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Fire and Rice: the value of Dayak cultural practices

Guest WriterMarch 24, 2025Cultural fire1 Comment

By Michael Hill.

On Kalimantan – Indonesia’s part of the island of Borneo – Dayak traditional culture is deeply connected to its people’s endless cycle of fire and rice.

Dayak people in the mountainous village region of Loksado have retained their ability to use wildfire to clear their fields, but they fear politics and confusion over their highly controlled wildfires and the destructive wildfires in other areas of Kalimantan will soon lead to a ban on their practices.

A Dayak firing boss in front with a carrying basket for supplies, and an ignitor behind with a traditional bamboo firing pole. Photo Michael Hill.

If the Dayak people are prevented from continuing to use wildfire, as they have done for hundreds of years as part of their system of slash-and-burn field rotations, their culture and identity will collapse.

I was fortunate to be invited to South Kalimantan in 2024 to practice wildfire-use skills with some of Kalimantan’s last Dayak people who live a remote, traditional lifestyle using fire to prepare fields to plant rice. The Dayak people use wildfire as a tool to manage the land on which they plant, and on which they and their ancestors have always relied.

Wildfire is used by the Dayak people to clear small, field-sized, often steep pockets of mountain forest; the ash created by the wildfires fertilizes the rice fields.

A Dayak guide named Samuel, with a friend, near the village of Loksado, demonstrates the use of traditional Dayak fire line scraping tools. Photos by Michael Hill.

I witnessed the Dayak people’s control of wildfire as a tool, and it showed me they are global leaders in managing complex wildfire-use situations. Dayak fire knowledge has tremendous value for wildland firefighting agencies worldwide.

Borneo, where the Dayak live, is the third-largest island in the world. Kalimantan’s meaning in Indonesian refers to the whole island, while in English, the term describes only the 73 per cent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 per cent of the island’s population. Kalimantan’s land mass covers 554,150 kilometers, divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei and East Malaysia.

Kalimantan was originally Kalamanthana, or “burning weather Island,” meaning its climate is very hot and humid.

Kalimantan is home to many cultures and the Dayak, or people of the interior, are an Indigenous group of traditional people known for their complex spiritual beliefs, welcoming hospitality to strangers, and for being proud of their culture based on their mastery of fire.

Historically, Dayak people are tied to the use of wildfire in their agricultural practices to clean up land, or slash-and-burn farming. Using fire to clear farming plots in a rotating system allows for conservation. Preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they are allowed to go back to nature to recover their fertility, while other fields are cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until the fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared and so on.

The Dayak world is rich with nature and spirits and the rotating system of agriculture and wildfires to clear land is culturally important. Clearing is extremely well controlled with organized family groups using pre-constructed fire breaks, fire-control tactics, and planning to consider terrain factors, predicted winds, and fuel conditions.

Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Now, cultural changes are happening as the Dayak people join the wave of progress brought by globalism.

Dayak people have maintained an incredible depth of fire-use knowledge, and if given the opportunity on a global scale, this knowledge could be part of the solution to manage wildfire in response to global climate change and potentially influence international fire management practices that are sometimes created for local political gains.

Over my 16 years as an Australian bushfire firefighter, with knowledge of North American and international Indigenous fire use practices, I have observed that Australia does not possess a national set standard course on advanced fire use skills for bush firefighters to the highly refined degree of knowledge that the Dayak people of Loksado possess. A relationship between the Dayak people and the Australian bush fire agencies would be a perfect marriage and would fulfill the needs of both cultures.

My journey with the Dayak people began more than 20 years ago when I was traveling the Indonesian islands as part of a trip across Southeast Asia. While in Borneo, chance led me to a riverboat to journey with a crew of Indonesian adventurers known as Bugies. We traveled upriver deep into the heart of the island of Borneo and back.

I saw many things on the river and occasionally on land, but I was most fascinated watching the traditional Dayak riverside villages during the burning season. I watched the pockets of smoke rise from the jungle, and in other places I saw blackened, fresh-burned fields among the otherwise jungled riverbank.

As a descendant of ancestors from the people of fire in America – the Cherokee Indian Nation – I was fascinated by the Dayak people’s slash-and-burn practice and developed a soft spot for the unique system. I wanted to know so much more.

Since my journey, outside forces have not been kind to the Dayak people. In the wake of recent bad fire seasons in Kalimantan Borneo, a storyline developed that all human-caused fires were a problem and, as a result, in the dry season, all fires were forbidden by law.

