Lenya Quinn-Davidson wants to change our relationship with fire. She wants to change how we think about it, how we talk about it, and, most of all, how we use it. “Fire is the most powerful tool we have as a species,” she says. “Fire feels good. It brings people together. It’s something we cook over. It’s something that warms us. It’s just very human. And I think for so long we’ve disconnected from it.”
She’s not talking about eating s’mores around a campfire. She’s talking about communities coming together, putting torch to vegetation, and watching flames spread through grass and brush, bramble and thicket. She’s talking about prescribed burning.
Quinn-Davidson ’04 is a fire ecologist. As director of the Fire Network, a new UC Agriculture and Natural Resources initiative, her mission is to bring the latest fire science directly to the people who need it most: those living in California’s fire-prone regions—which, according to CalFire, is over 7 million people.
Like water and sunlight, fire is fundamental to the ecology of California’s forests. But thanks to 150 years of mismanagement, today’s forests are ecologically out of whack, packed with spindly trees, dry brush, and thick layers of duff. This accumulated fuel load allows fire to climb from the forest floor up into the canopy, like a flame creeping up a matchstick to the combustible head. When the canopy burns, wildfires grow bigger and hotter. And as we’ve witnessed across the state, from Paradise to Coffey Park to Greenville, big, hot wildfires burn communities to the ground. (Recent fires in L.A. originated in chaparral, not forest.)
“We are painstakingly building a fire-trap that will piecemeal, but in the long run completely, defeat the aim of fire protection itself.”
Rancher Stewart Edward White, 1920
Prescribed burning, the setting of low-intensity fires under carefully managed conditions, scorches away that accumulated fuel, starving wildfires of the dry material they need to grow into out-of-control infernos. Over the last several years, Quinn-Davidson has burned a trail across the state, telling anyone who will listen that we can and must fight fire with fire, and that the only way we can burn enough to address California’s urgent and growing wildfire crisis is to get fire into the hands of the people. And quickly.
“Fire is a human right,” she says. “We all deserve access to it.”
In the early twentieth century, a public debate played out across the editorial pages of California’s newspapers and magazines on the practice then known as “light burning” in the state’s timber forests.
Many private landowners at the time set low-intensity fires to clear away accumulated detritus, control pests, and reduce the risk of catastrophic fires. But the leadership of the newly minted U.S. Forest Service decried the practice as a threat to timber stocks, calling instead for a strategy of total fire suppression, a policy later embodied in the character of Smokey the Bear with his trusty shovel and Uncle Sam–like slogan, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” In their telling, fire was the “archenemy of the forest,” the “greatest of forest evils,” and each and every one must be extinguished.
But decades before Smokey made it to billboards, the light burners countered that fire had been a feature of California’s forests from time immemorial. Though early white settlers often described the region as untamed wilderness, California’s landscape had, in fact, been heavily shaped by Native people who extensively employed beneficial fire. Private foresters argued that light burning created healthier forests and that suppressing forest fires altogether was futile and dangerous.
“One may prevent fires for five, ten, twenty-five, fifty years. But one cannot eliminate all carelessness, all cussedness, all natural causes,” wrote rancher Stewart Edward White in the March 1920 issue of Sunset magazine. “We are painstakingly building a fire-trap that will piecemeal, but in the long run completely, defeat the aim of fire protection itself.”
Unfortunately, forestry professionals rejected these dire warnings as unscientific. “[Light burning] is not forestry; not conservation; it is simple destruction,” wrote F. E. Olmsted, district forester for California. By the early 1920s, California had followed the national lead and adopted a policy of total fire suppression. Prescribed burning was officially condemned.
In the century since, the state has created one of the most sophisticated and well-funded firefighting apparatuses in the world. One entirely outmatched by today’s megafires.
“The way that we manage fire in California is we put out every fire. And the only fires that burn … are the ones we cannot put out,” Quinn-Davidson says.
Nine of the ten largest fires in the recorded history of California have occurred in the last decade. The August Complex became the state’s first, and only, gigafire, burning over a million acres across seven counties in 2020, a year that saw a record 4 million total acres burned.
