Enter

Last summer, the forest where I live began to burn. The fire spread, not the way ink bleeds into paper but the way lights turn on as a city heads into the evening—a few here, a few there, then, suddenly, the town is aglow. That is how I imagine a soaring bird might have seen the CZU Complex Fire in the early hours of the 16th of August 2020. A few isolated beacons of light beaming up through the oaks, madrone and redwoods. Lightning continued to strike the Earth, igniting more and more material in the coastal forests. As these individual fires grew more numerable, they began to coalesce and, stoked by strong winds, increased massively in area.

Tens of thousands of people fled their homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. As families departed the forest, so too did our perception of what was taking place on the ground. I was surprised to learn just how limited our technology is when it comes to sensing fires remotely. I scoured the internet for satellite images that would tell whether or not our home had been swallowed by flames. But there was no source that could provide a clear image—there was just too much smoke. Indeed, it would not be until after the fire was contained and families were able to resettle that we would have an idea of what had actually happened up in those trees.

In September we were able to return home. We took a steep road up to our neighbourhood on the ridge, following a creek which cut a narrow valley into the mountain side. We drove at night on an unlit road, but the damage of the fire was evident immediately—metal barriers on the roadside flattened by fallen trees, ash thick as fog hanging in the air and a sharp, tangy smell of something burning. Something burning. I could not say what. The smell was new to me. It was not the smell I knew from burning freshly felled trees, nor the damp, musty smell you get when you burn a piece of driftwood soaked in seawater. This was the smell fire makes when it burns entire worlds; a fire that consumes not only wood but leaves, soil, stone, animals, homes, memories.

I admit I did not feel a strong connection to the forest at the time. I had just moved to Santa Cruz when the fire broke out and I hadn’t spent much time in the forest. What I did know about the forest came from excerpts of botany and natural history texts. I recalled that Santa Cruz hosts a diverse, temperate evergreen forest with notable community members such as the live oak, madrone and coast redwood. I remembered reading that the forests of Santa Cruz are “fire-adapted” though I had no real grasp on what this meant. If anything, it sounded like the forest was fire-overwhelmed, at least that’s what the news media was suggesting. “Worst Fire in History.” I knew about the fire retardant qualities of redwood bark and had a vague notion of there being some plants which need fire to germinate their seeds. But according to the headlines, the press conferences, the daily reports of scientists and first responders, the fires we were seeing were of an intensity beyond the adaptive capabilities of the flora and fauna of the forest. Walking through the burn zones of the forest, it was hard not to share in their assessments.

It feels weird to say that my first time going for a walk in my neighbourhood was walking through the aftermath of the worst fire in the community’s memory. But such was the case. I stepped onto the trail, but I truly could not have told you with certainty where the established trail ended and the forest began for the understory was completely obliterated. The forest floor was a patchwork of black soot and grey ash. Occasionally the remnants of what might have been a shrub or small tree clawed feebly upwards through the murk. Looking up and around me I perceived a sight for which I can hardly find a comparison.

The feeling of being towered over, of standing in the shadow of something immense, is not new to me. Rocks are immense, as mountains, cliffs, dunes. Buildings are immense, as skyscrapers and stadiums. Trees are immense, living, breathing immensity. Standing beside any of these, there are a few qualities I have come to expect: rocks are grey or brown, white or rose, weathered by time and varied in texture; buildings mimic the colours of rocks, light up from the inside and are veined with sheets of glass; trees, in essence, are green though a closer look reveals blue, yellow, orange, crimson, mauve. You might give a tree a thousand colours—any tree but these. When I look up and see the jet black limbs of trees reaching across the trail, it is a sight I have never held before. Standing in the forest, it wasn’t the feeling of being towered over that so disturbed me. It was the bleakness of the event.

Moving further into the forest, a deep quiet prevailed. Even my steps were silent as I pressed my feet into the powdery film of ash that covered the forest floor. Black leaves fell from trees and floated to the ground without sound in the windless air. Yet somewhere far off I did perceive the faint rustling of some activity. It was like the sound of sand ricocheting off a windshield or dry hands crushing tissue paper. I would later learn that this was the sound of a fire still burning in the bowels of the forest, pouring up white smoke from the cauldron of a fallen tree.