In my opinion, the traditional Dayak people were wronged by this blanket no-fire mandate and on discovering this and being invited to help the Dayak tell their story of fire, I agreed without hesitation. I was trained years ago as a US Forest Service fire fuels-management and prescribed-fire use specialist, so I enjoy staying abreast of fire use and management practices worldwide.

The Dayak people showed me they deeply understand their landscape, weather and wildfire behavior. The terrain is a combination of forest and steep mountainsides, and the areas to be burned are filled with heavy fuel loads of slashed, cured bamboo alongside light highly flammable fuels; fires could easily escape if not well managed.

Center firing along the top of a steep incline with a heavy fuel load; this is a step in Dayak people’s traditional ignition technique to create a convective pull and control later firing operations. Photo Michael Hill

Watching, then helping the Dayak people burn, I felt the magic of generations of Dayak people as they shared with me their knowledge, experience, and wisdom about what wildfire can do and how to respect its dangers.

Tactics used by the Dayak people to manage fires include months of preparation of a burn site by slashing fuels to pretreat and cure them, cutting, burning, and scraping fire line perimeters that are adjusted to control changing fuel conditions, slope, and locations where a fire could breach containment lines.

Fire tools are made on the spot for single use from bamboo, water is gathered to be on standby, allied families work as a team, and every factor is carefully planned.

The Dayak people’s traditional fire management is held to an extremely high professional standard because there is so much at stake. The target is to make no mistakes, because anyone hurt would be a family member, and if a fire should escape and burn another’s land, tribal law indicates the loser of the fire must pay the damage cost, which would lead to problems retaining the old ways of fire and rice with the Indonesian government.

I watched the Dayak adjust firing patterns on burn sites of medium-to-steep complexity, but I was especially interested in the challenging ignitions across steep ground, which demonstrated knowledge and fire skills.

During one burn on a steep slope, experienced men carried fire across the top of a mountain to slowly burn a portion of the site to build in an upper-level buffer for a future massive firing event down below, while being careful not to place too much hot fire at once that could run up and against the upper fire line.

An example of Dayak tactical use of a fire effects to reinforce fire control line in steep terrain. Photo Michael Hill.

The landowner always acts as the burn boss, staging participating families with their water containers and bamboo scraper tools held ready above the burners. The burners work together to hold the upslope fire line perimeters while the ignitions take place below to prevent any ember-driven spot fires above from escaping, or to stop any flaming fire line slopovers that could increase the size of a fire.

Once the top areas of the steep slope burn were more secure with the ever growing, reinforced burned out buffers, I watched the burners slowly carry more fire down along the extreme mountain inclines, expertly building in depth and safety.

I watched the burners climb halfway down the mountainsides across from the flames they had lit, where the firing would be halted; following steep slopes to the right, the ignition teams moved across the rugged mountainsides to start a new fresh fire, safely protected from its spreading higher and to the left by the previously burned buffer. Slowly and carefully the burners created larger safety zones across the upper portions of the steep mountainous sites.

The next firing was positioned to slowly eat down into the center of massive, potentially explosive, steep, thick, cured, cut and dried bamboo fields.

The ignitors returned after lighting the center fires to the burn’s right flank, with their center fuels strongly alight. On this flank, for more protection, the burners used their bamboo ignitions poles with tips alight to carry a strip of fire down steep slopes along the interior edge of preexisting fire trails. The burners touched their poles strategically here and there to the cut bamboo plants inside the fire line to create new ignitions and reinforce the perimeter control lines with a long strip of flames.

The effect of these tactics was a controlled lighting pattern that soon became a flaming mountainside that pulled in smaller, newly lit flank flames in a long line. Dried bamboo was consumed as the fire and its heat were pulled inward toward the much hotter center fires, quickly creating a massively reinforced fire line protecting the whole right flank of the field.

I witnessed other tactics, such as fire being used to reinforce control lines before a burn. I saw fire used in dot ignition applications, strategically placed along the bottom of steep and dangerous mountain slopes that were piled high with even more dried fuels that worked to drive flames across whole hillsides horizontally, in powerful walls of flames.

The Dayak people have rules about burning; men are the wildfire-use ignitors while women and children build fire lines around new fields, slashing the bamboo and other fuels to the ground to cure in the hot sun for months to be ready to be consumed by fire. Women and children hold the fire line defensive positions during the actual burns.

