Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Model for Modern Fire Management?

For many thousands of years, aboriginal peoples worldwide used fire to manage landscapes. In NorthAmerica, the frequency and extent of fire (both human caused and natural) were much reduced afterEuropean colonization. Fire exclusion became the policy in the United States for most of the 20thcentury as the country became more settled and industrialized. Past fire exclusion has helped producelandscapes that are highly susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfire. An urgent challengefor land managers today is to reduce fire risk through several means, including prescribed burning,without harm to culturally significant resources or human communities. The Joint Fire ScienceProgram (JFSP) is supporting the development of methods and tools aimed at incorporating thetraditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples into standard science-based fire management.JFSP-supported researchers are also developing tools that provide a framework for organizing andsharing tribal knowledge with nontribal scientists and managers. Because indigenous knowledge andWestern science come from such different cultural traditions, blending them is not a straightforwardprocess. Even so, current partnerships among tribal leaders, agency and tribal land managers, andother stakeholders promise to move some landscapes closer to a resilient condition.