“That was on the low end of the historical level of fire we would have been experiencing in California,” Quinn-Davidson says, citing estimates that before European settlement of California, fires, both natural and manmade, burned as much as 11 million acres annually. In 2022, California announced a target of 400,000 total acres of prescribed burning by state and federal agencies by 2025. “The goals that are in that plan are really ambitious,” she says, “which is sad because they’re nowhere near what really needs to happen.”
In retrospect, Quinn-Davidson’s destiny almost seems predetermined. She was born deep in fire country, in the rural Northern California town of Hayfork. Her parents were back-to-the-landers who named her Lenya, after the Spanish word for firewood.
But in truth, she wasn’t always so fire-positive. Growing up in the foothills of the Trinity Mountains, she developed a deep-seated fear of wildfire. In summers, smoke often settled over the town. Once, when a fire burned dangerously close, she and her family helped friends urgently evacuate.
Quinn-Davidson’s mother cooked for a catering team that traveled to big wildfires around the Western U.S. to serve meals to firefighters. “I used to have recurring nightmares about my house burning down. And I was really scared of my mom being gone,” she says.
But fear and curiosity are closely linked. As an undergrad at Cal studying watershed restoration, Quinn-Davidson took a class taught by Professor Scott Stephens, Ph.D. ’95, one of the country’s leading experts on fire ecology, and she felt her perspective begin to shift. “I was like, wait a minute, [fire] is a natural process. Why are people like the folks in my community so scared of it?”
At Humboldt State, she pursued a master’s thesis exploring the impediments to prescribed burning. Time and time again she found herself confronting a core question: With California facing an unprecedented wildfire crisis, and plenty of science affirming prescribed fire as a powerful and inexpensive solution, why wasn’t the state burning more?
In August 2021, at the height of yet another historically destructive fire season, the Caldor Fire surged through the eastern Sierra Nevada foothills toward Grizzly Flats, a town of about 1,000 residents. In the early 2000s, the U.S. Forest Service pegged the town as being at severe wildfire risk and created an elaborate plan to reduce the fuel load in the surrounding El Dorado National Forest. The plan included a prescription for 10,000 acres of burning.
But by the time the Caldor Fire was on the town’s doorstep, a year beyond the plan’s original completion target, only 14 percent of the treatment had been done, including a paltry 136 acres of pile burns. The Forest Service later blamed lack of funding, environmental hurdles, and regulatory delays.
On August 17, the fire, with flames reaching 150 feet, leveled Grizzly Flats. Driven east by gusty winds, the blaze burned across the Sierra Nevada toward the city of South Lake Tahoe.
But standing between South Lake and the fire was the town of Meyers, where years of fuel treatments that included prescribed burns had hardened the town against fire. Fuel-treated areas are more accessible to firefighters, who can use them to create a frontline defense at the fire’s edge. As the fire reached that line, its progression slowed. Firefighters jumped into action, stopping the Caldor Fire along the outskirts of South Lake Tahoe.
“If there had been no treatments and they couldn’t get the firefighters on the ground, that whole area would have burned to the ground,” Cal forest management expert William Stewart, M.S. ’86, Ph.D. ’93, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Many experts have long advocated for a vast increase in fuel treatments by federal and state agencies. After decades of total fire suppression policy, the use of beneficial burning restarted in 1968 in California’s Sequoia and Kings National Parks, and it has gained traction in the decades since. A 20-year study from Berkeley’s Blodgett Forest Research Station published in 2023 bolstered existing evidence that fuel treatments, especially prescribed fire, significantly increase forest resilience against wildfire. But as the new millennium brought a succession of record fire seasons, the agencies lagged, hamstrung by red tape, scant resources, and a firefighting culture resistant to change.
Amid all the agency foot-dragging, Quinn-Davidson puzzled over a central part of the state’s challenge: Almost 60 percent of California’s forests were managed by the federal government and just 3 percent by the state. The rest, over 13 million acres, was privately owned. She began to wonder, “What about the people who want to be burning but aren’t?”