Dayak fires are first ignited by a landowner with a cigarette lighter (a very non-traditional tool), but after the fire takes hold, longer bamboo sticks are used to pick up and carry flames forward and out to pre-selected forest ignition locations.

Another recent addition along with cigarette lighters to the traditional Dayak firing kit is a hard-shell plastic backpack pesticide pump, temporarily repurposed and used as water-spraying firefighting pumps.

In my opinion, the Dayak people’s valuable but threatened traditional fire skills, and their wealth of knowledge and wisdom is a critically important resource. The Dayak people’s specialty knowledge of wildfire behavior and use is a treasure to humanity and is especially valuable considering extremes due to climate change.

Traditional cultures such as the Dayak people face unprecedented changes brought from powerful forces: the lure of money; technology, and globalization. One hundred years ago, the Dayak people could have escaped newcomers and government rules in their lands by retreating deeper into the forest, but this is no longer an option.

Around the mountainous Borneo community of Loksado, where the Dayak continue burning (for now), the traditional people are asking simply to be able to keep their burning and their rice cultivation; without this cycle, their treasured way of life cannot continue.

Preventing the Dayak people from burning, even for just a brief few seasons, will have a serious impact on their deep wildfire knowledge. If the Dayak people’s cultural treasure of knowledge is lost, some of their information might be able to be later collected and shared with others, but it will never be as complete as it is now.

The Dayak people told me they would be willing and interested in sharing their fire knowledge with the world. The Dayak need only to be approached to do so by wildfire researchers from international fire agencies, and not just academics who might wish to squirrel away their valuable information for the promotion of their own careers.

In return, the Dayak people told me, they wish only to be valued as a people and a culture uniquely empowered by their fire knowledge built across countless generations.

For the Dayak people’s valuable fire-use knowledge to remain, it must stay fresh and current. The Dayak people must be allowed to continue their cycle of fire and rice, even if only within their mountainous forest sanctuary setting of the Loksado region. Retaining fire knowledge comes with currency; as one traditional elder said, without this currency and historic fire knowledge, “the Dayak will be nothing.”

This Dayak elder explained that the people know well: “Fire can be dangerous. We must be careful with the fire.”

[This article first appeared in Wildfire magazine.]

Michael Hill began this journey in the 1980s as an American wildfire firefighter, and across his career worked as a hotshot and smokejumper. For many years Hill has been, and still is, deeply interested in Indonesia’s wildfires. He serves as an associate editor for Wildfire magazine and hosts a YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ TalkingWildfireWithMichaelHill.

Light ’em up – “Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World” book review

Brian BallouDecember 16, 2024December 19, 2024Cultural fire, Prescribed Fire

A book review by Brian Ballou

Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World

By M.R. O’Connor

“You sing the country before you burn it,” an Aboriginal fire-lighter in Australia told the author. “In your mind, you see the fire, you know where it is going, and you know where it will stop. Only then do you light the fire.”

Ignition, book cover — Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World, by MR O’Connor

Close your eyes the next time you are preparing to start a prescribed fire project and visualize its beginning and end. Where will you paint the ground with brushstrokes of fire? What is the wind saying? What tricks does Mother Fire have up her sleeve?

And, importantly, how will the day end? In calm twilight laced with thin smoke and the soft sound of dying, crackling fires? Or in a cacophony of bulldozers and bombers and the sight of your prescribed fire project racing over a far ridge?

“Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World” chronicles author M.R. O’Connor’s deep dive into the world of prescribed fire, mostly in the United States but occasionally elsewhere. She embeds herself with state, federal and private crews as they conduct prescribed burns — taking the training, wearing the clothes, learning the terms and the lingo — and finds it deeply fascinating and occasionally quite frightening.

There is a rush these days to return fire to the land, a belated response to a few decades of staggeringly large wildfires that could have — should have — been tempered by prescribed fire. She talked with many firefighters and fire-lighters and “began to deduce how complex working with fire could be.”

Using fire as a tool is an art people are still grappling with. “Fire-lighters seemed to carry with them a dream of a place where fire was stripped of safety regulations, government qualifications, diesel fuel, and engines. In this pyro-Eden, fire was so benign that lighting one was like watering a garden.”

