“On this site President Theodore Roosevelt sat beside a campfire with John Muir on May 17, 1903,” reads a wooden marker, not far from Bridalveil Fall in Yosemite Valley.

I stumbled across it last November, alongside other bundled-up tourists enjoying the valley’s autumn shades of green, orange and red and snapping photos of the chiseled, carefully painted all-caps lettering that sanctify the moment the founder of the Sierra Club inspired the president to protect Yosemite National Park. But to me, the sign tells a darker story.

“Muir urged the president to work for preservation of priceless remnants of America’s wilderness,” it continues. “At this spot one of our country’s foremost conservationists received great inspiration.”

Muir sold the president on a uniquely American myth of the wilderness — that if we work hard enough to isolate our beautiful public lands from our influence, we can preserve a landscape essentially “untouched” by man.

According to virtually all of the ecologists, fire scientists and Indigenous fire practitioners I have spoken with over the last year, this myth created our growing wildfire crisis in California.

To solve the crisis, they told me, the myth must die.

The days before my trip to Yosemite, I was bumming it in my polyester tent on Forest Service land. On assignment, I explored Stanislaus National Forest and nearby private timberlands from the passenger seat of a Toyota Tacoma driven by Megan Fisk, an environmental advocate with Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch who spends much of her time independently documenting the forest practices in the Sierra Nevada.

I saw a whole lotta forest ready to burst into searing flames and a whole lotta forest that already had, the awkward and inadvertent result of Muir’s pristine wilderness ideal. But, I also saw the modest footprints of prescribed burns and forest thinning work, a small part of the state’s sweeping attempt to correct the destruction this ideal ultimately caused.

Millennia ago, the mountainous forests and coastal chaparral of current-day California looked quite different.

The state’s conifer forests awaited low-intensity fires to roll across the ground every five to 20 years. Fire would clear out the understory — the vegetation underneath the tree canopy — releasing soil nutrients trapped in dead plants and letting sunlight reach a wide range of ground-dwelling plants.

Some conifer species, like the giant sequoia, rely on the heat of fire to crack open their closed cones and release their seeds; post-fire is opportune time to grow, with a newly open and fertile landscape.

The dozens of Indigenous tribes nestled within the forests surrounding the towering Sierra took on the responsibility of stewarding these fires: ensuring no area went too long without the fire it needed and taming blazes that threatened to burn too hot.

That all quickly changed.

Around when California joined the Union in 1850, gold miners reached Ahwahnee Valley. Tensions with the Ahwahneechee tribe in the valley rose and quickly snapped. Vigilantes in the miner group stormed one of the Tribe’s camps, killing 23 people. After retaliation from the tribe, the settlers formed a state-sanctioned militia and drove the Ahwahneechee out.

A doctor in the miner group renamed the valley “Yosemite,” a butchered word from a nearby tribe’s language.

Not two decades later, Muir, often described as the father of national parks, fell in love with the land. He believed the valley represented “pure wilderness” where “no mark of man is visible upon it.”

Six years after his 1903 trip with Roosevelt, the president signed a bill placing Yosemite under federal protection.

This view of wilderness also motivated Muir’s disdain for Indigenous people (who, he said, had “no right place in the landscape”) and his zero tolerance for fire (which he called the “great master-scourge of forests”).

And it was this vision that took hold among U.S. land managers in the Park Service and Forest Service.

“It’s a very deeply permeated notion in our society,” said Becca Lucas Thomas, executive director of the ytt Northern Chumash Nonprofit and an ethnic studies lecturer at Cal Poly. “The only way that the U.S. could be founded — or for some people to live with the fact that they are U.S. citizens today — is to believe that (they) weren’t taking away the land and rights and the ability to manage the environment from a very advanced society.”

As land managers in the Sierra Nevada sought to suppress every single fire that erupted through the 20th century — partly in the name of preservation, partly in the name of human safety — the forest floor brush and small saplings that fire would normally wipe out began to grow across California.

Open forests where, previously, light could reach down to the ground became dense, shadowy thickets. Many areas of the forest are now five to six times denser than they were before European settlement.

