The State of Fire: Why California Burns - Tapa dura

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Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water (2019), The Forests of California (2020), The Coasts of California (2022), and The Deserts of California (2023), all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle @coyotethunder on Instagram. His speaking tour dates are available at californiafieldatlas.com, and his essays are posted at coyoteandthunder.com. He lives in Oakland, CA.

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INTRODUCTION: "SEARCHING FOR NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: Spring in Whiskeytown"

It took me a few minutes to figure out what I was looking at, and significantly longer to figure out how I felt about it. Standing next to the reservoir on a sunny day, surrounded by human recreationalists, I was not in any so-called wilderness. I was at the edge of the wildland–urban interface, a term used until very recently only by policy wonks and land managers, but now relevant and popular, referring to where the built world of infrastructure meets untended landscapes in which few humans currently live. Recently, fire had left this land black and barren, and I'm sure it did the same to so many homes of the people who now relaxed on the beach. That day, both the land and the people seemed to have let the trauma subside and embraced the simple joy of cool, spring sunshine. A dense grove of green, broadleaved trees bent from the shore, offering shade to the beachgoers, and a snow-melt creek babbled nearby, flanked by purple and white flower-crowned shrubs attended by a host of happy birds and insects. In the distance, vernal snow still clung to Shasta Bolly's six-thousand-foot cornice, which wore a skirt of brown conifers, evidence of an ecosystem still deliberating the character of its postfire reorganization.

But even as I pondered processes that once may have been beyond the reach of human influence, I couldn't shake the historical question: Was any of it not shaped by human artifice? Every species in this watershed existed in some several-thousand-year relationship to human design and effort. And post–gold rush American will had manipulated, regulated, impounded, deformed, and simplified the patterns of the living world here. At the heart of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (WNRA), five years after megafire (the Carr Fire) reset and transformed this ecosystem, I found a landscape emblematic of what was happening across the planet. On that beautiful day, the question chilled me: Now that every terrestrial ecosystem was subject to the industrialized legacy of humanity, wasn't the whole world now inside the wildland–urban interface?

That legacy transforms the local landscape through the air, as pollution and climate breakdown by way of global warming; across the earth, through fragmentation by roadways and infrastructure buildup at the wildland–urban interface—an ever-increasing area of fire-prone rural and natural landscapes encroached on by sprawling modern settlement patterns; in the water, through the impounding of riverine ecosystems and dramatically altering hydrology. And then there is fire. The past, present, and future of fire are key in understanding humanity's power to upend the world. Ethical questions about what nature is pile up: What parameters of wildness define nature? What are our responsibilities to maintain those parameters? To what degree does fire define California's natural world? Are big fires, like the Carr Fire, indicative of the natural world restoring itself? Are we inside an inevitable age of reckoning? Or are these fires symptomatic of ill health and imbalance representing a landscape-scale dysbiosis, or a kind of disease that leads to little but ruinous calamity? Does the land experience trauma as we do? If we put effort into understanding how, where, and why California burns, might that be a prescription of healing for both the land and for ourselves?

In the spring of 2023, having been accepted into the artist residency program of the National Park Service (NPS) at WNRA, I knew I was going to one of California's best field laboratories for empirically researching these questions. Park staff welcomed me on a months-long cook's tour of this unique parcel of land. I joined students and scientists, rangers and researchers, and entered a season of learning that would change my life. WNRA is sixtyish square miles in size, ten miles west of Redding, California. Between the Sacramento River Valley to the east, Shasta to the north, the Trinity Mountains to the west, and the coastal ranges to the south, WNRA has unique geologic and climatic qualities found nowhere else in the state. The reservoir on Clear Creek called Whiskeytown Lake is flanked by four-hundred-million year-old soils that get blasted with sixty inches of rain in the winter, then cooked under weeks of temperatures that soar to more than 110 degrees in the summer. Before I arrived, I knew that I would be enmeshed in an emerging landscape because I knew what had happened five years prior to my visit. I knew all about the Carr Fire.

It was the last week of July in 2018 when the Carr Fire bore down on Whiskeytown and began its month-long crawl over a quarter of a million acres, an area eight times the size of WNRA. Before 2023, what I knew of the Carr Fire came from what I heard about on the news, which focused—and only ever seems to focus—on the human cost: damage and lives lost. Three days after it initially ignited, the Carr Fire spawned an apocalyptic fire tornado in a suburban neighborhood of Redding. At 2700° F and blowing at 165 miles per hour, the tornado existed for thirty minutes, was a thousand feet across and three miles high, and obliterated a half-mile-long stretch of homes. The damage was equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane and exerted the localized force of several atomic weapons equivalent to those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Five people died. Eventually, the Carr Fire would take eight lives in total. Across the surrounding woodlands, the severe burn zone, or the area of 100 percent plant mortality, extended for tens of thousands of acres. But the Carr Fire was not the largest or most severe fire in California that year, the year before, or the year after. In the past twenty years, the Carr Fire doesn't even make the top ten.

In the wake of such terror, it is easy to imagine that twenty-first-century wildfire is symbolic of some grand failure. Or to assume that California’s evergreen development has reached a limit, and that society’s relationship with the more-than-human world needs a grand reset. Both ideas may indeed be true. Whatever the case may be, my tour of WNRA made it startling clear that California's ecology and biodiversity have an ancient, profound, and fecund relationship with human fire on the land. The relationship between anthropogenic fire and the character of California's living landscape is so intrinsic that without it, California would not be California. Fire is a primary component of what is referred to a traditional ecological knowledge, which is a bundle of regionally specific, indigenous technologies of ecological fecundity on the land. Without millennia after millennia of applied indigenous fire, and without traditional ecological knowledge, California would not demonstrate the world-class biodiversity that it still does today. California's biodiversity largely exists as it does because of fire and not despite it; that fact is the thematic core of this book. The human story of Whiskeytown’s landscape is California's story, and is a very old story of resiliency, community, and adaptability. Despite centuries of pollution and injury, evidence of extant, robust biodiversity is everywhere. Five years after the megafire, botanists are combing the hills, redrawing plant distribution maps and discovering new species of fire-following flower species. The resurgent, vernal woodland sets a poetic backdrop for a grand city of songbirds and drunken bumblebees madly attending their wildflower paradise. The surprisingly vibrant attitude of the snag forest, the postfire forest ecosystem, is sometimes disguised by the gray-and-black color of its bone-like tree trunks now claimed as avian apartment buildings. Inside, untold thousands of nests hold a million dreaming infant birds, awaiting their turn to sing in the morning sun. Across the baked, greenstone soil of the Whiskeytown chaparral is a delightful panoply of life, an ecosystem catching its breath from the gut-punch fire. The ecosystem not only understands that fire will return but wishes for fire's recurrence, in accordance to how things once were and shall be again. Although, with the advent of so many novel stressors, from invasive grass to climate breakdown, fire's regular return has been forever altered from its precontact regime, evidence abounds for how this place is remembering itself, and fire is the agent of that reset, at once ancient and new.