Few of us imagine fire as a source of life. Most likely we picture the devastation in Los Angeles or the newsworthy orange smoke covering New York City or San Francisco as fires in Canada roar and the smoke travels south. But fire has long contributed to a regenerative community and a thriving biodiverse ecosystem, and it’s at the heart of a seasonal spiritual experience.
"Cool Burn" by Peter Martinka
Cool burning refers to a process in which small, controlled fires are lit in the forest underbrush. It starts on a chilly early morning as a group of people, usually with Indigenous or forestry background, walk the forest. They prevent the small fires from spreading quickly by keeping the temperature low. The flames sear the topsoil unevenly, clearing a path for plants while preserving the seeds and mycelium below. It’s one of the oldest recorded human activities.
For millennia, people across the world have used cool burning for forest cultivation. Evidence of the practice is present in pollen records and phytoliths from Australia (140,000 years ago), [1] South America (13,000 years ago), [2] and North America (7,000 years ago).[3] Evidence of controlled burns conducted in North America before the arrival of Europeans shows that the forest was regularly manipulated with fire, and not merely for food or fuel or material production: Cool burning was and is communal and cultural.
As a designer living and working in New York who is focused on creating futures that are regenerative, relational, and reciprocal, I’m continuously inspired by Indigenous practices, both historic and contemporary, because at the core of resource sharing and protection against exploitation is a multigenerational mindset. For example, here in New York, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy was the first and longest lasting example of democracy predating colonial arrival. [4] Its constituent tribes—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—
shared a social contract in which resource planning was meant to provide and honor those that have come before us and those that will come after us, in what is called the Seventh Generation Principle. [5] This common perspective about time and what it meant to be human is what motivated the collective to be intentional in both cultivation and consumption. It shaped what they ate, what they burned for fuel, how they hunted, how they determined their political boundaries, and how they chose the materials they used to construct their communities. Central
to maintaining all this for future generations was the tradition of cool burning.
No doubt the ground outside your window contains a longer record of fire-altered species than of those that were not changed by fire. However, as tribal influence on forests was systematically reduced and tribes were relocated to reservations, fire was reframed as enemy. For a few hundred years, cool burning was prohibited—and in some places, it still is. Timber companies devised extensive networks
of fire towers, telephone lines, and roads, along with generations of media campaigns, to prevent any size of fire, out of fear that fire would cut into their profits.
The interpretation of forests (interpretation is a word commonly used by foresters because every tree and forest can be valued and understood differently in varying contexts) as mere product rather than as cyclical habitat ironically make forests less productive and more vulnerable to
pests, diseases, drought, and megafires, all of which significantly reduce biodiversity and the lifespan of the forest. Every year, in the absence of cool burning, millions of acres of North American forests are lost to megafires. [6] This is why public and private forest owners today are turning to their tribal neighbors for leadership—specifically, to resurrect the cool burning tradition in the face of climate change and once again cultivate biodiversity with a sense of intention.
In the Midwest, the Menominee, well known for their approach to timber and forestry that increases biodiversity, are teaching folks how to practice cool burning again. After occupying over ten million acres of ancestral land before European colonization from the setting sun to the
rising sun and the trees will last forever.” [7] As the nation made this way of harvesting a tradition over the next 170 years, they cultivated a forest with more trees than there were in 1854, and more boreal species than in any nearby area. [8] Menominee forest design continues to produce high-value timber while protecting biodiversity.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative, which represents a coalition of public and nonprofit entities and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, made up of Klikitat, Palus, Wallawalla, Wanapam, Wenatchi, Wishram, and Yakama people, is working to overcome the historic degradation of checkerboard ownership patterns.[9] The collaborative wants to manage a healthy, contiguous forest rather than allow private property boundaries to cause habitat loss at their edges. The collaborative is co-imagining the ideal amount of burning that will result in an increase of both biodiversity and timber production for future generations.
The Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa Tribes host intergenerational burns to teach young people to respect fire and the forest. [10] Through burns, they prioritize huckleberries, acorns, hazel, bear grass, and the life cycles of salmon. The Pacheedaht First Nation harvest different species for
different market purposes, one of which is crafting traditional canoes and totem poles. Culturally, these builds require 400-year-old cedar, so the nation’s forestry plan was adjusted to continue to produce this cedar in 400-year cycles. [11] The Pacheedaht also have an annual production of timber that passes through their sawmill and financially supports the care of other, less marketable species.
Cool burning traditions vary among nations and ecosystems; each practice is deeply rooted in place and community. This traditional ecological knowledge is not only a form of expertise passed down through generations as a sheer survival skill—it is also about cultivating
multigenerational respect for communal resources. Resilient homes, just like resilient forests, require a regenerative mindset, along with time and creativity to build, nurture, and maintain them.
Fast-forward 100 years: My hope is that we have cultivated this mindset. Perhaps design students find themselves bundled up on an icy morning and, as part of their education, walking the forest with an elder—not just learning about where building materials come from or helping
to prevent megafires, but cultivating real roots: those of the forest, and those across seven generations. They’ll be learning about how designing forests through cool burning helps to build a home for the future.
This essay is a digital-only commission made by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for Making Home: Smithsonian Design Triennial and may only be accessed on the exhibition’s digital exhibition platform.
Notes:
[1] “Forest Fires Illuminate the Past,” Montage 3, no. 4 (June 1992): 1, 6, https://monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/2568599/vol3-issue4.pdf.
[2] Carolina Levis, “The Grandmother Trees,” New York Times, October 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/opinion/amazon-rainforest-giant-trees.html.
[3] S.Yoshi Maezumi et al., “The Legacy of 4,500 Years of Polyculture Agroforestry in the Eastern Amazon,” Nature Plants 4 (2018): 540–47, nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0205-y.
[4] Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Who We Are,” haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are.
[5] Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Values,” haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values.
[6] National Interagency Fire Center, Department of the Interior, “Wildfire and Acres,” https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires.
[7] Menominee Tribal Enterprises, “Our History: Forest Keepers: Traditions of Land Ethics and Sustainability,” mtewood.com.
[8] Menominee Tribal Enterprises, “Assessment of High Conservation Value Areas on the Menominee Indian Reservation,” updated January 9, 2017,
mtewood.com/Content/files/MTEHCVassessmentCAR20144.pdf.
[9] Tapash Sustainable Forest Collective, “Our Work,” http://www.tapash.org/.
[10] Page Buono, “Quiet Fire,” The Nature Conservancy, November 2, 2020, https://www.nature.org/en-
us/magazine/magazine-articles/indigenous-controlled-burns-california/.
[11] Josiah Haynes, “Pacheedaht First Nation: An example of reconciliation and development,” Resource Works, April 13, 2021, https://www.resourceworks.com/pacheedaht-example.
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