To Save Our Forests, I Had to Learn to Burn Them

I grew up in Washington with a simple understanding of fire: it was the enemy. Smoke on the horizon meant evacuation orders, orange skies, and the smell of loss that lingers for weeks. So when a forester first handed me a drip torch and told me to set the understory alight, every instinct I had screamed against it. That day changed how I see the woods forever.

Unlearning a Century of Suppression

For generations, we fought every blaze with total suppression, and in doing so we starved our forests of the very process that kept them healthy. Fire is not an invader here; it is a native force, as natural as rain. Our evergreen landscapes evolved with regular, low-intensity burns that cleared debris, opened the canopy, and returned nutrients to the soil. By putting out every spark, we let dead wood pile up and young trees crowd together, turning our forests into tinderboxes waiting for a single lightning strike.

The prescribed burns I now help conduct are careful, deliberate affairs—small plots, measured conditions, crews standing by. We are not fighting nature; we are restoring its rhythm. The smoke that once terrified me now carries a different meaning: it is the smell of stewardship. And we are not inventing this practice. Indigenous peoples across this region have used cultural burning for millennia, tending the land with fire long before state agencies existed. The modern science is finally catching up to that ancient wisdom.

The hardest part is not the heat or the work—it is the public's fear. Every controlled burn draws complaints about smoke and questions about why anyone would set a forest on fire on purpose. But the alternative is far worse: megafires that consume everything in their path. Learning to burn is learning to live with fire on our terms, in small doses, so that we never have to face it in the catastrophic form we dread. The forest taught me that protection sometimes means destruction—done gently, deliberately, and with love.