“Fire Follows Water, Beauty Follows Fire and Water”, these words shared by Jeanette Acosta express the essence of the June 25th, 2025 webinar LCW Quarterly Meeting Good Fire Panel by the non-profit organization Localizing California Waters.
I’m often struck by how beavers create beautiful ponds, often with stair-step pools, surrounded by lush vegetation, with the tranquil sounds of small waterfalls, bird songs and a plethora of insects buzzing away. In this panel discussion about Good Fire, I learned about how this practice of cultural burning is also creating beauty on the land, not unlike the way beavers do it – by being in active relationship with the land and the plants on the land.
Localizing California Waters (LCW) is a diverse network of land and water stewards in which everyone is a land and water steward. The organization is committed to community and watershed resilience by organizing local actions building toward holistic and coordinated land-based solutions.
Jeannette Acosta opened the panel discussion on Good Fire with panelists:
- Ron Goode Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe,
- Dirk Charley, member of the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians and retired U.S. Forest Service employee and firefighter,
- Jesse Valdez, North Fork Mono Tribe Member and cultural fire practitioner for over 20 years and
- Rob Hazard, retired Santa Barbara County Fire Marshall
What is Cultural Fire? How is it different from Prescribed Burning?
In his introduction to cultural fire practices, Ron Goode detailed how cultural fire differs from prescribed burning in several ways. While concerns of smoke and particles being released into the air, and of fire escaping are shared by both prescribed and cultural burners, one of the ways they differ is the type and amount of prep and post fire work involved in cultural burning. The prep work prevents fire from traveling up into the tree canopy, from scorching, and from affecting trees and shrubs that don’t respond well from burning. Additionally, prep work of small brush piles without large wood allows for fires to burn hot and produce less smoke. Larger woody pieces can be added after the fire gets hot, again to reduce smoke.
This “tending” of the fire piles hints at another major difference between cultural and prescribed burning, as distinguished by Ron Goode.
Cultural Fire is not about the fire, it is about the culture first.” explained Ron Goode describing cultural fire practices.
Cultural burning expects an immediate vegetative return of native plants such as elderberry, sourberry, redbud, and other plants that are used for food, basketry and other resources. Cultural burns are attended by families, basket makers, elders, and youth. While gathering materials, families tell stories, sing songs, and work together. This time spent tending the land, tending future basketry materials, future food sources, and future healthy trees gives the youth a stake in the forest health, added speaker Jesse Valdez, they are revitalizing the culture along with revitalizing the vegetation.
Goode explained that the post fire work involves a mixing of the top soil with the ash, mimicking the middens of past villages, which creates a nutrient-rich soil and cools the root systems, preventing them from being burned. This also allows for an immediate return of vegetation, as is desired with cultural burning, distinguishing it from prescribed burning, which seeks to eliminate the understory vegetation
Interaction with and Response to the Needs of the Land
The intensive tending and maintenance involved in cultural burning hints at a time when people lived on the land, actively interacting and responding to the needs of the land. Jesse Valdez described how this maintenance is necessary for the health of these resources. He likened this maintenance to the difference between your backyard and visiting a park. You are able to tend to your backyard and understand what it needs more than you would a park.
Photo shared by Jeanette Acosta. The foreground shows a tended and burned patch of straight, usable fibre source sourberry while the background shows an untended, unusable patch of the same sourberry plant. An example of how fire can bring back health to the landscape.
Refreshing the vegetation with fire means the plants are going to be healthier and are going to hold water.
Ultimately fire is about water.” said Ron Goode.”
This sentiment hints at why we at the SLO Beaver Brigade are so interested in this fire conversation to begin with, ultimately we care about healthy creeks and rivers. We’ve noticed that when beavers are in a river system, that system has a lot of good things happening in it; the beavers are tending and maintaining their habitat, creating a living, biodiverse waterway. Here we are learning that in addition to beavers, if good fire is being returned to the landscape, especially with this additional lens of cultural fire where plants are being harvested, tended, and maintained, you have yet another boost for your waterway.
Healthy Meadows
The photo on the left, above, of Yosemite Valley shows the 1872 valley where water, lakes, and the valley floor can be seen, alongside a more current view in the photo on the right of the valley, full of conifers completely consuming the meadow and climbing up into the hillsides. These conifers drink up the water that once saturated this historic meadow. This has happened all over California’s meadows. While healthy meadows hold water throughout the year, slowly releasing water in the summer or during droughts, conifer stands take up and use that water. Ron Goode shared that less than 5% of California meadows are considered healthy, Shown below is a graphic of a healthy meadow from the American Rivers website. You can see the water being stored in the water table, the riparian vegetation (and of course a few beaver ponds).
Fire Followers
Water is our first, and most sentient, ancestral living being here on earth, and fire in order to spread follows water, and beauty follows fire and water,” said Jeanette Acosta.
Photo shared by Jeanette Acosta of wildflowers returning after a fire, “fire followers”.
Many plants in California thrive after fire, Jeanette Acosta explained. California has over 6000 endemic plants here. There are obligate resprouters, which are plants that depend upon resprouting from their underground root system or burl after a fire. There are obligate seeders that depend upon their seeds to germinate after a fire. And there are facultative seeders where plants both resprout and seeds germinate after a fire. We also have fire followers, which include most of our annual wildflowers, some of them endemic fire followers, which means they sprout and germinate only after a fire, Jeanette Acosta added.
This is a land that knows fire, these plants are telling us this by how they respond to fire. And the people with a long tradition of living on this land practice this way of relating to the land. “This way of relating to the land with fire is not lost”, said Jeanette Acosta, “it is being practiced today, so that beauty can return.” These sentiments were also shared by Ron Goode and Jesse Valdez and Dirk Charley and others .
If you’d like to learn more about cultural burning, Ron Goode invited folks to follow the activities of North Fork Mono Tribe on their website northforkmonotribe.org. They are offering workshops for tribes on cultural burns and guidance manuals on how to put a cultural burn together.
Everyone is a land and water steward – please join!
If you’d like to listen to the panel discussion, you can access it here.
If you’d like to learn more about the Localizing California Waters, their website is https://localizingcaliforniawaters.org/ Consider attending their annual conference: Building Resilience Through Community Collaboration, LCW Annual Conference: Eastern Sierra Nevada, Oct 14-16, 2025. More information on their website.
If you’d like to participate in the water discussion, LCW have just released a community forum here https://lcw-net.mn.co/spaces/19061138/page .