It’s dizzying to think that something as simple as returning fire to the land could, and likely would, avert highly aggressive wildfire behavior. Could pre-treatment have kept 2018’s Carr Fire from spawning a fire “burning so hot and generating such intense winds that a whirl of fire with winds of 143 miles per hour … slammed into Redding. It picked up a truck and threw it a quarter of a mile down the road, killing the firefighter inside. It was the equivalent of a category 3 tornado.”

Indeed, the fire environment had become so dangerous that firefighters had begun experiencing post-trauma health problems at an unprecedented level. One firefighter O’Connor discussed this with “made me consider that confronting a monster — what you saw out there, the feelings you experienced and things and people you lost — could exact a mental and spiritual cost.”

“I thought about the dragon-fighting analogy a lot,” wrote O’Connor, digesting what she had been told by firefighters coping with wildfire-induced PTSD. “It conveyed something of the monstrous qualities of the wildfires themselves and hinted at the quixotic nature of fighting them.”

After years of fighting wildfires, some “began to see suppression as a lost cause.” One said, “If a fire was close to any type of community, it never crossed my mind that we shouldn’t go put the thing out. [But] I was on a lot of fires way out in the wilderness where I thought, Well, if somebody gets hurt or killed out here, this is really dumb. This is kind of for nothing, this is a lightning fire. This area needs to burn.”

With so much land needing a fire, and wildfires increasingly getting larger and more dangerous, agencies have embraced programs like TREX, in which fire-lighting skills are taught and tested. However, actual prescribed fires have moved forward slowly due to the fear of losing control of the burn, destroying private land and homes, even though this has rarely occurred.

“Of the roughly forty-five hundred fires [the Forest Service] ignited each year,” writes O’Connor, “fewer than 1 percent of them escaped control. The ones that did, however, were often emblazoned in collective memory and cited for decades. People didn’t forget, let along forgive, when the government intentionally lit fires that ended up burning down homes.”

A 2012 prescribed burn in Ashland, Oregon: Brian Ballou.

Nearing the conclusion of her book, O’Connor highlights the Washburn Fire that burned in 2022 within Yosemite National Park. The news media homed in on whether the fire would consume the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. “The Washburn Fire and so many others became apocalypse clickbait.” The news media nearly completely ignored the fact that areas that had been treated with prescribed fire burned with much lower intensity, if at all.

“Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World” is a fine read, and I find it particularly impressive that it was written by someone who knew next to nothing about prescribed fire. Perhaps that was best.

She asked wildland firefighters whether the current fire environment was too dangerous — an interesting question for people who sorta kinda really really like having a bit of danger in their day — and learned that maybe, yes, it was getting a bit too hairy out there.

O’Connor never provides a succinct message at the end of the book. I rather like that. But the alignment of the various segments of the book make it clear: The time for prescribed fire is today, yesterday and tomorrow. No, it won’t always be pretty.

Brian Ballou retired from the Oregon Dept. of Forestry where he was a fire prevention specialist and public information officer. In the 1970s and ‘80s he was a firefighter with the US Forest Service. He lives in Medford, Oregon.

Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World

By M.R. O’Connor

Bold Type Books

Nonfiction

Hardbound, 372 pages, $30 (also available from Amazon and Apple in ebook format)

Burning Weather Island

Guest WriterJuly 15, 2024July 15, 2024Cultural fireBorneo, Indonesia, Kalimantan, peat fires2 Comments

by Michael Hill
This feature originally ran in Wildfire Magazine.

The peatland ecosystems of Central Kalimantan are transitioning from wildfire resistant to wildfire prone; with the potential huge release of carbon from burning peat stocks, it’s time for local and global actions to better protect these lands and communities.

As someone who has visited and observed wildfires in Indonesia for more than 20 years, I’ve witnessed the increasing loss of forest ecosystems and I recognize the potential for constructive international assistance.

Sebangau National Park firefighters moving fire equipment on the fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

In the Indonesian language, Kalimantan refers to the whole island of Borneo (the third largest in the world), while in English it describes just the 73 percent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 percent of the island’s population.

Kalimantan covers 554,150 kilometers divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei, and East Malaysia.

The meaning of the name Kalimantan — originally Kalamanthana — is burning weather island, referring to the very hot and humid climate.

Kalimantan is home to many cultures; the Dayak, or people of the interior, are Indigenous and have long used landscape fire in their agricultural practices to clean up land for slash-and-burn farming.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured during times of wildfires as air pollution.

