A Karuk leader who has been among those leading the charge to bring managed fires back to the landscape has been appointed to a new federal wildfire commission.
On Thursday, the Biden-Harris administration announced that Bill Tripp, the Karuk Tribe’s director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, was one of 18 experts appointed to the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The commission is expected to provide recommendations to the federal government on how to address catastrophic wildfires.
Tripp said it was “quite the honor to be selected.”
“I think that we are in a new time where people are ready to listen to the perspectives that come from Indigenous communities on this subject matter,” Tripp said.
Indigenous communities traditionally use fire to manage the landscape and keep the ecosystem in the region healthy, but that changed with colonization. A series of Midwestern fires in 1910 led the U.S. Forest Service to adopt a policy of fire suppression, and Indigenous people’s use of fire was criminalized. That combined with extensive logging of the most fire-resilient trees led to a changed forest composition and the buildup of flammable material.
Climate change also transformed forests into tinderboxes ready to spark the next catastrophic wildfire, leading to an increasing number of record-breaking fires.
Tripp first learned the traditional method of using fire as a tool to manage resources from his great grandmother, according to a news release from the Karuk Tribe. He’s been working for years at the local, regional and national level on bringing back the use of good fire, including ensuring it was a central part of the Karuk Tribe’s climate action plan.
State and federal officials have also become increasingly receptive to the idea that fire suppression isn’t the best way to protect communities and have started investing resources and changing laws to expand the use of cultural burning and prescribed fires.
“Seeing people actually start to use terms like cultural burning both at the state and federal level just gives me hope that we truly can start to see the types of paradigm-shifting behaviors that we need to truly overcome the wildfire- and climate change-related problems we see around this issue,” Tripp said.
Tripp said he was looking forward to the first commission meeting coming up next month and getting to work with his fellow commissioners.
“The Karuk Tribe is very proud of Bill Tripp,” Karuk Chairman Russell ‘Buster’ Attebery, said in a statement. “It’s a great honor to have a Karuk Tribal member part of President Biden’s team and we know Bill will help federal agencies develop better strategies to address the wildfire crisis.”
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 707-441-0504.
