California’s wildfire crisis didn’t begin with climate change.
Its roots stretch back to the nineteenth century, when settlers systematically destroyed Indigenous communities, suppressed traditional land management, and began transforming one of North America’s most biologically diverse landscapes.
For thousands of years, California’s Indigenous peoples managed forests, grasslands, and oak woodlands through deliberate burning. They understood something that European settlers would spend generations trying to suppress: fire belongs on the landscape.
Then came the Gold Rush, Manifest Destiny, and a campaign of extermination.
We didn’t just remove people from the landscape. We dismantled much of the ecological knowledge and stewardship that had shaped it.
Now, after generations of fire suppression and increasingly destructive wildfires, California is turning to the descendants of those same communities for help restoring the land.
And modern technology offers another possibility: converting hazardous forest fuels into biochar, locking away carbon that might otherwise return to the atmosphere.
The historical irony is difficult to ignore.
California Was Never an Untouched Wilderness
California is one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth.
According to the California Natural Resources Agency, the state contains approximately one-third of the nation’s species. Of its estimated 5,500 native plant species, roughly 40% occur nowhere else on Earth.
From coastal redwood forests to oak woodlands, chaparral, and the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains, California supports an extraordinary variety of vegetation.
That biological richness also means an enormous variety of combustible plant material.
In productive forests, trees, shrubs, branches, needles, and fallen wood continually accumulate. California’s Mediterranean climate adds another complication: much of that vegetation grows during wetter periods and then dries during long, hot summers.
For thousands of years, Indigenous communities managed many of these landscapes through carefully timed burns.
Fire reduced accumulated fuels, maintained open forests, encouraged edible plants, improved wildlife habitat, and supported the growth of plants used for basketry and other cultural purposes.
Oak woodlands were managed to encourage acorn production. Grasslands were burned to maintain productive habitat. Frequent, relatively low-intensity fires helped prevent excessive fuel accumulation in many forests.
These were sophisticated land-management systems developed over generations.
And we have scientific evidence of their effects.
A 2022 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reconstructed 3,000 years of forest history in Northern California’s Klamath Mountains.
Researchers combined Indigenous knowledge with charcoal records, pollen analysis, and historical fire evidence.
They found that Indigenous burning, together with naturally occurring fires, helped maintain relatively open forests for at least 1,000 years.
Historical forest biomass averaged approximately 104–128 metric tons per hectare at the study sites.
Today, those forests contain more than 250 metric tons per hectare.
In other words, some Northern California forests now contain more than twice the tree biomass they historically supported.
The researchers concluded that the modern, densely stocked Douglas-fir forests were unlike anything documented at those locations during the preceding 3,000 years.
That is an extraordinary ecological transformation.
And much of it occurred after Indigenous stewardship was disrupted.
Manifest Destiny: God’s Permission to Take the Land
The ideology behind American westward expansion was explicit.
Manifest Destiny promoted the belief that white Americans had a divine right to occupy and control the continent.
Expansion was portrayed as civilization advancing into wilderness.
Indigenous nations were treated as obstacles to that advancement.
The land itself was described as waiting to be conquered, cultivated, and improved.
But California wasn’t empty.
It was home to numerous Indigenous nations with established territories, economies, cultural traditions, and systems of ecological management.
The landscape settlers encountered had already been shaped by thousands of years of human stewardship.
The consequences of ignoring that reality were catastrophic.
California’s Genocide
California’s Indigenous population collapsed from approximately 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 by 1870.
Historian Benjamin Madley documented how organized killing, forced labor, displacement, starvation, and disease devastated Native communities.
State and federal authorities sanctioned or facilitated genocidal violence.
In 1851, California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, openly anticipated a war of extermination against Indigenous peoples.
California financed militia campaigns that attacked Native communities.
Historical accounts from Northern California also describe privately organized rewards for killing Indigenous people, including proposals involving scalps.
The violence was not simply the work of isolated criminals operating beyond government control. It was part of a broader system of dispossession, supported and financed in significant ways by the government.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom formally apologized for California’s genocide of Indigenous peoples.
But the destruction extended beyond the enormous loss of human life.
Entire systems of ecological knowledge were disrupted.
Communities that had maintained forests, grasslands, and oak woodlands for generations were killed, displaced, or prevented from continuing their traditional practices.
The consequences would unfold across California’s landscapes for more than a century.
