Armed with torches, dozens of volunteers set fire to fern bushes, dry trunks and dry leaves in a peri-urban forest in Santa Cruz County, near San Francisco, California. It is a controlled fire to clear the ecosystem to make it more resistant to flames.

The state of California is organizing more and more businesses of this kind.

Their goal is prevention to reduce the intensity of forest fires that have killed more than 200 people in the last decade and are multiplying due to Climate Change.

“The best way to fight fires is with fire,” recalls Portia Halbert, a California state parks scientist in charge of the operation. “The vegetation will eventually burn anyway. So we want to burn it (…), in a not too extreme way, to avoid the extension of the fire to the houses and causing human losses”.

American Indian practice

A victim of drought, California has experienced mega-fires of unprecedented intensity and enormous proportions in the last decade. The occurrence of these fires led to the realization of mistakes in their management, summarizes Portia Halbert.

California realized that its forest fire management policy, which had been designed around stopping fire at all costs, was proving ineffective. Overprotected, understory vegetation dries out faster due to climate change and turns forests into powder stores capable of fueling wildfires.

To limit the risk, California rediscovered the practice of controlled fires practiced by American Indians on their lands and banned in 1850.

By 2025, the state of California plans to burn 16,000 square kilometers per year.

In this context, during the last years, about twenty agencies have been developed in California. In addition to the action of the fire and forest services, these associations teach private individuals to organize and carry out such operations.

However, despite these efforts, the state is quite far from its goals.

“We have to change the scale,” says Jared Childress of the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association, which has overseen the Santa Cruz controlled fire. “We need to organize fires just like this across California, during the fall, winter, spring and even during the summer.”

Lack of hands

At present, the time “windows” that authorities have set for controlled fire operations are very narrow.

Because if the vast majority of them remain “under control”, this practice remains difficult: in the fall of 2022, a controlled fire got out of control in New Mexico and turned into a historic wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes.

But the needs remain huge, according to Lenia Quinn-Davidson, an expert in the field at the University of California.

“Our natural landscapes lack fire,” he insists, recalling that before the arrival of settlers, American Indian tribes used to burn between 16,000 and 45,000 square kilometers every year in the region.

To motivate citizens to take action, the state of California – where almost half of the land is privately owned and remains outside the radius of action of the authorities – created a fund of resources intended for the organization of controlled fires.

However, the biggest brake is the lack of workers, according to Lenia Quinn-Davidson. Between the specialized knowledge required for controlled fires and the amount of administrative procedures required to organize them, “thousands of people need more training,” he says.

Among the volunteers in the Santa Cruz forest, Ian Cook learns in training to pass a weather report to the other volunteers in his group. Thanks to this training, this Ecology student has acquired skills equivalent to those of a firefighter.

“Fire doesn’t care what club one belongs to. We have to work together because it’s a problem that concerns us all.”