A volunteer firefighter with firefighting patrol boats on a fire in the Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. District level volunteer firefighting brigades in Central Kalimantan are locally known as Masyarakat Peduli Api, or MPA firefighters.

This system of using fire to clear farming plots in the rotating system of land use allows for conservation; preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they’re allowed to go back to nature to recover fertility, while another field is cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until its fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared, and the small scale of slash-and-burn continues as the land recovers after farming.

This system of rotating agriculture and wildfires to clear land has been culturally important. The Dayak use of fire for cleaning and clearing was extremely controlled historically, with organized groups using pre-constructed fire breaks and advance planning to consider predicted winds and fuel conditions.

The Dayak have been masters of using fire as their tool to clear their forest lands. However, cultural, modernizing, and competitive economic forces have brought changes which, during a severe dry season, can quickly transform some areas of the Indonesian part of this island into a thick smoke-filled hazard, lasting months and impacting the surrounding islands and even the cities of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Recent changes in vegetation and culture have swung the Dayaks’ historic mastery of fire in Kalimantan out of balance. The Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan, where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Also, within Dayak culture, changes are taking place as the people join the wave of progress brought by globalism sweeping the world which, as a byproduct, disconnects us from the natural world and our hands-on, sustainable practices. The landscape is being modified and fire use has fallen outside of its traditional Dayak checks and balances.

While most of the fires in Kalimantan are human-caused, the fire origins are complex. Many past fires arose from the fact that land ownership claims in Kalimantan historically have been legally proven with the use of applying fire to land for clearing, thus establishing legal usage. Other blazes are ignited by accident — or by fishermen to attract more fish or drive away mosquitos — or fires are lit by hunters to attract wildlife, and myriad other reasons.

Sebangau National Park firefighter moving hose across fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

But in recent years, during extra hot and dry seasons, when fires do get started in what may now be often lighter fuels, they can spread quicker and carry flames into forest areas, or even into the swamp peat forests. And once the peat layer below ground is lit, it will burn underground down to the water table and then move laterally beneath the surface, consuming important thick layers of organic decaying peat matter.

These burns can become huge subsurface peat fires with their flames not visible until they occasionally climb up to the surface to consume vegetation. But the heavy smoke from these peat fires, referred to locally as smog/haze, will have local, regional, and global impacts. The Dayak historically did not apply fire to the forest where there were peat layers beneath it, as they were burning for their agricultural fields and they knew their crops would not grow in the peat region.

Peat swamp fires on Borneo are unique for wildfires because the peat itself, created from countless generations of falling and then decaying organic forest matter, has been built up into massive locked-up carbon stores — and these peat stores burn underground as a slow smolder, releasing heat and smoke to the surface. The thick carbon stockpiles begin to release their carbon when the peat swamplands they are part of are dried by drainage canals created to open lands for timber harvest, home building, and other uses. If this dried peat is then consumed by fires, the huge pool of stored carbon that had been safely locked away will be released into the atmosphere, causing global concerns for air pollution and climate change.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured as air pollution during times of wildfires.

Kalimantan fires became an international concern in 1997 when a massive man-made ecological disaster burned in the peat forests, and since then, because of that disaster’s compounding effects, additional new dryseason peat fires have created an accelerating cycle of fires, peat loss, and flooding.

Peat’s organic matter, lying below the surface in a swamp forest, has long functioned as a natural sponge; the small percent of its decaying matter is able to soak up as much as nine times its volume in water. This layer of peat acts as an absorber to dampen the effects of seasonal flooding river systems. However, now with large areas of peat lost to wildfire seasons in 1997, 2015 and 2019, the summer dry seasons are followed by rainy seasons and large flows of water are draining from the burned peat lands into Borneo’s river systems and to the sea, leading to much human property loss and misery along the way.

Protecting the remaining peat beneath the swamp forests has become a priority in Central Kalimantan for those understanding the issue, and over the last 20 years, people have been adapting to the situation. Groups of people in Central Kalimantan have been organizing into both volunteer fire militia and paid fire forces, ready during dry seasons to fight fire. With the help of Japanese, Indonesian, and English scientists, new tactics and techniques are explored, and in 2015, there arose an international effort to assist in fighting wildfires. Indonesian law enforcement has also been activated to target illegal burners with stiff penalties of up to 15 years in prison and 15 million Indonesian Rupiah (about $930 USD) in fines.

