On the
flight today that we did, we looked at a variety of sequoia groves
and some of those groves had been treated with prescribed burns
with these recent severe wildfires.
To me, they've been a really clear demonstration of the value
of having gone in and done prescribed fires ahead of time.
And certainly in the Redwood Mountain Grove in the 2021 KNP
Complex fire, the lower part of that grove, it's a really big
Sequoia grove, one of the biggest.
It had never received prescribed burning and that's where the fire really
did a lot of damage and killed most of the big sequoias.
And as soon as you cross the line into the areas
that had recent prescribed burns,
the sequoias are alive.
The areas where we had done the prescribed burns did pretty well.
They're still very green. Most of the trees survived.
And so that's kind of what we want to see.
And it really shows the importance of doing prescribed burns and restoring
fire into these areas.
Prescribed burning
is returning an ancient process to the landscape.
Fires have burned across these landscapes for millennia,
and they were started by lightning and they were started by Native Americans
who were managing the landscape. Starting in the late 1800s,
those fires started getting suppressed, and that led to conditions
that are just not great for giant sequoias.
Burns are going to probably be the major way
that we're going to protect sequoias from unwanted fire.
That burning is very difficult or impossible to really protect those areas.
There's all this 100 years of fuel on the ground.
There can be really deep litter and stuff, and then there's a lot of small trees.
So the prescribed burns really reduce the fuel.
And so the idea is if you can get fire back
behaving the way it used to behave in the past,
that's what does the best job perpetuating giant sequoias going into the future.