Hands on the land, heart in community: Returning cultural fires

It was a California Summer. I was working in a plant nursery tucked into the Cascade Mountain Range—blue mountains in the distance and rivers and creeks to splash in.

But I couldn't clearly see my hand outstretched in front of me. It's the smoke. Like almost every summer of my childhood, a wildfire raged in a nearby forest.

Looking back, what was most disturbing was not the smoke or the thick layer of ash on my car after work, it was how normal this was. Evacuations and high severity forest fires are an almost annual occurrence. California's forest fire problem now routinely makes international news as entire cities are destroyed.

Now more than ever California forest fires have become synonymous with death, destruction, and long-term economic depression.