Wildfires: The Fire That Heals
Author
Janne Bierwirth
Date Published
The indigenous group Caiapó, or Mẽbêngôkre, a name that can be translated as “People of the Water Hole,” uses the tradition of burning a small mosaic-like pattern around villages to help clear the land and regenerate it. This practice also reduces the risk of dangerous wildfires.
Similar techniques have been used for centuries in Indigenous communities throughout the world, from Australia to North and South America. These controlled burns are not comparable to the destructive deforestation caused by big oil or petrol companies, even though this argument has often been misused to hide the long-lasting effects of these companies’ disruptive invasions of the forest.
In the heart of the forest, not every flame is destruction.
Some fires are prayers, slow breaths of renewal, guided by ancestral hands.
For generations, Indigenous peoples have tended to the Earth with fire that listens.
They light it not to consume, but to cleanse, not to end, but to begin again.
Low and steady, the flames trace ancient paths through the soil,
burning only what must be released:
the dry leaves, the heavy memories, the restless weeds.
In the Amazon, such knowledge survives in silence and smoke.
It is not the wildfire of despair,
but the controlled burn of care,
a dialogue between flame and root, between balance and rebirth.
Science calls it fuel reduction,
the people call it renewal.
And when the ashes cool, life returns:
the insects hum, the soil breathes,
the forest sings itself back into being.
These fires are not chaos, they are choreography,
the ancient art of tending life through transformation.
For to know the forest is to know
that even in fire, the Earth remembers how to heal.
Read the article of Planet Pulse here:
How Indigenous Practices Prevent Wildfires
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