Cultivating reciprocity through wildland fire science in the era of climate change

In the New Jersey Pine Barrens, vividly colored Pink Lady Slippers and yellow fringeless orchids dot the open sandy woodlands, and native bees buzz around the post-burn flourishing understory. In the Sierra Nevada, fishers and fox squirrels forage in a recently scorched ponderosa pine forest while a black-backed woodpecker searches for beetle larvae in a charred snag. These two very different ecosystems on opposite coasts have something in common: fire breathes life into them. Without fire, pinecones do not release their seeds to grow the next generation of pitch pine, wild blueberry production decreases, and Pink Lady Slippers disappear. Without fire, the mosaic of pine and mixed-conifer forests and grasslands that support diverse wildlife would cease to exist.

Fire has always been a part of the story of the North American continent. For millennia, Indigenous peoples were integral to maintaining a diverse and resilient landscape composed of non-forest and forested areas. Their stewardship was based on the concept of reciprocity: a deep awareness of the mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the environment they live in. Fire was an active part of those relationships and, for many, a key tool in their ecocultural land management practices. Post European colonization, much of that ecocultural knowledge was violently suppressed. Reciprocal environmental stewardship was replaced by short-term economic priorities. That shift led to widespread logging, followed by catastrophic fires, and then over 100 years of fire suppression activities, causing a devastating shift in North American ecosystems and our societal relationship with fire. Researcher Justin Angle and journalist Nick Mott explore this history adeptly in the 2021 podcast "Fireline".

Today, we are grappling with the impacts of our continent’s recent fire history and the currently unfolding impacts of climate change. Fire suppression has led to denser, more homogenous forest structures. Climate change is creating hotter and drier conditions. Their interaction has created a landscape where fire has and will continue to become more frequent and more severe. At the same time, the consensus in the scientific research community supports an active role for fire in maintaining ecosystem health from coast to coast, and that ecological and social contexts matter a great deal in how more fire is brought back to the land.

There is a building convergence of Western and Indigenous knowledge around the need to reinstitute that concept of reciprocity, in how our society approaches land and wildfire management. More importantly, there is a need for a purposeful cultural shift in how we think about fire and our relationship with it; how we study it, manage it, and live with it. Two recent major reports provide comprehensive recommendations on pathways forward in this regard. A congressionally established multi-disciplinary and cross-organizational commission released a comprehensive report on wildfire policy priorities in September 2023. In December 2022, an executive order promulgated the formation of a team of Indigenous and Western scholars and practitioners. They released an ecocultural state of the science report in March 2024 providing recommendations for future forest stewardship and place-based examples of success. These reports represent a collective shift in how we view forest management and the role of fire. Both reports, while addressing overlapping but not identical topics, converge on several key recommendations. First, they both support more effective collaboration among scientific disciplines, management agencies, communities, and tribal groups, especially. This collaborative environment is key to transitioning the approach to wildfire and forest management practices from uniformly reactive to dynamically proactive, which is a second key recommendation these reports share. Finally, investments in educating and training a new workforce that integrates Western and Indigenous knowledge is critical to adapting sustainably to a world with more fire.

More fire is inevitable, and what that will look like is highly dependent on the approach we decide to take as a society.  Through culturally-inclusive and convergent wildland fire science, we can transform how we view fire.

This means prioritizing building trust and cultivating relationships with one another and our environment. It means broadening our idea of what a healthy forest looks like and redefining the role of fire in creating resilient landscapes. And it means rekindling a beneficial relationship with fire for the sake of our communities and the ecosystems we all depend on.

Available Resources

• 1&3: MacLauchlan et al. 2019 J of Ecol: Fire as a fundamental ecological process
• 2: How does wildfire impact forests and wildlife?
• 3: Why Pine Barrens Need Fire to Survive
• 4: Redefining the urban wildfire problem in the West

Explore More

• Podcast: Fireline: Exploring what wildfire means for the West, our planet and our way of life
• Short Video: Re-kindling a Relationship with Fire
• Documentary: Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire
• Reports & Comments: Braiding Indigenous and Western Knowledge for Climate-Adapted Forests Report, Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission Report, Extreme wildfire seasons loom- science can help us adapt

Author

Jennifer Riehl, Ph.D.
2023-2025 Executive Branch Fellow at the U.S. National Science Foundation 

Editor

Sharmini Pitter Boghos, Ph.D., Environmental Earth System Science and Archaeology 
2023-2025 Executive Branch Fellow at the U.S. National Science Foundation 
LinkedIn

Andrew Czeidinski, Ph.D.
2023-2025 Executive Branch Fellow at the U.S. National Science Foundation 

Image: Emma Renly, Unsplash