How forester Kira Hoffman is harnessing the healing power of fire

Even as a child, Kira Hoffman understood that fire wasn’t merely a destructive force. Growing up in Smithers, British Columbia, she helped her parents burn the family farm’s hayfields to enrich the soil. Then, fresh out of high school, she joined a helitack crew battling raging blazes in remote areas with massive water drops. Hoffman loved the work but was disillusioned with the forest service’s extinguish-at-all-costs approach. “Fire was treated as this very scary thing that needed to be suppressed right away,” she says. “It was immediately clear to me that if we just kept putting out all these fires [like that], later we were going to have a lot of fires that we couldn’t put out.”

Today, as one of the world’s leading fire ecologists and a National Geographic Explorer, Hoffman is helping reframe how we think about fires in nature, from damaging to deeply revitalizing. Three years ago, Canada had its biggest and most destructive wildfire season in memory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. As record-breaking fires become more frequent and extreme because of rising global temperatures and increased droughts, Hoffman’s research at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Wildfire Coexistence continues to show that the best path forward is to look to the past: specifically, a proactive approach called cultural burning, long employed by Indigenous communities who’ve used it to improve ecosystem health and steward the land. Not only does this form of intentional fire setting help renew damaged woodlands but it will also reduce the risk, impact, and rapid spread of today’s megafires, Hoffman believes.

For thousands of years, Native nations in North America periodically lit fires for a myriad of reasons, including to remove vegetation, stimulate plant growth, cultivate soil, control pests, boost biodiversity, and improve water quality. “A lot of these ecosystems are fire adapted,” Hoffman explains. “They’re craving fire.”

While climate change and more modern suppression tactics result in fires hot enough to destroy the soil’s mycorrhizal layer, cultural burns can have the opposite effect. When managed in such a way as to spread more slowly and at lower temperatures, they ensure that even if wildfires ignite, those fires tend to be smaller and less likely to rage out of control.

Six years ago, representatives from the Gitanyow Huwilp, a First Nations community in northwestern B.C., reached out to Hoffman for help bringing back cultural burns. She studied their land to identify potential burn sites, trained community members eager to participate, and met with elders like Darlene Vegh—a longtime advocate for bringing fire back to the Gitanyow Nation—to learn more about the Gitanyow’s traditional relationship with fire. “They burn with seven generations in mind, and they always talk about fire being a teacher,” Hoffman says.

In 2021, Vegh lit the first legal fire in Gitanyow territory in more than a century. Now cultural burns there take place twice a year, with dozens of people participating. While Hoffman is still analyzing data on long-term benefits, transformations have been immediate and visible: Within a few months, shoots popped up, turning the forest floor electric green with growth, including staples like rice root and wild onion.

This success has led to Hoffman partnering with other Indigenous communities, including the Wetsuwet’en, Cheslatta Carrier, and Gitxsan Nations—which, in turn, has forced her to reckon with obstacles beyond the ecological. Well into the 20th century, tribal members who set fires were subject to fines and even imprisonment under Canadian law, curtailing cultural burns. Land dispossession has further disrupted intergenerational transmissions of knowledge, all while misguided policies have made dangerous fires—the kind that leave Indigenous groups among the most vulnerable—more likely. (First Nations communities make up nearly half of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.) As a result, Hoffman often finds herself facilitating relationships between Indigenous Nations and British Columbia. “I’m always walking a tightrope,” she explains. “To be trusted on both sides means you’re probably going to disappoint people on both sides at some point.”

Thanks to the work of ecologists like Hoffman, cultural burns are now more common in Canada as well as the United States and Australia. Don Hankins, a professor at California State University, Chico and a Miwok cultural fire practitioner, believes Hoffman’s efforts with multiple First Nations are crucial: “In order to really see the change, you have to get to a totally different scale—you need to be thinking across boundaries.”

Back in Smithers, Hoffman and members of the Gitanyow Nation will host a community center art class using materials such as charcoal and ash harvested from cultural burns. Hoffman and the Gitanyow also educate school groups at burn sites. “Fire has this way of bringing us together,” Hoffman says. “Sometimes that’s when it’s a disaster—but it can also be a healthy thing, and that brings us together too.”