My first walk in the forest was brief, eerie and altogether puzzling. It was hard for me to see how any forest, however well adapted, could dream of growing back after such apparent devastation. It was not until I began my walk home that the forest, as if sensing my skepticism, sent a signal of its resilience, a shard of hope for its posterity. At the edge of the forest, where soil and trees meet concrete and telephone poles, there lay the fallen trunk of a redwood tree. 30 feet from stem to stern and burnt pitch black by the flames of the inferno, this sideways trunk supported a number of secondary trunks which shot straight up toward the sky. They stood there in defiance of death, as a monument to the strength of the tree and, perhaps, one might wish, the strength of the forest as a whole. Perched atop one of these trunks, within a tangle of blackened branches, I glimpsed the little green fingers of still-living leaves. Emerald crystals protruding from the ceiling of a coal mine. I imagined the tongues of flame lapping hungrily at the trunks of this magnificent tree, reaching desperately for that island of life in an ocean of fire.

In ecology we often talk about ecosystems being in a state of balance. The drought is followed by the deluge, the hurricane by stillness, night by day and decay by growth. The fear in such an ecosystem is always that a disturbance will come along with such ferocity that it moves the ecosystem into an entirely new state—tips the scale so far that the initial equilibrium is lost forever. This fear is echoed in the rhetoric around climate change and features prominently in conversations about wildfires. Standing at the base of these jet black organ pipes, watching the faint tendrils of green leaves stretch for the Sun, I wonder where the scale of this ecosystem sits. Has the scale been tipped over into a new regime? Has the fire caused so much damage that native flora and fauna will inevitably be displaced by different species in a sort of ecological gentrification? Are we simply witnessing the extreme end of a swing in the pendulum, waiting for the ecosystem to come crashing back to equilibrium with growth as prolific as the fire was destructive? Or is the pendulum still swinging outward, setting the stage for a fire even more powerful than the last?

Listen

I had no illusions of setting out on some untravelled path. I knew, indeed, that there would be hundreds of people working to understand and address the effects of the CZU Fire. The most visible of these were the people with white helmets and reflective vests. Twice daily, scores of these men and women would make the pilgrimage to and from the airfield across the street from our house where they would exchange their commuter cars for vehicles bearing the official block lettering of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company: PG&E. The Company had set up its base of operations up here on an island of unburnt land, an area that scarcely contained our neighbourhood. This nexus of activity, replete with fleets of cranes, trucks, floodlights, helicopters and security personnel, was a 24/7 operation. By setting up their staging area in the middle of the burn zone, the Company put themselves closer to the tasks they needed to carry out and saved themselves (and their employees) the trouble of moving heavy equipment up 2000 feet of steep, wooded mountainside every day. With the intended goal of restoring electricity and internet, it was easy for them to justify the immensity of the operation.

The projects of PG&E workers were ceaseless and demanding: cut branches, fell trees, move logs, fix power lines, direct traffic, “DRIVE SLOW BE PREPARED TO STOP.” For months it was a regular sight to come around a bend in the road and see a person 30 feet up in the air on the end of a crane, using a saw to negotiate with the limbs of a redwood tree or Douglas fir. All of the trees which had fallen on the road during the fire were removed. Trees growing too close to power lines were groomed while their neighbours, sufficiently far away from lines, were left untouched. I will not speak much further on this subject, having only a superficial understanding of the inner workings of PG&E. Suffice it to say that extensive human and financial capital went immediately into addressing the fire.

My contribution, by comparison, was rather modest. My goal was to construct a picture of the post-fire landscape by monitoring a specific area of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. Was the forest just a tangled mass of wood, leaves and charcoal that we could prune into shape with saw and scythe? Was the forest strong enough to recover from the fire? Could we, could I find clues to the timing and severity of the next fire? These were the questions I hoped to answer when I marched into the forest for the second time. With a notebook, pencil and phone camera, I started to piece together a scrapbook of frantic sketches, paragraphs and photos.

