Indigenous people experts in fire management

 “We need to get back to having more fires of choice and fewer fires of chance.”

That was the overriding message of Don Hankins who earlier this year gave a talk called All Things Botanically Related: Restoring Land with Fire.

He is a professor of geography and environmental studies at Chico State as well as field director for the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve.

Don Hankins shows a slide of before and after the Park Fire that started in Chico in 2024. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

“Landscapes were traditionally treated with fire to avoid devastation,” Hankins said.

He delved into how indigenous people have been using fire for centuries as a nature-based answer to solving problems. They used knowledge about the weather, plants—including medicinal, and animals from insects to large mammals and birds—for their protection and for hunting and fishing purposes—to make decisions about when and what to burn.

A key difference between indigenous fires and controlled burns by land managers is the former take into account cultural factors, not just clearing brush.

Some indigenous fires were to maintain travel routes. They understood when to burn and not burn to have the best outcomes.

“If you are not paying attention, you could have adverse impacts to the plant communities,” Hankins said.

Lack of managing the landscape in part is why wildland fires are becoming worse.

“Indigenous fires were of different scales from an individual plant up to a watershed scale,” Hankins said. “No indigenous fire that we know of got to the scale of 1 million acres.”

He was referencing the nearly 1 million acre Dixie Fire in 2021 that burned through Northern California.