Restorative Fire

Giant Sequoia Sequoiadendron giganteum

California’s landscape had been managed by fire for hundreds of thousands of years, as long as Indigenous people have lived on this land. When the colonizers stole the land, they didn’t understand it had been tended - they thought what they were stealing was “pristine, untouched wilderness”. They were afraid of fire and how it might damage this “beautiful, pristine” place.

So for centuries they banned fire, and fire did come, but it came so infrequently that when it did come it was starving, and it gorged itself on the plants that had overgrown and the invasive weeds that the settlers had brought with them that became the perfect fuel for a massive, destructive blaze.

And the fire that was normally so healing for the land, that normally would clear out underbrush to encourage growth, that normally would add vital nutrients to the soil, that normally would germinate seeds that would lie in wait for it, became an inferno so hot that it was no longer healing, but devastating to the land and to the lungs of the people.

One of the seeds that has been waiting for restorative fire are the cones of the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), the grandfathers of the forest and the tallest trees in California (and quite possibly the most massive trees on Earth). Sequoia cones contain up to 200 seeds, and can take nearly 200 years to mature. They are covered in a thick resin, and they can lie in wait for decades for a fire that will melt the resin and release their seeds into the newly ashen soil. Plants that require fire to germinate are called pyrophiles, and Giant Sequoia is the most notable pyrophile in the California landscape.

Centuries after the forced colonization of this land, after multiple attempted genocides of the Indigenous people who once tended it, the people who know about restorative healing fire survived. And as colonizer descendants are learning that what we were taught about fire might not actually be true, that how we have managed these stolen lands might actually be making “fire season” even more devastating, we are beginning to realize how desperately we need Indigenous leadership to bring back healthy fire to the landscape. And I can only hope that as healing fire becomes a bigger part of the ecosystem, that we will all become more familiar with the pyrophiles who have been lying in wait for it all of these centuries, patient that it would return once again.

This illustration was featured in Issue #3 of Folklore for Resistance: Fire.