In the Northeast, a Question of Fighting Fire With Fire
The view from Plains Road, a sandy two-track running through the pine barrens in Montague, Massachusetts, often looks parched, rust-colored, and, occasionally, blackened by fire. In recent decades, state officials have deliberately burned several hundred acres of the forest to restore what some believe was a traditional Indigenous land use practice.
For the previous century or so, the more common approach to fighting fires had been to put them out as quickly as possible, but this may have had the unintended consequence of helping to fuel future fires by leaving behind unburnt underbrush. As an alternative, experts have increasingly called for prescribed burning as a forest management tool. By setting smaller, controlled burns, the thinking goes, it’s possible to control the fuel load and the destructiveness of uncontrolled burns down the road. In 2020, firefighters deliberately ignited nearly 9.5 million acres in the United States, including about 1.5 million on federal land.
Now, however, prescribed burning has become a political flashpoint: President Trump is reportedly mulling the creation of a federal agency that prioritizes fire suppression. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second administration, calls for curbs on prescribed burning and to instead focus on logging. The issue came to the fore as smoke from wildfires and predicted fire activity crept into areas where it hasn’t, at least in recent decades, been particularly common. In late 2024, when fires broke out around New York City, The New Yorker published an online story headlined: “The Northeast Is Becoming Fire Country.” Questions also arose in recent years when fires broke out in the suburbs of Boston and when fires in Canada’s boreal forest blanketed the region in an apocalyptic orange haze.
Behind the politics and the headlines is a more complex story. Scientists have long debated the scale of intentionally set fires, particularly in the woodlands of eastern North America. And a dust-up over a 2020 journal article on prescribed burning illustrates the debate’s nuances. The research was led by Wyatt Oswald, a professor of environmental science at Emerson College and a research associate at the Harvard Forest, a 4,000-acre long-term ecological research site in Petersham, Massachusetts. In the study, Oswald and several colleagues reflected more than 40 years of work concerning fires in what is now southern New England, dating back 14,000 years. In an op-ed describing their paper, the authors suggested that setting the Montague sand plains on fire did not appear to mimic past practice. The headline was as blunt as it was bombastic: “Native people did not use fire to shape New England’s landscape.”
The research did several things: It questioned the basis for modern management strategies based on fire; it antagonized people advocating for Indigenous land sovereignty; and it contradicted a revisionist history that began percolating into popular culture in the 1950s. Scholars had debunked the longstanding myth that North America was pristine wilderness prior to colonization and people increasingly came to recognize the impact of Indigenous practices, including managing grasslands and forests with fires, which, in turn, slowly worked its way into government policy.
Aspects of the story remain contested today, as does its influence on the management of forests and fires. Oswald doesn’t dispute that people had set intentional fires, but he balks at the uncritical acceptance that controlled burns restored forests in the Northeast to pre-colonial conditions. Little evidence supports the hypothesis that significant and widespread burning and intensive farming changed the land prior to European colonization, he says, and he disputes whether the region is becoming fire country again. After all, while weather was unusually dry last year, he told Undark, the area’s climate had been trending wetter for 8,000 years, which means it is unlikely to become a prime target for regular forest fires.
With forecasts predicting the intensification of fires, the 2020 debate spilled beyond the pages of academic journals and bestselling works of popular history. After all, whether these ecosystems had even been fire country was directly relevant for how people manage the landscape.
Scholars had debunked the longstanding myth that North America was pristine wilderness prior to colonization and people increasingly came to recognize the impact of Indigenous practices, including managing grasslands and forests with fires.
A dry, sandy site like the Montague sand plains might look like it should burn because the area grew with tree species that are flammable. But, as David Foster, director emeritus of the Harvard Forest and one of Oswald’s co-authors, said: “Applying a purported ‘Indian land use’ to that landscape isn’t very logical.”
“It’s a compelling story,” he added, “although it is still, even if it were true, it would be a completely culturally derived story.” It made sense to replace the erroneous myth about the continent being a totally pristine, unpeopled land, but Foster did not think it made sense to base policy around another myth about human involvement and its presumed ability to restore the landscape.