It is December. The days are short and damp. The trail is easier to see after a few months’ foot traffic. It leads me through a flat of trees and shrubs, none of which was tall enough to escape the blaze. The seared leaves of oaks cling desperately to their branches. Other plants, madrone and manzanita, have no leaves left at all. Their limbs are bare and black, black as the cast iron soil from which they extend. And right there is something curious. There, where trunks and stems meet earth, is an explosion of new growth. The nascent tendrils of green life may be minuscule compared to these plants in their former glory, but considering they’ve grown this much in just the last couple of months their size is formidable. I am sure the rain has played its part in this. Plants which seemed so convincingly dead in September are yet living and I wonder again what the fate of a plant means for the forest as a whole.

I continue to visit the forest, each time investigating the same areas, looking for changes, for consistencies. With each rain, the dead material on the forest floor decays further into the ground, and material which is alive grows stronger. I am watching the transfer of energy take place before my own eyes. The fallen leaves, limbs and trunks becoming soil, becoming the substrate and sustenance for new life. Young leaves burst from the trunks of old redwoods, encrusting the cathedral of trees in bands of green coral. The leaves fan out, grow a bit everyday, stretching to reach new fragments of light. Beneath them their trunks are stained blacker than tar, like a church that has lived through a war.

I visit the forest by myself, but I am not alone. Actually, my company grows greater with each visit as the rains continue to bring new life. I make another discovery. Since the verdant carpet of the forest floor has burnt away, years of human waste appear. Glass drinking bottles, food tins and other refuse, as if the Earth were whispering, “Hey, you dropped something.” And I wonder if it is the world which burns each summer or us. The pattern of new growth repeats as I start to explore areas of the forest that I haven’t seen before. Even areas where the burn looks more severe, I see green peeking out from the bases of trees. I see immense stumps from which bloom multiple generations of growth. These stumps, over eight feet across, have been hollowed out by past fires but they support a flurry of younger, thinner trunks. These adolescent trunks are painted with fresh fire scars—the CZU Fire may have been their first severe burn—and they now have even younger stems shooting up from their bases. Standing here it is hard not to see the intimate relationship between fire and the forest.

I wanted to know how my observations fit into the current understanding of forest management in the Santa Cruz Mountains so I spoke with a forester who has built her career around the stewardship of these lands. (I have kept her identity anonymous because of the sensitive nature of our conversation). We walked through the part of the forest where I had been studying the rapid regrowth of trees and shrubs. One of the first comments she made was that this area represented a “good burn,” that the forest could regrow in an area like this because the fire had not destroyed the existing root structure of plants or sterilised the seed bank. She picked up a pinecone and pointed to a stand of grey, leafless trees about 50 feet tall. She explained to me that these pines, knobcone pines, are indicators of fire—“fire followers,” she called them, trees not only adapted to fire but dependent on it. They live 40 to 50 years and then they die, becoming fuel for the next fire, a fire which they require to open their cones and germinate their seeds. This is what happens, she reminded me, in a good burn like the one we were standing in. She warned me, however, not to take this segment of forest as a gauge for how the rest of the forest was responding to the fire.

She explained to me that the CZU Fire had been more intense than the fires to which this system was adapted. In terms of the amount of heat generated, the total area burned and the mortality of trees post-fire, the CZU Fire was uncharacteristic compared to the fire regime of the preceding millenia. While the fire in this one area caused a good burn, elsewhere in the forest the fire had severely altered the “trajectory of succession,” the natural cycle of death and regrowth that occurs in redwood forests. There were 1000-year-old redwoods, trees which had survived many fires, that were now dying because of the extraordinary intensity of the CZU Fire. Following the fire, non-native grasses were invading burn zones, replacing the botanic diversity that evolved here under a lower-intensity fire regime. She stressed that the redwood forests of the central coast represent a globally rare ecosystem, a mixture of Northern California, Southern California and Sierra Nevada biomes. The ecosystem here has such high biodiversity that fires with the intensity of the CZU Fire could be destroying cryptic species that we haven’t even discovered yet. I drew a comparison between these forests and the gradual loss of coral reefs worldwide—both and spatially rare and tremendously diverse—we agreed the survival of both systems seems precarious. My question for her was the same I might pose to a coral reef ecologist: in the face of overwhelming evidence that these ecosystems are in trouble, what would be the best way to protect them? The answer, of course, is not a simple one.