In 2017, one year into her new role as the state’s lone fire advisor for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR), she began to shift her focus from the impediments slowing agency burning to the barriers faced by everyday people. “Like private landowners and community members and ranchers and tribes,” she says. “Some of these groups have been left out of the conversation entirely for a long time.”
Liability concerns and lack of training opportunities topped the list of real concerns. But in other states, private citizens were already burning. A lot. Florida, for example, was burning roughly 40 times as many acres as California, at least half of it done by private citizens.
Quinn-Davidson and a colleague traveled to Nebraska, where community members were forming Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) to burn on private land in the Great Plains. She was impressed. “There’s just no reason we can’t do this in California,” she thought.
That year, Quinn-Davidson created the state’s first PBA, in Humboldt County. They put their drip torches to undergrowth, and word spread. “We were getting calls from all over the state. People wondering, how are you doing this? Is it legal? And, can you come help us do the same thing?”
In the summer of 2017, 18 major wildfires, including the now infamous Tubbs Fire, burned simultaneously across Northern California. Collectively dubbed the Northern California Fire Siege, their combined destruction over several weeks would be the costliest in life, homes, and dollars in the state’s history to that time.
Calls for Sacramento to do something—anything—grew .
State legislators invited Quinn-Davidson’s former Cal professor, Scott Stephens, to the Capitol. His message to them was simple: “There’s no way you’re going to solve this problem without direct engagement with private individuals and landowners.”
He offered an idea that he’d been kicking around for years: a network of fire experts embedded in counties across the state, giving local people guidance on everything from home hardening to evacuation planning and prescribed burning, all of it informed by the latest in UC fire research. Best of all, UC already had a mechanism for bringing this kind of community-level support: Cooperative Extension.
In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act mandated the creation of Cooperative Extension to link everyday people living in rural areas with land-grant university research. In California, it has since provided farmers with the latest findings and practices in soil health, pest management, water use, and more, laying the scientific foundation for the state’s wine, almond, and dairy industries, among others. Today’s Cooperative Extension, through UCANR, has advisors working in every county in the state and has expanded into areas like aquaculture, nutrition, and internet access. So, Stephens thought, why not wildfire mitigation too?
Stephens estimates that he and his colleague, Cal forestry expert William Stewart, made about a dozen trips in three months to Sacramento to convince the legislators to fund the idea, which he called the Fire Network.
“I just kept talking about it,” Stephens says. “One time I went into a hearing and a legislator says, ‘There’s that guy. All he talks about is Cooperative Extension and fire advisors.’”
Eventually, the talk turned to action. The funding came through in 2021. The Fire Network would soon be born.
Driving north through the heart of Siskiyou County, Highway 3 descends from the conifer-covered Scott Mountain Range into a heavily cultivated agricultural plain. A sign greets you: “Welcome to Scott Valley.” Smaller signs and flags tacked on fences along the road make clear that this is also Trump Country.
Scott Valley is home to folks with other political leanings too, of course. That includes Charnna Gilmore, executive director of the Scott River Watershed Council. She’s grown accustomed to some professional friction with her neighbors, in particular the ranchers and farmers who often view the council’s mission as conflicting with their water needs. The broader political environment doesn’t help. “I’m on the liberal side, so that’s a point of tension in these crazy times we’re living in,” she says.
However, in recent years, Gilmore has discovered an unlikely unifier of her community, left and right: prescribed burning.
But it didn’t start out that way.
Several years back, Gilmore grew interested in prescribed fire as a way to help restore healthy forests to Scott Valley. So she brought the idea to the community. “They were not even remotely receptive. Some of them were even hostile about it,” she says. “They were like, ‘Are you nuts? That’s stupid. What are you talking about?’”
So Gilmore reached out to Quinn-Davidson, who, in 2019, came to Scott Valley with her colleague Jeff Stackhouse to make a pitch for the formation of a PBA. “The room was full, which never really happens,” Gilmore says. “There were CalFire people, there was Forest Service. And a lot of community members.”
