Wildfires & The Buried Science Of Community Forest Management

• Indigenous forest management practices, such as controlled burning, when suppressed, lead to the accumulation of dry matter, increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
• Traditional ecological knowledge, as seen in India’s jhum cultivation, promotes a balanced, adaptive approach to forestry that integrates human activity with natural cycles, preventing uncontrolled fires and enhancing biodiversity.
• A just transition in forestry, which empowers local communities through decentralised governance and traditional stewardship, can create resilient ecosystems while sustaining both ecological and human well-being.

Across the world, wildfires are getting worse each year. Beyond the smoke, however, a deeper crisis is unfolding: the loss of community stewardship. For instance, indigenous communities in US’ California once managed forests through controlled burning, preventing fuel build-up. Controlled burns were used to clear underbrush and promote healthy forest growth. But modern forestry practices, globally, have outlawed these practices and disrupted the ecological balance.

The current ‘scientific’ fire suppression policies allow dead matter to accumulate, creating a tinderbox that ignites with devastating consequences.

Restoring community stewardship is the key to preventing future disasters. Community forestry in India has good examples of this type of stewardship.

Modern forestry and the disconnect from nature

Shaped by colonial and industrial paradigms, we often view forests as fortressed static entities. We see them as zones of timber extraction, wildlife conservation, or carbon sequestration; and believe that giving local communities individual forest rights (IFR) would lead to deforestation. The extant belief is that forest people will prioritise economic gains over ecological balance. The reality, however, is far more nuanced. Traditional communities that have lived in forests for generations possess, more often than not, a symbiotic relationship with the land. Care is deeply ingrained and reinforced by adaptive ecological sensibilities accumulated and passed down through centuries.

By excluding these communities from forest and its management and by downgrading them to the role of forest labour, we have disrupted this delicate balance. Wherever Europeans settled, whether California or Australia, indigenous peoples were removed from forests. This led to the erasure of many essential forest management practices. One of the most important of such practices was of controlled burning. Indigenous communities traditionally practiced controlled burning to develop and manage cultural and functional landscapes. In the process, not only soil fertility would get enhanced but highly inflammable dry matter would also get cleaned.

For instance, in northeast India, controlled burning is not seen as a destructive force but as a tool for renewal. When a patch of forest is burned, the fire’s heat eliminates pests, prevents weed growth, and releases nutrients into the soil. The local community’s intimate understanding of wind patterns, burning volume and quality, topography and soil quality has ensured for ages that the process is both safe and beneficial. Moreover, the mixture pattern of cultivation prevents fires from spreading uncontrollably.

The knowledge we lost

In many parts of the world, indigenous and local communities have managed forests through sustainable adaptive practices that have been passed over generations. These practices usually evolve from centuries of ecological interaction.

Take, for example, a community-owned forestry system in India’s Odisha and the northeast states – called jhum. This method of shifting cultivation has been maligned by colonial foresters as “primitive” and destructive. However, when examined closely, jhum cultivation turns out to be a sophisticated system that balances farming, forestry, and biodiversity.

In some of these regions, local knowledge deeply informs every decision. When a forest patch is identified for cultivation, villagers first carefully assess soil quality, forest structure, termite activity, soil moisture, and wind direction, along with the extent of the area. They then assess participant household’s food requirement and labour availability. In the selected patches, trees are then felled, pollarded (cutting off the top branches to encourage new growth), lopped and coppiced through sophisticated tending operations – which is based upon a rich knowledge of trees’ silviculture. Forest people clear the undergrowth and dry it. They collect the dead and dried wood for fuel and household timber, clear the fire lines and only then burn the trees with precision. Moreover, fires are lit only during specific seasons so that risks of spreading are minimum.

As a result of these sequential and intelligent steps, and despite patches after patches put on fire, hardly any fire goes uncontrolled or unintended patches get burned. Communities maintain buffer forests so that the smoke and flying debris do not affect habitations. In fact, the ash from burning enriches the soil with nutrients like calcium and magnesium. This helps amend soil acidity that gets higher in the slopes of humid tropics due to leaching from high rainfall. For two to three years, this enriched soil supports diverse crops, cereals, millets, and vegetables, before fertility declines and weeds take over. Then the land is left fallow and natural forest grows back again.

This is very unlike the even-aged monocultures promoted by modern forestry. Systems like jhum create a mosaic landscape where patches of farmland, regenerating forest, and mature forest coexist. This patchwork ensures that even if a fire occurs, it remains localised and manageable, a stark contrast to the wildfire crises of California. These systems largely rely on communal tenure, where property rights shift dynamically between communal and private use depending on land use. Such a variety ensures higher biodiversity, and facilitates ecosystem flows through pollination, nutrition and watershed services among the patches.

Seeing forests beyond trees

Modern forestry believes humans, plants, and animals cannot coexist. On the other hand, traditional forest-based communities see forests not just as a source of forest products but as a living landscape. Some trees are left standing to maintain canopy structure and provide shade. Fruit trees are preserved, and selective harvesting is done to ensure yields of timber and firewood can be sustained. Intercropping is done and biochar (terra preta) is used to enhance soil quality and sequester carbon.

Contrast these regenerative practices with California’s fire-prone forests, where the absence of indigenous practices has left ecosystems vulnerable. Increasingly centralised and technocratic management has narrowed the focus to monocultures for timber and pulp wood production. Since indigenous communities no more live in the forests, granular, site-specific knowledge has been lost. Even when it comes to controlling a wildfire, the burden is exclusively on external agencies which neither have the fine skills nor the local knowledge. Very often, these agencies are understaffed, and limit to being reactive rather than being preventive.

The need for just transitions

As climate change and biodiversity losses accelerate, we must rethink forest management with a focus on community stewardship. A “just transition” in forestry, where local communities take the lead, can strengthen both resilience and the local economy. Forests are not isolated wildernesses; they are living systems where human interaction plays a vital role. In northeast India, this transition is already happening. Communities are adapting by enhancing ecological practices. The Angamis in Nagaland retain more alders (Alnus nepalensis) to enrich soil. Farmers in Tuensang add pulses to jhum cropping. In Phek and Mon, locals preserve oak and Macaranga trees to improve fertility. These strategies help forests withstand population pressures while maintaining ecological balance. India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA, 2006) has further empowered indigenous communities, sparking new models of sustainable forest management. By reclaiming their stewardship roles, these communities are proving that conservation and livelihoods can go hand in hand.

Reconnecting people and forests

California’s burning forests are a stark warning of what happens when communities are excluded from forest management. Modern forestry reduces forests to economic assets, conservation zones, or carbon sinks, ignoring their complex, interconnected nature. Indigenous systems show a different reality: forests thrive when humans actively care for them. It is time to restore this connection, not just in California but worldwide. Decentralised governance, guided by traditional knowledge and strengthened by modern science, can build resilient forests where nature and people coexist. Only by embracing this approach can we prevent future wildfires and ensure that thriving forests mean thriving communities.

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)