The question of what we can or should do is increasingly complicated by the number of different groups included in the term “we.” I do not say this to divide people—doubtless we mostly all share a desire for safe and healthy human and forest communities—but when it comes to management priorities and long-term goals, the term “we” is hardly all-inclusive. An anecdote from the forester’s own experience illustrates the blatant conflicts of interest involved in forest management. There are areas in the Santa Cruz Mountains where foresters oversee massive landscapes under the direction of state, county, private and public agencies. The foresters who steward these land management systems have landscape-scale objectives to maintain intact forest. And this isn’t just, “any old land,” she reminds me. This is a globally unique ecosystem, including flora and fauna that we do not see anywhere else and sacred cultural sites of indigenous people. Under normal conditions, there is a permitting process to even be able to touch a tree on these lands. But then you have last summer when a power company comes in and indiscriminately cuts 400-foot-wide roads along 9 miles of transmission line to "prevent future fires"—even though parts of the ecosystem depend on fires. The whole situation is very confusing. On the one hand, the fire generated motivation and funding for fire management (California Governor Gavin Newsom committed $1 billion for forest management in the wake of the August fires). On the other hand, groups are so divided on what it means to manage forests that it is difficult to imagine anything beyond the cosmetic changes we see along the roadside—chop down trees, clear roads, take down broken power lines, put up new ones. As I tried to wrap my head around this situation, I scoured historical records for clues to the origin of this complex relationship between humans, forests and fires.

I learned from my research that my study area shared a common history with other areas of the coastal forests. Following their migration to California, early Euro-American colonisers promptly began to clear-cut vast areas of old-growth redwood forests. Logging operations were constantly on the move, establishing mills in a harvest area then dismantling them and moving to new areas after felling all of the nearby trees. Loggers actually utilised fire in this task. In late autumn they would burn out the understory of a harvest area and after the rainy winter months had passed they would head out into the burn zones, which the fires made easy to travel through, and cut down the old-growth redwoods that had survived the low-intensity surface fires. Natural fires, on the other hand, were met with the firm opposition that persists today. As early as 1888, residents of Boulder Creek, a few miles up the river from my study area, had financed and excavated a reservoir in the hills above town and installed a six-inch diameter pipe to deliver water to a series of fire hydrants along the main street. Which is not to say that firefighting was a successful endeavour.

In the summer of 1891, a fire decimated the business district of Boulder Creek, destroying all but one building. Residents attempted to douse the flames with buckets of water and wet blankets, but to no avail. Railroad workers and lumbermen hurried desperately to haul away the thousands of cords of wood stacked at the railroad yard—surely to be used in the construction of some other flammable structures elsewhere in the state. One Daisy Hollenbeck even wrapped a chain around his home and hooked it to a locomotive which he sent down the tracks in order to level his house in an attempt to create a firebreak. But the house merely served as kindling and the fire burned through the night. The technological shortfalls continued six years later in 1897 when a fire raged through the nearby town of Ben Lomond—fire crews brought hoses from Boulder Creek but found they did not fit the water mains of Ben Lomond. The arms race between fire and technology went on into the 20th century. Horse-drawn hose carts were replaced with fire engines and chemical tanks meanwhile fires continued to raze homes and hillsides. Volunteer firefighters even used dynamite to clear trees for firebreaks, with varying degrees of success. It was clear that fire was an enemy.