Quinn-Davidson and Stackhouse painted a compelling picture: a community unified against the threat of wildfire, taking the health of local forests into their own hands. Their secret sauce, according to Quinn-Davidson, was their contrast in vibe: he, the rugged redneck, and she, the gentle hippie. “We always joked that between the two of us, we could resonate with any audience,” she says.
Gilmore says she fell in love with their vision that “people with boots and Birkenstocks are out burning together, having a beer together at the end of it, then walking their separate paths in life.”
The meeting struck a chord. “It was one of those times when you’re like, okay, I think we’re ready to take this plunge,” she says.
Gilmore went to work. She relied heavily on Quinn-Davidson, who served as a mentor and a source of both inspiration and information. “She was a walking library for me,” Gilmore says. “Just her willingness to pick up the phone on a dime. She’s available. She’s there.”
In 2020, Gilmore, along with an increasingly supportive local community, founded the Siskiyou Prescribed Burn Association.
Launching more PBAs around the state was a huge step toward getting fire into the hands of the people. But what good were they if nobody in the community was willing or able to actually light a fire?
“Liability was a huge barrier,” says Sara Clark, J.D. ’10, a public interest lawyer based in San Francisco. “Folks were like, ‘I want to do this, but I’m afraid that if a burn escapes, I will lose my house or put my kids’ college savings at risk.’”
A client, frustrated by the lack of insurance options, put Clark in touch with Quinn-Davidson. The two hit it off and began touring the state putting on what Clark calls a “dog-and-pony show about liability.” It caught the attention of then–State Senator Bill Dodd, who’d become a force on fire legislation after his district was repeatedly ravaged by massive wildfires. The trio put their heads together, collaborating on two prescribed burn bills,
SB 332 and SB 926. The first raised the liability threshold for prescribed burners to gross negligence, and the second boosted that protection by creating a first-of-its-kind $20 million fund, an insurance backstop, to protect burners against claims.
They also collaborated on a third bill, one that gave financial protection to Indigenous Californians and streamlined their permitting process. This is another important thread running through all of Quinn-Davidson’s work: supporting the resurgence among California’s tribes of what’s known as cultural burning—an array of Indigenous fire practices that pre-date tribes’ expulsion from their homelands and bans on burning.
Quinn-Davidson then turned her sights on the next roadblock: certification. The legal protections applied only to certified burners. Beginning in 2021, she took a primary role in designing the curriculum for the state’s new burn boss program. While “burn boss” typically refers to an agency professional who manages burn projects, a 2018 state law mandated the creation of a training program allowing non-agency practitioners to get certified.
But the program hit a snag.
“CalFire was uncomfortable with the idea of non-agency people being certified, and they stalled the program pretty significantly in the first year,” Quinn-Davidson says. Of all the barriers that had to be overcome, she says one of the biggest has been what she calls the “culture of fire,” a holdover from the state’s century-long militaristic approach to fire suppression. “[It’s] this attitude from fire management agencies that said, ‘If you’re not a professional, you shouldn’t be able to do this work.’”
She doesn’t blame the people, but rather the culture they’re immersed in. After all, her husband is a “fire guy,” a fire management planner for the National Park Service. “I mean, he’s great, but he’s a very by-the-book kind of person,” she says, laughing. “I’m the opposite of that. So he’s always like, ‘Oh god, what are you doing now?’”
Quinn-Davidson published a public letter calling out the agency for their stalling tactics. “If we don’t start making space for outside perspectives and expertise, we’re not going to make it,” she wrote. “So if the existing rules and standards don’t facilitate the right things, let’s change the rules. Let’s rewrite the standards. Let’s honor the innovative work that people have been doing, and let’s choose leaders who think outside the box…. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”
It was a rare instance of the ever-congenial ecologist flashing her tough side, Clark says. “She’s built so much credibility and so much goodwill with people that they respond to her when she needs to use that little bit of push or force.”
Within weeks, CalFire had removed the barriers and let the program go forward. Quinn-Davidson then helped teach the first three cohorts.
“She’s very busy,” says Len Nielson, CalFire’s staff chief for prescribed fire and environmental protection. “I don’t know how she does it all.”