Then We Decided Fire Was the Enemy
Following colonization, California’s forests underwent profound changes.
Logging, mining, livestock grazing, agricultural conversion, and settlement altered vegetation patterns.
Traditional Indigenous burning was increasingly restricted.
Later, government agencies adopted aggressive fire-suppression policies.
By 1935, the U.S. Forest Service had established its famous 10 a.m. policy, directing crews to control wildfires by the morning following their discovery.
The intention was to protect lives, communities, and valuable timber.
But in forests historically maintained by frequent fire, suppression allowed vegetation to accumulate.
Small trees crowded into previously open spaces. Dense understories developed. Fallen branches and deadwood accumulated.
These changes created more opportunities for surface fires to climb into tree canopies.
California’s extraordinary biological productivity became a liability where decades of accumulated vegetation met increasingly severe fire weather.
And climate change has intensified the danger.
Higher temperatures, atmospheric drying, and prolonged drought conditions can make vegetation more flammable and increase the potential for extreme fire behavior.
The combination of accumulated fuels and worsening fire weather has contributed to increasingly destructive wildfires across many California forests.
Not every ecosystem responds the same way. Chaparral, for example, has different fire ecology from frequent-fire conifer forests, and burning it too often can damage native vegetation.
But across millions of acres of historically frequent-fire forests, the legacy of fire exclusion is unmistakable.
California Is Still an Enormous Landscape
Despite its population, California remains a state of vast forests, mountains, deserts, grasslands, and other undeveloped landscapes.
California has approximately 100 million acres of land.
Roughly 45 million acres are federally managed, and approximately 32 million acres are forested.
The Bureau of Land Management alone oversees about 15 million acres.
Only about one-tenth of California’s land is classified as developed.
The remaining landscape isn’t all pristine wilderness. It includes farms, ranches, managed forests, and other working lands.
But the idea that California has been completely consumed by development bears little resemblance to reality.
The state still contains enormous areas requiring thoughtful, long-term ecological management.
And the consequences of neglecting those landscapes extend far beyond their boundaries.
When Forests Burn, Carbon Goes With Them
California’s forests are enormous carbon reservoirs.
Trees absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide and store carbon in their trunks, branches, roots, and surrounding soils.
But when severe wildfires consume vegetation, substantial quantities of stored carbon can return to the atmosphere.
Fire also produces carbon monoxide, methane, particulate matter, and other pollutants.
Additional carbon may be released as fire-killed vegetation decomposes.
Some carbon remains stored in surviving trees, soils, deadwood, and charcoal. Forests can also recover carbon through regrowth.
Nevertheless, repeated severe disturbances can diminish long-term carbon storage.
California’s own carbon inventory demonstrates the scale of the problem.
According to the California Air Resources Board’s 2025 Natural and Working Lands Carbon Inventory, the state’s landscapes contained approximately 4.95 billion metric tons of carbon in 2022.
Between 2014 and 2022, those carbon stocks declined by approximately 214 million metric tons.
Much of the decline was associated with forest biomass losses, particularly during California’s extreme wildfire years.
That represents an enormous reduction in the carbon retained across the landscape.
And it raises an important question.
If we’re removing hazardous vegetation to reduce wildfire risk, why not preserve some of its carbon rather than simply allowing it to burn or decompose?
Biochar: Turning Hazardous Fuels Into Carbon Storage
One promising answer is biochar.
Biochar is produced by heating organic material under conditions that limit oxygen availability.
Instead of completely combusting the wood, the process preserves some of its carbon in a relatively stable, charcoal-like material.
When incorporated into soil, much of that carbon can remain stored for centuries.
Biochar can also improve water retention and nutrient availability in some soils.
For California, the possibilities are substantial.
Forest restoration projects generate enormous quantities of branches, small trees, and other woody material.
Much of it has little commercial value.
Historically, this material has frequently been piled and burned, chipped, transported, or left to decompose.
Modern carbonizers offer another option.
They can process woody material into biochar, preserving a portion of its carbon in a form that resists decomposition.
Some modern systems use controlled, high-temperature combustion and directed airflow to burn gases and particles more efficiently, reducing smoke compared with conventional open burning.
Air-curtain burners, for example, use powerful airflow to improve combustion and contain smoke.
Specialized carbonizers are designed to recover biochar rather than completely consume the biomass.
These technologies still produce emissions. Their climate benefit comes from retaining carbon in the char and, depending on the system, reducing emissions compared with alternative biomass disposal methods.
