As climate change continues to escalate, temperatures around the world become more extreme, at-risk climates become drier, and things like dry lightning and high winds start to whip flames across beautiful forested regions. This is something we’ve seen especially in Europe and the United States, as the fires ravaging the land worsen and break more catastrophic records.
Modern hazard reduction works to prevent these fires from spinning out of control, but it’s become clear that contemporary fire management alone is not working. Instead, more fire departments are turning their attention away from modern technology and toward ancient indigenous traditions of controlled burning. Indigenous populations around the world learned to use fire to regulate the land, but their knowledge was suppressed with colonization. Now, however, as the planet burns out of control, we need a more holistic understanding of the land, to bridge the profound cultural differences that stem from different understandings of belonging, history, values, and science.
Click through for some fascinating fire know-how, and for what we can learn from the cultures and traditions that date back millennia.