Internationally, an agreement among Southeast Asian nations has been developed to assist during times of high fire activity, though there are still very real needs for which international assistance would be greatly appreciated and valued globally — by reducing the peat fires and their massive carbon releases.

Indonesia is still adapting to the emerging wildfire issues in Kalimantan, and as such, has so far developed only limited capabilities, with a particular need for shared technology in fire detection and wildfire response equipment. Many other fire-prone areas of the world have developed and routinely share these types of technologies, and Indonesia should be added to this group. Indonesia has unique firefighting technology advances to share, such as locally developed fire response systems and cloud seeding.

Aircraft dropping water on vegetation has been found to have limited effectiveness on peat fires, and therefore the fires are fought from beneath the ground. The priority is to find a water source on a peat bed nearby; this water source must be safely away from the fire to prevent its burning, and it’s usually found by drilling down as if through the ice on a frozen lake.

Using an augur to bore beneath the peat to find the water table, crews will tap into the water with a firefighting water pump and install a series of pipes and hose to carry water to firefighters, who spray it where needed to cool the flames. These firefighting pumps and their draft drill holes are strategically laid out and are manned with crews across the path of wildfire or in its wake, depending on the responding agency to act as anchor points, working outward with the cooling water while supporting each other. This is hard work, Kalimantan style, but necessary.

Indonesians are also experimenting with Japanese-developed soap agents that can be injected underground into the peat to extinguish flames, and the Air Force is using weather modification by cloud seeding to create rain. It is truly a fascinating time of change and adaptation for wildfires in Kalimantan.

While these changes are internal, the funding and support for Indonesia’s efforts can come from beyond the region’s borders. Indonesia’s emerging wildfire issues are global issues, considering the potential climate impacts of the massive carbon releases from the peat.

Better protection of the peat reserves could be accomplished by a change of local land ownership laws to allow for proof of ownership to be legally established in new ways, thereby supporting long-term management, conservation, and restoration. Instead of the historic local use of fire to clean property, incentives could be created toward fire prevention. Tree planting instead of clearing could be transformed into legal proof of land ownership. Indonesia has huge stockpiles of reforestation funds at the government level, and some of these funds could be invested into bank loans to assist in these efforts and for program development (and local hiring and training for landowners).

Water-canal damming is undertaken to allow the saturation of dried-out peat soils; these efforts could be greatly assisted by the international community, and as an essential byproduct of healing these soils could begin to return more of Kalimantan’s fire-resistant blanket of forest with the added benefit of assisting in the fire protection of its peat lands.

The damage to the peat lands over the past 20-some years is immense; however, to protect the remaining peat lands and their carbon sinks would require only strategic forest replanting above the damaged areas, such as along waterways after the area’s water levels are again raised from canal damming.

Kalimantan’s El Niño dry season fires, especially in the peat swamp areas, have the potential to affect the world’s climate with their associated huge carbon releases. For this reason alone, Kalimantan and Indonesia should be offered more support internationally in their efforts to help to protect the remaining peat swamp forests.

Kalimantan may be an island that seems isolated and far away, yet when the peat fires burn they impact us all with carbon releases, whether we can see the smog or not.

Learn more about Kalimantan’s wildfires, nature, and the Dayak culture on Michael Hill’s YouTube channel, Talking Wildfires with Michael Hill.

Fuel, fire and smoke: Evolving to meet our climate challenge

Kelly AnderssonJanuary 30, 2024Cultural fire, Fire behaviorAustralia, conference, fire behavior, Ireland1 Comment

Wildfires have become an increasing challenge to humanity, the ecosystem, and the atmosphere we depend on. Responding to larger and more destructive wildfires and protecting against their climate impacts is challenging; understanding fire behavior and our responses is critical.

The 7th International Fire Behaviour and Fuels Conference is a forum in which fire management experience is documented, current work is showcased, and emerging research is shared as we together develop solutions to these challenges.

This conference on three continents brings together countries in three areas of the world to develop fire policies at national, regional– to learn from others how they address fire risks and build resilience. The conference unites policymakers, scientists, managers, and indigenous land stewards for a shared purpose in living with fire.

The 7th International Fire Behaviour and Fuels Conference hosts events on three continents, highlighting a range of experience from different countries to develop fire management policies in facing risk and building resilience.

The conference will bring together policymakers, scientists, fire managers, and Indigenous land stewards, and more for a shared purpose of creating a future where we can live with fire. Join us for an authentic conversation on managing fires and creating a sustainable future.

