Last month, the State of California officially recognized the right of first peoples in the state to practice burning the way their ancestors did. Senate Bill 310, which passed the state assembly and state senate in September, has been entered into law and is in effect as of February 27.

The new law restores tribal sovereignty to the 109 federally recognized tribes in California for the use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge of fire in their ancestral territories, allowing them to burn without state permits, and places tribes on equal footing with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air resources control boards. Tribes can also access the Prescribed Fire and Cultural Burning Claims fund without having to complete formal burn plans.

Tribes use fire to enhance food sources, fiber resources, and medicinal plants as part of their belief system, while also establishing and maintaining wildfire resilience. This layered practice distinguishes cultural burning from prescribed burning, which simply reduces the severity of landscape fire. Together they are referred to as healthy fire.

Healthy fire and biochar both reduce fuel in overstocked forests that has resulted from over 100 years of fire suppression. They can be seen as bookends, approaching the wildfire problem from opposite directions. Where manual fuel reduction is unnecessary, fire can be returned to a unit of forest land in a single step. Otherwise, manual treatment comes first, and the thinned material can be pyrolyzed and left in place as biochar, a valuable soil amendment for long-term forest health. In either case, the endpoint is to manage land with fire. Making biochar can be seen as transitional toward that end, although some will continue to be needed by us indefinitely.

We can be grateful that TEK still exists in California and that tribes are willing to work with us after all the damage that our culture caused to the forest and the people who sustained it before we arrived.

A press release from CNRA is available here.