Fire threatened homes and it endangered the few stands of old-growth redwood forest that had survived the blades of loggers. These were trees that lumbermen had sacrificed from their profits and if they were lost to fires they would have spared the trees for no reason. Trees should be cut down for profit and if not they should grow in perpetuity, free from fire and other dangers. This was the prevailing logic throughout the 170 years that led up to the CZU Fire. But 170 years in the lifetime of trees which can live for millennia is not much time at all. I knew I would have to look even further back in time to make sense of the current reliance on fire suppression. For more information, I turned to the Amah Mutsun.

I am grateful to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band for sharing so much of their people’s history, especially their relationship with fire. The Amah Mutsun identify themselves as the descendants of the indigenous people wrongfully detained at Missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista in the early 1800s. On their website, they refer to this period as a “keyhole in time,” a moment which disrupted their connection with their own history. However, the Amah Mutsun are reclaiming their history and traditional practices, including their relationship with fire. Through oral traditions and collaborations with anthropologists, archeologists and ethnobotanists, the Amah Mutsun have started to share their knowledge of fire and how they have used it as a tool for stewarding the land for thousands of years.

The Amah Mutsun have been living on the California coast for around 15,000 years. That is over 800 generations of people seeking knowledge of the natural world. Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Council, explains that his people were created to protect the land and all beings in it and that includes using fire to enhance the productivity of landscapes. This knowledge comes from Amah Mutsun oral traditions and modern science is confirming these oral accounts. Indigenous people have been using ‘cultural burning’ for thousands of years. Cultural burns are deliberate and strategic. Initial burns increase the productivity of seed plants which made up 40% of the indigenous people’s diets. Subsequent burns lead to the growth of hardwoods which can be used for building. Fire also helped to clear the understory which allows for travelling and game hunting. Scientists have identified over 70 different uses of cultural burning in California. The first Euro-Americans to survey the coast of what is now Santa Cruz County, the Portola Expedition of 1769, recorded that the land had been recently burnt and held good soil with extensive grasslands. We now know that these burns and the associated grasslands were the result of intentional cultural burning practices. The indigenous people of California not only lived with fire, they depended on it, not unlike the other beings of the forest.

Native burning practices consisted of frequent, low-severity fires which increased the biodiversity of native ecosystems and reduced the risk of major fires. By regularly burning the land, Natives prevented any one species from taking over, maintaining mosaics of vegetation that included not only wooded forests but grasslands, shrubs and prairies. The redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains burned every 10 years for at least the last thousand years, probably longer, and scientists attribute the vast majority of ignitions to cultural burning. These frequent fires limited the build-up of fuel loads on the forest floor, so when fires did spread they were restricted to a certain area and remained low to the ground instead of jumping up into the canopy of trees like we saw in the CZU Fire. The fires of the past thousands of years were of an entire different character than the ones we experienced last August. The August fires would almost certainly have been less intense if native burning practices had been in place.

The intensity of the CZU Fire was a direct result of the past century of fire suppression. When Euro-American colonisers detained, murdered and displaced the Amah Mutsun and other tribes, they functionally ended the millenia-long practice of cultural burning. Taking possession of the land, these early colonisers clear-cut most of the land in the Santa Cruz Mountains—the forests you see here today are less than 170-years-old. These ecosystems are dependent on fire but, like us, they have grown up in a world of fire suppression, a world fundamentally different from the world which was here originally.

I began to view my study area in a new light. The forest is not some helpless victim that goes along with whatever we plan for it. It is a living, breathing, delicate and powerful system that evolves through time with us. All of the different groups who have lived here—the Amah Mutsun, the missionaries, the loggers and their families and now us—all have treated the forest differently, have cared for the forest in our own unique way. We are able to understand the effects that past practices had on the forest and now we must make an honest assessment of how our current approach to forest management affects this ecosystem. Today we are at a crossroads where our understanding of the long history of fires meets the overwhelming need to address the unprecedented, catastrophic fires of the 21st century. The Amah Mutsun, the people who have lived here longer than any of us, used fire regularly as part of their relationship with the land. We have a choice to learn from these original stewards of the land and to rediscover a connection to the land that was destroyed some 200 years ago.