Presenters and speakers this year include Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, Dr. Dean Yibarbuk, Dr. Lachlan McCaw, Prof. Nerilie Abram, Prof. Sarah Legge, Dr. Dan Pronk, Katie Lighthall, Dr. Mark Finney, Dr. Mark Parrington, Dr. Joseph Wilkins, Edward Alexander,and Dr. Conceicao Colaco. All conference registrants at any of the three locations will receive access to recordings of each presentation.

Workshops: Our interactive workshops are educational and feature a range of topics to choose from. You can learn new skills and connect with experts in their fields.

Field Tours: Each location has scheduled a collection of field trip opportunities. Field tours provide hands-on learning options from exploring nature to sharing history and culture. Select your trip when you register.

Exhibitors: Our exhibition hosts a range of displays and demos. You will learn more about the latest products and services in fire science and management. We look forward to seeing you there!

The International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) professional association committed to a non-partisan approach for uniting the global wildland fire community. We were formed in 1990 as a global professional membership association. For 30 years IAWF has grown from a fledgling organization to a global member-focused association spanning 26+ countries. The IAWF was formed to promote a better understanding of wildland fire and built on the belief that an understanding of this dynamic natural force is vital for natural resource management, protecting the health, safety, and welfare of people including firefighters and the public, and for harmonious interactions between people and their environment. IAWF is dedicated to communicating with the entire wildland fire community and providing a global linkage for people with shared interest in wildland fire and all of the associated topics of this multifaceted community. To accomplish these goals, we convene and create networks across sectors, fields, and disciplines to connect the wildfire community through multiple platforms, through which we communicate — including conferences, our website, the premier academic journal in our field (International Journal of Wildland Fire), a popular-oriented magazine (Wildfire) and via social media outlets.

Reclamation of fire and water for Klamath River tribes

Hunter BasslerDecember 5, 2023Cultural fireKlamath, Smith River, Yurok3 Comments

The elements themselves were taken from the Yurok Tribe when the federal government forced them onto a northern California reservation in 1855.

Gone was the earth of the tribe’s ancestral lands. Gone were the salmon-filled waters the tribe had relied on. Gone was the tribe’s access to cultural burning. And, earlier this year, the tribe even lost access to its air.

On the evening of August 15, the Six Rivers National Forest was hit with 150 lightning strikes that ignited 27 confirmed fires, according to inciweb. A dozen of those fires were ignited in Del Norte County, fires that would later be managed together as the Smith River Complex.

Smoke from the complex drifted down onto the town of Klamath on the Yurok Reservation, according to Arizona Republic reporter Debra Utacia Krol. The town’s air would go on to acquire the unmistakable odor of gas-powered generators after the local utility shut power off in fears of sparking another wildfire.

The Smith River Complex would burn 95,107 acres before it was 100 percent contained nearly two months later on October 13. The complex’s BAER team assessment estimated that ~49 percent of the area’s soil was burned at either a moderate or a high severity. The assessment also found that multiple watersheds in the area were severely burned. While the fire didn’t burn on the Yurok Reservation itself, it stands as one of the many reasons the tribe is pushing to reclaim its elements.

In 2013, the tribe formed the Cultural Fire Management Council to keep alive the practice of cultural burning on the Yurok Reservation and ancestral lands. The group partners with numerous agencies and nonprofits, including the USFS, Cal Fire, and the Nature Conservancy.

The council pushes toward its goal through fuels reduction, cooperative burns, and returning the freedom to burn back to individual families and property owners on the reservation. The council also offers numerous workshops and trainings to get more people involved in cultural and managed fire.

“We’ve been suppressing fire and really, what we’ve been doing is suppressing this critical piece of who we are as humans,” the group’s treasurer and cultural fire practitioner Elizabeth Azzuz told High Country News. “Fire isn’t something apart from us. Fire is family.”

The tribe is also working to reclaim its waters by leading the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. Over the next year, four dams along the Klamath River will be deconstructed and removed as part of a 20-year effort by river advocates and tribal members to stop the devastation of the river’s salmon population. The deconstruction of the first dam occurred in early November.

The recent wins contribute to a sense of the tribe’s reclaiming agency over its natural resources for the betterment of the land and the tribe’s members.

“We’ve been talking and begging about doing this for so long, just spinning our wheels,” Yurok Forestry Director Dawn Blake told the Associated Press. “It feels like we’re finally being heard.”

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