Stray lightning strikes used to ignite rolling ground fires that ate up brush, twigs and saplings and only gently scorched the base of the forest’s matriarchs.

Now, fires explode. Capitalizing on the incredibly dense energy stored in the vegetation, they devour everything in their path. Flames over 100 feet tall can topple even the largest trees. Even the state’s best-trained and -equipped fire crews struggle to contain them.

For centuries, fire was mainly caused by the rare thunderstorm that would strike with the perfect dry and windy conditions and by coastal tribes using cultural burning — or “good fire” — as a tool to steward the land.

But cultural burning was outlawed in the state Legislature’s first-ever session in 1850. And today, fewer than 5% of fires in Southern and Central California’s coastal chaparral ecosystems are started by lightning. The source of the rest is seldom “good fire.”

In their wake, these high-severity fires leave a moonscape. Often what grows back is not a conifer forest. Instead, what you get is a field of shrubs.

Instead of preserving “pure wilderness” as Muir and Roosevelt intended, Northern California’s fire-suppression policy has accomplished the opposite. It’s fundamentally changing the ecosystems that exist, a phenomenon that scientists call “type conversion.”

In Southern California, the low-lying chaparral ecosystems of scrub oak, sugarbush and manzanita adorning California’s rugged coastal landscape are adapted to withstand fires roughly every 30 to 130 years — much longer than what they experience now.

Some parts of the Santa Monica Mountains, for example, experience fire as frequently as every eight years. That’s simply too often for the native species to recover in between.

As the chaparral drowns in flames, quick-growing and flammable invasive grasses — brought by settlers alongside their sparks — are more than happy to fill the void.

In recent decades, modern science has caught up to what Indigenous tribes have known for millenia: Humans are a part of nature. A healthy forest — and a fire-safe town — both rely on human participation. And in the last few years, California’s policies have caught up, too.

In 2021, a wildfire task force convened by Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a goal to actively steward 1 million acres of land each year — including by mechanically thinning forests, using grazing and prescribed burns, in an attempt to break the dangerous cycles we’ve created in the wildlands.

It’s a significant acknowledgment from the state: After more than a century championing a “hands-off” policy, it now aims to place the human touch on vast swaths of the state’s wildlands. To do it, the state hopes to work with the same Indigenous tribes it has spent much of the last century restricting and terrorizing.

In the last few years, tribes such as the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region have been able to practice their first burns in well over a century.

“It’s connecting back to the land in a really tangible way for our people,” Lucas Thomas, who is also a cultural burn practitioner with the tribe, told me back in January, shortly after the Palisades and Eaton fires tore through L.A. County.

Whereas prescribed burns typically follow a discrete cycle of plan, execute and move on, cultural burning is a much more subtle and dynamic practice — a “continuous relationship,” as Lucas Thomas put it.

But many old-school environmentalists still find the concept of “active stewardship” uncomfortable. It requires intentionally starting fires — a hard selling point for those who have seen what fire can do to communities across California.

Further, the idea of pristine wilderness is so pervasive that many of the champions of active stewardship I’ve spoken with still, in some sense, buy into it. For them, the intent of actively managing the land is to simply undo the damage the last few hundred years have done: Once we restore the land, we can then truly coexist as friendly but detached neighbors.

“It’s something that I hear a lot from my students at Cal Poly, too: We’re just trying to ‘fix’ the environment that we’re in right now to get it back to a place pre-colonization,” Lucas Thomas said. “That’s what we hold up to be the utmost goal in a lot of environmental conservation circles.” But in reality, “there’s no static state in the environment.”

It’s the Indigenous experts with whom I’ve spoken, like Lucas Thomas, who remain the most clear-eyed on what it means to hold a relationship and responsibility toward the land.

Instead of longing for the past or the pristine, Lucas Thomas spends her time imaging — and creating — a new relationship with the landscape she lives in. It’s not a relationship just based on paying the debt of our past mistakes. Instead, it’s playful, dynamic and ever-evolving.

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