Addressing Racial Justice in California's Wildfire Response

10.29.20

California is experiencing an unprecedented wildfire season.

More than 4 million acres have burned in California, razing long-standing communities and sacred Indigenous sites. We've lost lives and homes at a staggering scale. Over the past month many news stories have sought to trace how California's wildfires got out of control. There are several explanations. We are in a climate emergency and excess natural ground fuel coupled with extreme heat and dry lightning strikes have made for an extraordinary fire-filled year. It's also true that COVID-19 has made it particularly challenging to fight megafires with necessary public health protocols to keep crews safe this wildfire season. But, to understand how this year culminated in a West Coast inferno, we need to also sift through the many historical policies and processes that steered our wildfire response away from effective and longstanding practices used by Indigenous communities while also relying on an incarcerated workforce to fight fires. In light of the national calls for racial justice and growing concerns about the alarming consequences of climate change, California faces a unique moment to tackle wildfires with a commitment to address the historical injustices that led to this year's devastation.

The link between racial injustice and wildfires

Across North America we all occupy stolen, Indigenous land. The removal of tribal communities came at the steep cost of losing centuries of Indigenous knowledge of maintaining healthy lands — for California that meant losing an understanding that fire is part of the ecosystem.

Following the decimation of Native American populations by white settlers, we entered into an era of land suppression dubbed as “conservation.” Conservation efforts, such as those pioneered by John Muir who became the architect of the National Park System, were propounded as a way to “protect” and “conserve” landscapes across the U.S. Following the establishment of the National Park System, policy shifted away from preventive cultural burning practices long practiced by Indigenous people toward a focus on more reactive suppression efforts that were used once a fire was underway. Fire suppression was the preferred approach by the time Cal Fire was founded in 1905, and further solidified in the 1920s when the National Forest Service decided to ban intentional burns favoring fire-suppression on public lands. California fully moved away from intentional burns in 1924 when the state made it illegal to conduct intentional burns in forested areas.

Addressing our history and our present

There are other racial injustices embedded in our wildfire response. Cal Fire’s practice to support its emergency response workforce during peak megafires includes a program known as the Conservation Fire Camp. In 1915, Cal Fire developed the program with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) during World War I to support a then depleting workforce. The goal was to train currently incarcerated people to provide support in emergency disaster efforts. Led by CDCR, this program is a partnership with Cal Fire and the Los Angeles County Fire Department. There are more than 44 fire camps across 27 counties in California.

This wildfire season exposed the complexity of the program. Conservation camps were originally created as a supplement to the existing workforce. Today, the program exploits this labor as the state heavily relies on inmates receiving $0.14 an hour for putting their bodies on the fire line to protect people and property, fight wildfires and participate in other emergency disaster efforts. Yet many of these same brave people are barred from permanent employment in fire agencies once they have served their time because of their criminal records.

Since 2017, the prison population has oscillated between 115,000 to 125,000 people according to the latest report published by CDCR. Black men and women are overrepresented in California prisons. In 2017, Black men made up 28.5% of the prison population while statewide Black male residents comprised only 5.6% of California’s population according to the Public Policy Institute of California.. Similarly, 25.9% of the female population are Black in comparison to the 5.7% of the state’s adult female population.

Last month, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2147, a bill that would expunge the record of firefighters that participated in the California Conservation Camp Program or a county incarcerated individual hand crew program to make it easier for those who have served their time to find meaningful employment with city and county firefighting operations.

Moving toward a more just future

California has an important opportunity and responsibility to address the ongoing threat posed by wildfires while repairing a complicated history that in 2020 culminated in the convergence of a call for racial justice and an undeniably dire vision of our environmental future.

First, we must have a statewide conversation that acknowledges the historical and ongoing harm that wildfire suppression has caused to Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities. Through that process, state agencies and local communities can overhaul their current fire suppression policies that we have seen only exacerbate wildfire intensity. This is crucial as our fire “season” grows longer and more intense as the climate changes. Our federal, state and local government need to work intentionally with tribal governments as we revisit how we manage our lands and respect ancestral practices that have been proven to work.

We also need to ensure that we address workforce inequities and past injustices by actively creating career pathways for people who are exiting the criminal justice system with firefighting experience so that they have an opportunity to rebuild their lives through jobs that protect our state. With Assembly Bill 2417, Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature took an important first step by opening the door for employment for people exiting the criminal justice system. But more work is needed to ensure that California is ready for the challenges ahead.

This year of viral and anthropogenic catastrophes has shown we must address the systemic ways that racial injustice is embedded in the policies and systems that govern how things work. In the case of California, we can leaders and demonstrate how to better manage wildfires while racial injustices.