Nielson acknowledges that fire agency culture had been a hurdle in allowing non-professionals to burn. The foundation of firefighting is putting fires out, he says. “So when we say, ‘Hey, we want you to let this fire burn,’ it goes against that foundational premise.… But I think we have really shifted in our department towards that.”
Shifting the minds of fire professionals is one thing, Nielson says, but getting buy-in from communities has been hard too. He calls Quinn-Davidson the “Elmer’s glue” holding the PBAs together. “It’s been amazing to work with her because she’s very passionate.”
Ultimately, Nielson says, the benefits of prescribed burning speak for themselves. “You finally get the landowner convinced that it’s okay to burn. You burn it. And they see firsthand how controlled it is. They see the positive impacts to their land for the next few years.” According to Nielson, the burners almost always get invited back to burn more.
“Now my community is like, ‘We need fire. We need a lot of fire’ … Fire is the place where we find common ground.”
Charnna Gilmore, executive director of the Scott River Watershed Council
In 2023, Quinn-Davidson was made the first director of UCANR’s new Fire Network. She hired a half-dozen fire advisors in fire-prone counties around the state who assist in the formation of PBAs and provide guidance on everything from post-fire recovery to burn boss certification. The Fire Network also taps several dozen UC experts in fire, forestry, water, livestock, and other fields to keep the advisors abreast of the latest research. The network now supports 27 PBAs across the state, some consisting of hundreds of community volunteers conducting burns.
“A really cool element of this PBA work is that it’s so versatile,” Quinn-Davidson says. “People are using fire for so many different things.”
The Humboldt County PBA conducts burns for oak woodland restoration. In Plumas County, it’s primarily for wildfire prevention. The Good Fire Alliance, a PBA in the North Bay, trains aspiring prescribed burn professionals, while PBAs on the Central Coast are focused on rangeland improvement for livestock and controlling invasive species like star thistle, Medusa head, and goat grass.
And while the total acreage of burning by PBAs is relatively low, Quinn-Davidson explains that because the burns are conducted in and around communities, they punch above their weight, protecting people and property from big wildfires.
“The burns are targeted and high quality,” she says. “They do a lot of burns right around houses. The actual burn might be two acres, but it provides that buffer.”
Although Stephens is thrilled to see the Fire Network making a difference, he says they need more funding and more advisors. “You’ve just got to get more people in the fire space that could join this network,” he says. “They’ve got six people covering 58 counties. I think you probably need close to 30 fire advisors in the state. Even that could be small.”
Timing may be on the network’s side. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has committed to vastly expanding prescribed burning. Total acres burned in the state by CalFire and the U.S. Forest Service have been trending upward. In the 2022–23 fiscal year, the latest available complete statistics, more than 87,000 total acres were burned in California. Whether the target of 400,000 acres by 2025 is reached remains to be seen.
“It’s still ‘small ball’ compared to what we need to do,” Newsom said in an April livestream highlighting state wildfire mitigation initiatives. In March, the governor declared a state of emergency to fast-track mitigation projects. According to his office, $2.5 billion has been allocated for efforts that include prescribed burning. “Not taking risks in the space, not leaning in, is the most reckless thing we could do,” he said.
In the years since Quinn-Davidson first visited Scott Valley, Gilmore has, along with the Siskiyou PBA, burned all over the surrounding mountains. Today, when her team conducts a burn, she says, “There’s nothing but thanks. No hostility from people that typically would not side with us from a political standpoint, or even a social-cultural standpoint.
“Now my community is like, ‘We need fire. We need a lot of fire,’” she says. “Fire is the place where we find common ground.” Gilmore also discovered something that, according to Quinn-Davidson, happens again and again to people she takes on prescribed burns: The revelation that burning is a profound, beautiful, and fun experience.
“It’s just this sense of community … when you’re out tending to the land you love so much,” Gilmore says. “When you’re burning with your community … and you’re burning with the Native people and you’re burning with the local fire department, you kind of look around, and you’re like, ‘This is so frickin’ cool.’”
Coby McDonald, M.J. ’17, is a freelance writer and podcast producer based in his hometown of Berkeley.
