UC Davis Tahoe Science CenterScience Speaks Series: Rethinking Fire: Cultural Burning and the Art of Not Fighting Fire

When fire ravages forests, homes and lives, it can be hard to think of it as anything other than terrifying and something to be avoided at all costs. For thousands of years, Native Americans in what is now California and across the West treated and nurtured fire as a tool through the practice of cultural burning. For non-Native people, cultural burns require a mental adjustment — one that views fire as restorative, not destructive.

Join Beth Rose Middleton Manning, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Native American Studies, and Honorable Ron W. Goode, the Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, for a conversation about the Native American practice of cultural burning.