Almost more than fire, I think, people today are afraid of smoke. It feels like a hallmark of a polluted, post-industrial landscape run out of control.
And yet most cultures the world over (even in Europe, if you go back far enough) view fire and even smoke as cleansing.
In a direct way, fire is a cleanser: heat kills germs. From the perspective of the people indigenous to the West, it also plays a cleansing role in ecosystems—enriching soil, killing moss that chokes trees, removing invasive and flammable undergrowth. It spurs germination of the native species evolved to need fire to grow, and keeps the fuel load, dead or dying plant matter, from building up to the point that wildfire runs out of control. In a 2022 article published in “Nature,” Jude Coleman quotes Rod Mendes, a member of the Karuk Tribe and the fire chief for the Yurok Tribe Fire Department: “When I was a little kid, my grandmother used to burn around the house. She [said she] was just keeping the place clean.”
In British Columbia, Kelly Boutsalis explains, in “The art of fire: reviving the Indigenous craft of cultural burning,” the Tsilhqot’in word for fire translates to “lightening the load off the land.”
But in fact, smoke, too, has long been an important feature of summer in the Northwest, and was seen as a cleanser, served a cleansing purpose. Smoke can reflect sunlight and cool river water, which is good for salmon. Research has also shown that light diffused by smoke actually increases photosynthesis in certain plant species, while it renders summer heat less withering.
Of course, a sky full of burning plastic, and whatever chemical nightmares today go up in flames, is not quite the same as one that is mostly fir needles, moss, and sage. Fires now burn hotter, longer, and produce more smoke, because of the heat, and the droughts, and the hundred-year fuel buildup that colonial land management created.
And yet.
There is something about the idea of smoke as cleanser that stirs and surprises my brain more than any other fact I’ve learned about the history of the Western firescape. Confined to my house in North Idaho, with the smoke erasing light, shadow, gradation, I find it easier than ever to feel trapped in a kind forever-present of fear and disorientation. It feels like the smoke is increasing as a presence in the air, a direct reflection of the summers growing hotter and dryer. But in fact, most of the 20th and early 21st centuries were times of unusually smoke-free skies.
As Pyne writes: “…while wildfires gather more and more media attention, the amount of land actually burned overall is shrinking … California experienced 4.2 million burned acres in 2020; in preindustrial times, it would have known probably over 10 million acres burned though not burned in wild surges.” The same is true throughout the Northwest.
This, Indigenous fire scholars argue, needs to happen again if we want to rebalance our ecosystems. In a 2019 article, “Indigenous fire practices once shaped the Northwest—and they might again,” Manola Secaira quotes Cody Desautel, natural resource director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, in eastern Washington: “…[W]e need to shift perspective away from trying to stop fires to making sure that we’re doing fuels treatments and forest health treatments throughout the year to make sure that when fire comes, you can have a resilient landscape that can respond to fire.”
![Forest Fire 1910 - Wallace [1910] Placer Creek after the fire.](https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines/objects/im-26.jpg)
Several organizations, some affiliated with tribes, are offering trainings in setting “good fires.” In a 2020 essay, “Good Fire on the Klamath,” non-native fire practitioner and historian, Jared Dahl Aldern, asked Bill Tripp, of the Karuk Tribe Natural Resources Department, about the danger of these non-tribal collaborations perpetuating forms of colonialism. Though of course this may not be a universal perspective, Aldern explains that Tripp feels it comes down to what is best for the land: “‘Our creation stories tell me it’s my responsibility to care for the land, and it’s my responsibility to do what I need to do to get that work done.’” Aldern goes on to explain: “Karuk people … operate under the assumption that as more people may come to live in Karuk homelands, they ought to engage in reciprocal support with tribes and uphold Indigenous people’s rights to do the things they have always done there, including the right to sustain an appropriate relationship with fire.”
At the end of September 2020, when smoke had been blotting out the sun for months, Aldern published another essay called “Where There’s Good Fire, There’s Good Smoke.” In it, he resists the perspective that so many during that time took—that the smoke was a frightening enemy.
“During a rainy spell,” Aldern explains, “I sometimes get to the point of thinking, “‘You know, I sure am tired of all this rain, but I know we need it — for now I’ll stay inside or, if I need to go out, I’ll throw on a raincoat or grab an umbrella, just in case I need it.’ If we can get through our current pandemic of wildfires and their lethal smoke-storms, and if Indigenous people can re-establish their cultural fire regimens, perhaps, during a future smoky spell, I’ll be able to start to say to myself, ‘You know, I sure am tired of all this smoke, but I know we need it — for now I’ll stay inside or, if I need go out (maybe even to see if I can pitch in and help with the burns), I’ll grab an N95 mask, just in case I need it.’”
Maybe I love this approach just because I’m the person perennially nagging people not to complain about rain in the West. But there’s also a lightness, a practicality in it—a gentle call to exit the subject-object relationship to smoke, yet in a way that’s human, that’s not asking too much. Many of the problems we currently face are overwhelming, and enormous, and frightening to take on. But in this, and in those returning to their traditions of cultural burning, something begins to clear a little. It starts to feel possible to imagine a future in the Pyrocene.