WATSONVILLE — Take a look at the immense destruction caused by wildfires within Santa Cruz County and across the state in recent years and it’s easy to understand why some might bristle at the notion of intentionally setting any part of the local landscape aflame.
But amid those concerns is a growing chorus of scientific, governmental and community-based experts touting the benefits of “good fire” coming in the form of prescribed burns that they say turn down the heat on catastrophic wildfires while providing ecological benefits and honoring practices employed for centuries by Native Americans.
The latest example came this week at Mount Madonna Center, a yoga teaching and retreat center sitting atop 380 acres of redwood forests and grasslands in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Watsonville. The center hosted a four-day, experiential-training event that explored the benefits of planned fires while teaching the skills necessary to ignite them safely.
“I feel like it demystifies fire a little bit. They watch the briefing, they see how much planning goes into it, they see all the contingency planning,” Barb Satink Wolfson, area fire advisor with UC Cooperative Extension which helped put on the event, told the Sentinel. “It’s not just someone out there with a match.”
Two-way exchange
Known as Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges, or TREXs, the events bring together people from different professional and social backgrounds to shine a light on the benefits of prescribed burns while providing participants with an opportunity to work directly with the flames themselves. The concept is now being utilized worldwide, but first came to California in 2013.
Joining the UC extension in organizing the exchange was the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association which seeks to increase the frequency and scale of prescribed burns throughout Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties.
This particular high-altitude exchange, according to organizers, marked a first for the program and the state by bringing together fire practitioners and professional foresters. The hope was to create interdisciplinary sparks between the two groups with the potential to ignite new ideas and mutual understanding.
“We recognize that foresters are the land managers for huge portions of California and there’s a real interest in forestry around trying to incorporate fire as a management tool for their work,” said Jared Childress, program manager for the Central Coast association and the event’s “burn boss.” “But those foresters don’t have a background in fire, they’re kind of figuring it out. So the concept was: let’s combine these two things and really focus on that as it relates to foresters specifically.”
The gathering of about 50 participants, happening Monday to Thursday, includes educational presentations on everything from weather forecasting to liability considerations and forest management that are combined with hands-on, experiential sessions such as shelter deployment, engine operations and, of course, an actual prescribed burn.
Genevieve Tarino, a forester with the Sonoma Resource Conservation District and a participant at the Watsonville event, said the thinking in Sonoma County began to shift in 2017 after a monumentally destructive wildfire season.
“For so long we’ve tried to suppress fuels and that was kind of forest policy and management for a long time,” said Tarino. “There’s been a giant change in policy funding statewide, but also the county approach. Now, there’s a lot more focus on using good fire on the ground.”
Burn notice
Approximately 6 acres of primarily redwood understory was methodically scorched Tuesday evening at Mount Madonna, with exchange participants experiencing each step of the process and members of the public invited to watch.
After high winds delayed the original burn schedule until evening hours, ignitions using drip torches full of diesel and gasoline began around 8 p.m. and burned the unit from the top down. Ignitions ceased around 10:30 p.m., but crews took shifts monitoring the site throughout the night until reinforcements came Wednesday morning to “mop up.”
According to Childress, the fire suppression paradigm has dominated the thinking among officials across the state for at least a hundred years resulting in an accumulation of dead material that can supercharge wildfires.
“Historic burning in coastal California was majority due to Indigenous burning and colonization really changed that,” he said, adding that interns from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County were among the participants in this week’s events. “Fire is one of the earliest land management tools introduced to California via native burning and with that 15,000 years of burning, it’s ecologically the most appropriate, too.”
Soma Goresky, the director of land management at Mount Madonna Center and a registered geotechnical engineer, said the organization’s long-standing intention to reintroduce controlled fire to the land was realized last December when it conducted a 15-acre prescribed burn at another section of the property.
Though it’s only a few months removed, Goresky, who has lived at the center for about 40 years, said she has observed a proliferation of mariposa lilies with white petals and peppered purple interiors cropping up in the burn area, a location she’s never seen them before. This, in her mind, gives credence to the contention that “good fire” can reinvigorate native seed banks.
“I bought in hook, line, and sinker to all the reports that the native plants and animals actually have evolved with burning,” said Goresky. “The mariposa lilies were a proof of that.”
‘Ah-ha moments’
The burn required permits from Cal Fire and the local air quality district, but overall, Childress said there are far fewer bureaucratic hoops to jump through in private land burns versus agency-owned ones, with the former coming together in only a few months and the latter sometimes taking 2-10 years.
A task force put together by Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a goal in 2022 of annually treating 1 million acres of land across the state with prescribed burns by 2025. The rough estimate Childress had heard from those in the fire community is that about 60,000 acres currently gets burned in a high-achieving year.
As for the plot of charred land at Mount Madonna, Wolfson from UC extension said the hope is to use the site as a case study in the weeks and months ahead with plans already in the works to visit for subsequent measurements and observations.
“This cross pollination of people, always you end up with new ideas,” said Wolfson. “You really have a lot of ah-ha moments in events like these, which is really cool to witness.”
