“The number one issue facing our community is to bring fire back to the land.”
- Margo Robbins, Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC)
Margo Robbins believes that fire is essential for restoring our lands and our ways of being.
Fire replenishes our food, medicine, and other resources that we depend on. It is our responsibility, and our right, to be able to use fire to support our communities.
Margo Robbins, co-founder and executive director of Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC), is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe located in Northern California. She facilitates the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) on the Yurok Reservation. Margo’s work aims to restore the ecological and cultural deficit caused by almost two centuries of fire exclusion
The Yurok live in a landscape that used to be over 50% prairie land. After gold was discovered in California in 1848, the use of fire by Native Americans was outlawed and fire was suppressed. Older forests were logged, and Douglas fir trees were planted by settlers to support a continuous supply of timber for their growing population, and trees took over the places the Yurok peoples had long maintained.
Three weeks after a prescribed burn turns a section of forest black, there are ferns, deer, and new life that wasn’t there before.
Featuring Margo Robbins
Facing Fire: Building Resiliency to Wildfire
Short film by Javan Bernakevitch about shifting from fighting fires to working with fire to creatively manage our fire-prone landscapes.
The Big Burn: Setting a Forest on Fire
Podcast by LAist studios about the benefits of putting fire back on the ground.