Not All Fire Is Destruction: Reclaiming Fire as a Tool for Forest Stewardship

Tags: Collaborations, Cultural Burning, Defensible Space, Forest Futures, Forest Futures Salon Series Winter/Spring 2025, Forest Restoration, Regenerative Economy, Stewardship, Wildfire Prevention, Wildfire Resilience

This April, Tahoe – Truckee community members, Indigenous leaders, forest and fire professionals gathered to explore a tool that is both ancient and prescient to all forest stewards: beneficial fire.

Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation’s (TTCF) Forest Futures Salon, “When Fire Helps: Scaling Prescribed Burning Across the Sierra,” made clear: in an era of catastrophic megafires, the question we face is not if we should burn in the name of forest restoration, but how to do so wisely and at scale. 

Fire Has Always Belonged to the Forest

Sierra Nevada forests were once shaped by regular fire that cleared away undergrowth and allowed larger, older trees to thrive. These cycles were interrupted by decades of fire suppression policies.

“On USFS lands in the Sierra Nevada, 500,000 acres would burn historically due to cultural burning or lightning strike ignitions. Currently, only 35,000 acres are treated with thinning or prescribed fire. More than a 10-fold increase in fire use and fuels reduction is needed,” April Shackleford, Forest Fuels manager of the North Tahoe Fire Protection District, explained.

The goal of stewarding our forests now is to first “mimic the effects of fire” – thinning forests to resemble the uncrowded, well-spaced forests that regular fire once helped to maintain. Then, we must restore healthy fire as a key part of forest ecosystems. Without this, when overcrowded forests burn today, they are much more vulnerable to megafires that burn hotter, deeper, and more destructively than natural fires once did.

We Need to Embrace Multiple Types of Beneficial Fire

The term “beneficial fire” encompasses both prescribed fire, led by fire and forestry agencies, as well as cultural burning, led by Indigenous communities with deep, place-based ecological knowledge.

 “Cultural burning is very important for scaling beneficial fire. This is rooted in Indigenous knowledge, practice, and belief systems,” said Colleen Rossier, Senior Research and Policy Advisor of the Karuk Tribe. “While current estimates call for at ten-fold increase in fire treatments, in our work with Karuk Tribe, we understand that figure to be closer to 50-fold.”

Compared to other forms of treatment, such as mastication, beneficial fire has ecological benefits that leave the forest better than it was before. This includes nutrient cycling, water availability, improved tree health, improved diversity of understory plants, greater carbon retention, greater soil retention, and healthy old-growth forests.

Our Current Policies Were Built on Flawed Assumptions

There is an urgent need to reform the policies that govern fire and forest management, many of which were created without Indigenous voices and are based on outdated assumptions about fire and nature. 

Many laws [regarding forest management and fire] were written without Tribes and Indigenous people at the table. Thus, they were built on flawed premises: that humans and nature are separate; that fire is scary, bad, and should be suppressed, extinguished, treated as a disturbance; that smoke is always bad and should be minimized.

– Colleen Rossier, Senior Research and Policy Advisor of the Karuk Tribe

Correcting this means acknowledging Tribal sovereignty and elevating traditional ecological knowledge. In March 2025, the Karuk Tribe and the California Natural Resources Agency signed the first-ever cultural burning agreement under SB 310, a California law passed in 2024 to recognize and support Indigenous-led burning. It’s a critical step toward reintegrating fire into forest stewardship in a way that honors and uplifts Indigenous leadership.

Fire as a Forest Ally

Kyle Tabor-Cooper, Environmental Specialist at the Washoe Department of Environmental Protection, offered a powerful reframe: fire is your “favorite cousin”—welcome on the landscape, “even if things get a little wild sometimes.”

For the Washoe people, who have lived in and around the Tahoe Basin since time immemorial, cultural burning is part of a broader vision of environmental stewardship for future generations. As Tabor-Cooper shared, the Washoe Environmental Protection Department was created in alignment with traditional values to protect and enhance natural resources, including through cultural burning.

The Future of Beneficial Fire 

TTCF recognizes the importance of prescribed fire and cultural burning in forest stewardship efforts. We’re committed to:

• Exploring funding and policy pathways that empower practitioners, including Indigenous communities
• Creating opportunities for community learning and collaboration
• Ensuring that fire becomes not just an emergency, but a relationship

As Forest Futures moves forward, we know that fire — used wisely, and at scale — must be part of our shared path to resilience.

Read Our Forest Futures Salon Series 2025 Blogs

• Forest Futures Salon Series Kicks Off with Stories of Stewardship
• Spotlight on the Speakers of Forest Futures Salon #2 – Wood Innovations: Building a Regenerative Sierra Economy Through Forest Restoration
• Forest Futures: Building Resilience from the Forest Floor Up, Part 1 – Turning Forest Risk Into Opportunity
• Forest Futures: Building Resilience from the Forest Floor Up, Part 2 – Powering Communities with Local Wood Innovation
• Forest Futures: Building Resilience from the Forest Floor Up, Part 3 – Designing a Regenerative Future: Mass Timber and Creative Architecture
• Protecting Homes and Communities – Part 1: Building Community Resilience
• Protecting Homes and Communities – Part 2: The Future is Fire Resistant
• Protecting Homes and Communities – Part 3: Navigating Wildfire Risk
• Not All Fire Is Destruction: Reclaiming Fire as a Tool for Forest Stewardship
• Growing a Forest-Focused Future: Building Careers in Stewardship, Fire, and Wood