Speak

As I walk through the forest I am hopeful. The forest has received the fire it craves. New life is taking hold around the base of trunks and in the boughs above my head. Slowly the palette is shifting from grey and black to green and brown. I am visiting the forest every day and I can’t help but think that things are getting better, that the system is doing exactly what it is adapted to do. One night in late January, the first windstorm of the season hits the mountain side. The power goes out in our neighbourhood. Crews and bucket trucks return to the mountain roads, sending workers up into the canopy with cranes to remove branches from power lines. It looks like September again.

As much as I want to enter the forest to see what is happening, I know that I need to wait until the wind dies down. After a few days, I return to my study site. Everything looks normal at first, better than normal—the understory is covered in green! Initially, I figure that the rain from the storm has spurred another burst of life from the root systems of old trees. But then I realise the sea of green on the forest floor comes from the leaves of fallen branches. Branches 10, 15, 20 feet long have broken off in the wind and are accumulating on the forest floor in great mats. Entire trees, some over 50 feet long, are also laying on the forest floor. All of these trees are scarred by fire at their base. Maybe these trees were going to fall this year no matter what? But my guess would be that these trees fell because they were weakened by the CZU Fire. The fuel load of shrubs and small plants that burned in the CZU Fire is now being replenished. Not with living plants but with dead branches and trees, fuel that is even more likely to burn in the future. The forest is replenishing its fuel supplies and we see the cruel irony of our current fire regime.

Not only does fire suppression lead to major fires, but the major fires themselves lay the groundwork for progressively larger fires. The heat kills vegetation and when this vegetation falls to the forest floor it becomes fuel for the next fire. And unlike typical fuels (e.g. live shrubs and small plants) these fuels are made of dead material which will burn more easily than living plant matter. By suppressing fires for 170 years, we have allowed a massive amount of living plant material to accumulate. Now that this plant material is dying, it is being converted into fuel. At this rate, it is no wonder that scientists and foresters are predicting more intense fires. The fires essentially need to become larger in order to contribute the amount of burning that has been lost in the past couple centuries. Fire is no longer an optional condition of living here—it is a prerequisite.

My original questions were about if the fires were causing permanent changes in the forest and if the forest would be able to bounce back after major fires. The forest is changing, but now it is clear that the changes began much earlier than 2020. In the 1800s, colonisers introduced fire suppression which led to the build-up of understory plants. This material is finally burning and our modern-day fires, rather than representing a change in the system, could actually be returning the system to its original state. However, we have pushed the system so far from the equilibrium that was established by several millennia of native burning practices that returning to the ‘original state’ will likely mean enduring several more major fires. While these fires could be beneficial for native plants, there is also the danger that non-native invasive species will replace the botanic diversity that fire usually brings. This is something we need to figure out because these fires are not going to go away. We need to decide if we are going to adopt a fire regime where fires are frequent, low-intensity and lead to greater botanic diversity. Or are we going to insist on the current fire regime which invites high-intensity fires that reduce botanic diversity and endanger human life? I do not suppose that either path will be easy but in making our decision I encourage us to acknowledge the wisdom of those who have lived here the longest: native people and native plants. 

Throughout the CZU Fire, the primary objective of first responders was the preservation of human life and property. I wonder, can we broaden our objectives? What we need to thrive is not inconsistent with what the forest needs. Instead of preventing fires for the sole purpose of protecting human dwellings, can we use fires to optimise the land for us and other creatures? Loving the land is not a foreign concept to our society. We already have national parks, outdoor recreation areas, campgrounds. It is a matter of making our love for the land compatible with the needs of the land itself. The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the need for communities in the United States to build stronger relationships between people. The August fires then highlighted the need to build stronger relationships with land. Furthermore, we have the systems and technology we need to succeed in reinstating cultural burning practices: computers that can predict and model the responses of forests to fire; GPS technology that can clearly demarcate the borders of burn zones; instant communication networks; the capacity to collect real-time data; historical records; human and ecological census studies; and fire management and response infrastructure. We have inherited a history of poor stewardship of lands and the despicable treatment of native people. It is not our fault that these things happened. But it is our responsibility to embrace a new way of living for the benefit of future generations.