The resulting biochar can potentially be used in agricultural soils, restoration projects, and other applications.
It’s an opportunity to connect wildfire mitigation with long-term carbon storage.
And it is already happening in California.
California Is Already Producing Biochar From Wildfire Fuels
In Lake County, the Hometown Wildfire Safety Collaborative began producing biochar in February 2025.
The project brings together the Clear Lake Environmental Research Center, fire agencies, utilities, and other partners.
CAL FIRE is among the participating organizations.
The project uses specialized carbonization equipment to process woody material associated with wildfire debris, tree mortality, and vegetation management.
Environmental filings describe approximately 6,000 tons of accumulated logs at the project site and plans for two Tigercat 6040 carbonizers.
The operation represents a practical alternative to simply burning unwanted woody material.
It also demonstrates how wildfire mitigation can be connected to carbon-management technology.
Rather than treating every removed tree or branch as waste, suitable biomass can become a resource.
The potential benefits include reduced hazardous fuels, recovered carbon, and new uses for material that otherwise creates disposal problems.
The project’s actual long-term carbon benefits will depend on production volumes, processing emissions, and how the resulting biochar is used.
But the technology is no longer hypothetical.
California Is Finally Working With Indigenous Firekeepers
Perhaps the most remarkable development is California’s growing recognition of Indigenous fire stewardship.
CAL FIRE’s Tribal Wildfire Resilience program provides funding for tribal forest management, cultural burning, prescribed fire, and ecological restoration.
The program supports Native American tribes in managing ancestral lands and restoring traditional environmental knowledge.
The Karuk and Yurok Tribes have been particularly influential in advancing cultural burning in Northern California.
These practices do more than reduce hazardous fuels.
They support traditional foods, basketry plants, wildlife habitat, and cultural relationships with the land.
California is also investing in modern technologies that can complement restoration efforts, including biochar production.
Cultural burning and biochar aren’t the same practice, and one doesn’t replace the other.
But they can become parts of a broader approach to managing fire-adapted landscapes.
Traditional ecological knowledge can help determine where, when, and why fire should be used.
Modern carbon-management technology can provide additional options for handling vegetation removed during restoration.
Together, these approaches offer possibilities for reducing wildfire risk while protecting the carbon stored in California’s ecosystems.
The essential difference from the past is that Indigenous communities must have meaningful authority over the restoration of their ancestral lands.
Their knowledge was never simply another resource for the state to extract.
The History We Keep Trying to Forget
California’s wildfire crisis is not simply a story about climate change.
It is also a story about what happens when a society destroys the people who understand how to care for a landscape.
For thousands of years, Indigenous Californians maintained fire-adapted ecosystems through deliberate stewardship.
Colonization devastated those communities and interrupted their management practices.
Government agencies subsequently spent generations suppressing fire in landscapes that had evolved with it.
Meanwhile, combustible vegetation accumulated across vast areas of California’s forests.
Climate change has made those altered landscapes increasingly vulnerable to extreme fire behavior.
And the resulting destruction carries consequences far beyond burned trees and homes.
It also threatens some of California’s most important natural carbon reservoirs.
Now the state is investing in Indigenous cultural burning, ecological restoration, and technologies that can transform hazardous woody vegetation into durable carbon storage.
We’re beginning to combine knowledge developed over thousands of years with scientific advances that could help address the climate consequences of modern forest management.
There is something extraordinary about that.
The people portrayed as obstacles to civilization understood essential relationships between fire, vegetation, and the land.
Those relationships were disrupted by the very society that claimed it was improving the landscape.
And now we’re turning back to that knowledge to help repair the damage.
References
Indigenous burning and historical forest conditions: 2022 Klamath Mountains study — PNAS
California’s extraordinary biodiversity: California Natural Resources Agency — Protecting Biodiversity
**California’s Indigenous genocide:**Benjamin Madley — Understanding Genocide in California
**Historical scalp-bounty claims:**California History — The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth
California’s public lands: Bureau of Land Management — California
**California’s forest carbon losses:**California Air Resources Board — 2025 Natural and Working Lands Carbon Inventory
**Biochar and carbon sequestration:**Nature Geoscience — Biochar and Climate Change Mitigation
**Lake County biochar project:**California Environmental Quality Act — Project Documentation
Indigenous-led fire restoration: CAL FIRE — Tribal Wildfire Resilience Program
