: sfweekly – excerpt
State Senate candidate Jackie Fielder wants California’s Indigenous tribes to play a much larger role in wildfire prevention, as they did before colonization.
As skies finally begin to clear following a week of smoke that can only be described as hellish, many Californians are probably thinking, how can we prevent this from happening again?
Yes, California, the U.S. and the world need to begin drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But, as SF Weekly recently reported, in terms of what the state can do to reduce the intensity of wildfires in the near term, the consensus is clear: California needs to burn off a lot more fuel in controlled fires.
A recently approved program to limit the environmental review process for prescribed burns and vegetation management will help, but money and labor remain major obstacles. California will need to get creative to actually achieve its fire management goals.
That’s where a new plan by San Francisco State Senate candidate Jackie Fielder could come in. Fielder, a lecturer at SF State and leader of the recent campaign for a public bank in the city, has proposed an Indigenous Wildland Fire Task Force that would give Indigenous tribes a more central role in wildfire prevention. Building off tribes’ millennia of experience with “cultural burns,” the plan would establish new opportunities for collaboration among researchers, state, local, and federal regulators, and Indigenous communities; expand cultural burns beyond existing tribal lands; and provide new leadership and job opportunities for Indigenous people and others…(more)
