On a bright morning in August, I visited Shiloh Ranch Regional Park in Sonoma County. What I notice first while hiking up the park’s hillside, in the shade of the coast live oak forest, is the black tinge of the bark. Not charred, but a blue-black cast cross a whole slope of ascending trunks.
Shiloh is a small park that almost entirely burned in the Tubbs Fire, and it lies just west of where the flames tore down from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, killing 22 people the night of October 8, 2017. Tubbs was the beginning of 21 major fires that roared through the North Bay, burning 245,000 acres, forcing some 100,000 people to evacuate, and ultimately taking 44 lives. Statewide, wildfires scorched more than 1.2 million acres in 2017. It changed California irreparably.
In the subsequent nine years, people have worked hard to adapt as the wildfires have grown larger and more frequent. Cal Fire’s annual budget has ballooned from $2.2 billion in 2017–2018 to $4.2 billion in 2024–2025, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Terms like “prescribed fire,” “home hardening,” “wildland-urban interface,” “fuel loads,” and recently “Zone 0” have slipped into the lexicon. As insurance companies drop homeowner policies or flee the state entirely, more than 1,700 neighborhoods have become Firewise communities in California. That Native Americans routinely and proactively burned California, until the practice was outlawed 175 years ago, has become the widely acknowledged backstory of the wildfire crisis. The warming climate shapes its future. Fire has upended worlds and seeped into our collective peripheral vision.
Its pervasiveness is almost too big to capture. In this issue of Bay Nature, five stories give a snapshot of fire in our lives today: how a decimated community rebuilds; new data products that reveal vegetation at a 30-meter-resolution scale statewide; the delicate job of a defensible space inspector; expert advice on choosing garden plants that support wildlife while limiting fire risk; and how Indigenous fire is returning to the East Bay.
In Shiloh, I realized the sheen of the singed tree trunks caught my attention because the lower tiers of the forest—the shrubs, grasses, saplings, fallen branches, and ground cover—were completely absent. There were no ladder fuels, as the fire linguists would say, to feed the next blaze. Circles of ash suggested the county has been burning piles of vegetation. The naked land left the trees plain to see in their jackets of soot. By contrast, when my gaze followed the dark trunks and branches up into the canopy, there a tangle of vibrant green leaves grew, brimming with birds.
—Victoria Schlesinger
Editor in chief
