effect of the fire, illustrating the effect of governmental disregard for indigenous practices. Recent research from environmental scientists has emphasized the importance of prescribed burning while acknowledging the limitations of conventional fire suppression strategies. A report by the California Fire Science Consortium found that current firefighting practices are often regressive and perpetuate future wildfires by accumulating fuel, concluding that these longstanding practices may have contributed to increasing wildfire intensity in recent years. Instead, the consortium recommended that higher-intensity fires should be first targeted by suppression, adding that controlled burning techniques can strengthen fire-prone forests by increasing their resilience to flame. These conclusions, however, were often rejected by authorities who had historically overlooked the effectiveness of indigenous practices.
For centuries, indigenous communities have adapted to the environmental intricacies of their homeland, forming a traditional system of land stewardship that curbed the spread of wildfires. However, American firefighting has yet to adopt indigenous practices that have persisted for centuries before the arrival of European settlers, who have historically discouraged the validation of indigenous customs.
According to the Sacramento Bee, Indigenous communities are 1.7 times more likely to be affected by wildfires and continue to mitigate the effects of smoke exposure by burning techniques developed through centuries of indigenous stewardship. With the escalation of weather patterns due to climate change, the importance of effective firefighting strategies is imperative to minimize wildfire risks for underserved communities. While some experts have suggested that indigenous burning techniques are unsuitable for some types of biomes, most scientists generally endorse controlled burning. Local governments, such as the City of Chico, should recognize the immediate risk of climate change from exacerbating wildfires, and implement alternative strategies like controlled burning to prevent future disasters.
As California’s once-luscious fields fade to a burnt yellow, authorities must recognize the unprecedented volatility of the Park Fire — and future climate-fueled disasters — as a sign of institutional change. The future of our lands depends not only on the use of innovative suppression strategies and indigenous techniques but also on the centering of indigenous voices and stewardship to ensure an equitable approach to wildfire prevention and land stewardship as a whole.
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