These people are setting new blazes
on purpose during California's worst wildfire season.
It's called a prescribed burn,
a method of bringing good fire back to the land.
Your head's always on a swivel, and you
always want to be kind of on that fire's edge right there.
That's going to be your safest place to be.
Give it a whirl.
Now, more Californians
see this as one solution
to the state's catastrophic wildfires.
All of our ecosystems require fire,
and many of them require fire on a pretty regular
and frequent interval.
And as these volunteers
learn how to do this work ...
This is one of our main tools for ignitions.
You want to orient the curlicue.
... they're asking for help
from the land's original stewards.
Falling!
Conservation organization, state parks, national parks.
We work with them because we believe
that they truly want to take care of Mother Earth.
We also believe they don't know what the heck they're doing
and they need our tribe to help them.
But over the past century,
new inhabitants tried to stamp out fire completely.
Those focused on fire suppression
are actually getting stretched thinner and thinner,
and they don't have the capacity to do
all of the prevention work that we need.
These volunteers could be the reinforcements.
So far this year, an area nearly the size
of New Jersey has burned inside California.
That seems like a lot, but until European colonization,
this was normal, according to fire ecologists.
Much of the American West was intentionally
burned by humans.
Smoke and fire were common,
but the conditions were rarely devastating.
It was a central part of Indigenous culture.
Our tribe recognizes that fire is a gift from Creator.
It was a gift that allowed us to have warmth, to have light.
It was very important to manage landscapes,
and that prevented the very large buildup of fuel loads
such as we see now,
when they've taken fire off the land.
Our people did that for thousands of years,
and then came the horrific brutal periods of
colonization, and tribes were not allowed to burn anymore.
And while a changing climate
is making wildfire more likely, what set the stage
for this apocalyptic year was a policy
of removing all fire that dates back
over 100 years to 1910.
That year, there were millions
of acres burning across the Western United States,
similar to what we've seen in 2020.
In the aftermath,
the US Forest Service declared war on fire.
Now, regular people are learning how to bring good fire
back to the landscape.
Fire Forward is a program of Audubon Canyon Ranch,
and we're working to improve capacity
for prescribed burning in the Bay Area
and beyond by really changing the way we live with fire
as a culture.
Volunteers learn the basics
of wildland firefighting and prescribed fire lighting
over the course of eight weekends.
Safety is No. 1.
We're all here to teach and learn,
so please don't be afraid to stop or ask me or anything.
They must complete 40 hours
of online coursework,
complete a strenuous pack test,
and attend a field training day.
Bare mineral soil,
and that's the goal of any hand line, is to leave behind you
nothing but dirt. You don't want anything there.
Much of this work is done by hand
in small teams.
The McLeod and Pulaski are tools customized
for carving fire lines out of the landscape.
Volunteers also learn how to handle water hoses
and drip torches, which drip diesel fuel
to ignite dry brush.
They even learn how to use a fire shelter,
a last-resort safety device.
So we pop this open, step in with your other foot.
Now you've got three positions of contact,
so you can remove this hand,
grab the other strap, put it over your head,
and lie down.
Yay, awkward.
This training has attracted
a wide cross-section of Californians.
18-year-old Orion Bernan Pullman is an aspiring firefighter.
Emily Brody is earning a Ph.D. in ecology.
There are national park employees,
retired locals, and concerned citizens motivated
by the worsening fires of the past years.
I got exposed to Fire Forward in 2017, after the fires
came into Sonoma, and was here through the evacuation.
We had a number of friends who lost their homes.
Other volunteers haven't experienced fire
firsthand, but are eager to learn.
I do believe that it's our collective responsibility,
and it's almost to me like as an inhabitant of the planet,
it's kind of up to us to understand
how it works and to learn how to keep each other safe.
Members of local Native tribes are also present
at Fire Forward programs,
offering lessons that have been passed down
over hundreds of generations.
You know, it's really great to see everyone out here
and be putting fire back on the land
because it's definitely an essential part
of taking care of all of our tribal lands.
By the end of it,
volunteers are certified as basic wildland firefighters.
They aren't allowed to work on the front lines
of a dangerous blaze, but they can assist
on prescribed burns under the guidance
of an experienced crew chief.
Beautiful.
Good call, Todd, way to be paying attention.
Professional firefighters
do use prescribed burns, but the recent years
of back-to-back emergencies have left little time
for prevention work.
Volunteers could help, but there's always the risk
that a fire could get out of control.
The culture of the fire service believes
that using prescribed fire as a tool is more in their house.
They're the owners of that.
They are uncomfortable
with the idea of handing that tool over
to the general public because they don't have the training.
They don't have the knowledge of fire behavior.
But years of neglect are beginning to compound.
So far this year, fire suppression has cost taxpayers
over $1 billion, 10 times more than a decade ago.
No matter how many fire engines we buy,
no matter how many firefighters are on the ground,
there will never be enough firefighters
or equipment to be able to combat
the explosive, catastrophic nature of fires
that we've seen over the last few years.
The impacts of removing fire
can be seen all over California.
The Amah Mutsun lands on the Central Coast of California
didn't look anything like they do today.
This forested land was covered in grass, and it was one
of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America.
Today, that biodiversity is gone.
And today that coastal prairie is pretty much all gone.
Because once you stop the fire, then the shrubs encroach,
and then the Doug fir encroach,
and then the redwoods encroach.
And that just eliminated
that coastal prairie that is so essential.
For the past three years,
Native stewards from the Amah Mutsun tribe
have been working to restore the prairie
using fire as a key part of the process.
Because of the heavy fuel load that was there,
we couldn't just go in and light the thing on fire.
That wouldn't be safe.
And so what we were doing is we were cutting
down the trees and putting them into burn piles.
Falling!
There.
I'm the squad boss of the crew.
I'm an Amah Mutsun tribal member,
and my ancestors probably once roamed these lands.
We get that tree ready to process it so we can fell it.
We start limbing the tree from limb from limb
and then put it into a pile.
Then, when conditions are safe,
they burn those piles.
The end goal is to get enough fuel off the land
and then light prescribed burns that creep along the ground.
This slow-moving fire kills invasive species
that are not adapted to the heat.
When the smoke clears,
these burns restore balance to the ecosystem.
Fifteen months before the Glass Fire,
we did a prescribed fire in this area.
The Glass Fire burned over here.
This was our fire line for the prescribed fire.
The Glass Fire burned up to it and stopped.
You can see the green ferns, green grasses, green sedges,
tan oak sprouts, and outside the prescribed burn,
quite a burn.
I think that today, the impacts that we're seeing
from these fires demand a change.
We really don't have an option.
We cannot continue to see these kinds of impacts and losses.
And we've got to do something to change.
Back at Fire Forward's
first prescribed burn of the season,
the day starts with a welcome, prayer,
and test burn from a tribal citizen
of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
With Cal Fire representatives, water tankers,
and 50 volunteers on site, they burned 15 acres.
I don't think it's existential threat or sadness
that's drawing people into this movement.
I think what it is, is it's a ray of hope.
There's a tangible solution here.
And that is that we all learn to live with fire
in a different way.