In questioning the narrative, the group sparked controversy. Scientists dissected the groups’ methods. Critics claimed they’d resurrected racist tropes and accused the group of practicing settler-colonial science. While the dust created by the 2020 paper has since settled, the underlying issues remain unresolved. “And so,” Foster said, “the question is, in today’s world, does it make sense to try to recreate aboriginal land use practices in landscapes that have been heavily modified by European activity and are now undergoing climate change and everything else?”
The frequency of fire, its intensity and duration, is determined by many factors. Looking back, these factors are easy to document but difficult to substantiate. For one, fire is ephemeral. “It does not await the archaeologist’s trowel,” as the geographer Christian Kull put it in one paper. Indeed, what has largely sustained the dispute — and makes it rather irreconcilable — is the role precolonial burning has played in shaping present-day changes in the land. Researchers contend that European colonization disrupted Indigenous burning, and prescribed fire advocates called for a return to these management strategies to create open forests dominated by so-called “pyrogenic” trees, like oaks, that favored full sun, and other plant communities that tolerate or depend on fire. Oswald’s research suggested a strategy focused on the growth of mature forests with closed canopies that tend to create darker and wetter microclimates that promote “mesic” trees and also maximized carbon sequestration. These goals are in direct opposition. In the Northeast, the undeniable decline of oak forests either does or does not make the densely populated landscape today more susceptible to uncontrolled fires.
As is customary in the field of paleoecology, the branch of ecology that studies the past, Oswald’s research focuses on looking for evidence of fire by analyzing the charcoal bits that remain locked in ancient lake sediment. His analyses combine data on sediment cores taken from lakes with climate data, such as pollen, to reconstruct climate, vegetation and fire, in an effort to see how ecosystems responded to climate change, and help us think about human-environment interactions. “As you go down in the mud,” he said, “you’re going back in time.”
Through analyzing the sediment, the resulting charcoal accumulation rates, or CHAR, capture changes in fire activity. For Oswald’s work in southern New England, his team looked at the average CHAR values and found what appeared to be elevated fire activity during two time periods: The early Holocene, which began roughly 10,000 years ago during a regional extreme dry period, and then again after colonization, when European settlers burned wood and cleared forests to farm the land. Using pollen and data from several archaeological sites in southern New England, the group suggested that the identifiable signals had been driven by the climate.
“Humans were present across southern New England and thus could act as ignition sources throughout the postglacial interval,” the paper said, “but fire regimes in the region were controlled primarily by climate interacting with vegetation.” In written accounts, European settlers claim to have observed Indigenous people setting fires (or the wide-open forests, presumably the results of such fires), but little in the paleoecological records, as Oswald and his colleagues saw it, supported the inference that people engaged in widespread burning to clear entire forests and extensively farm crops like corn and beans in the region they studied.
Later that year, Nature Sustainability, the journal where the Oswald team’s 2020 paper appeared, published two post-publication commentaries. Christopher I. Roos, an environmental archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, said the paper’s conclusion reinforced an outdated dualism treating fire as either “natural” or “cultural.” Roos also said that averaging charcoal values would more likely detect signal from a synchronized event, such as the regional shift in climate, as opposed to set fires taking place across a region populated by 14 or more tribal groups. (Oswald agreed. These impacts were localized, at a finer resolution. “If you’re looking for them with lake sediment data,” he said, “you’re not going to see them.”)
Two other researchers, Marc Abrams, a now-retired professor of forest ecology at Penn State, and Gregory J. Nowacki, an ecologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, suggested these methodological biases were further exacerbated because low-intensity fires do not produce sufficient charcoal to turn up in lake sediment cores. These details might seem small bore, but their implications were not. Abrams wrote about his rebuttal in Scientific American, and the editorial was later cited as part of the argument for repatriating national parks to the tribes.
Oswald and his colleagues responded to these critics by providing more granular figures, showing the charcoal abundance in each of the lakes sampled, and, in essence, sticking to their argument. Foster said the team was not exactly blindsided. “We certainly anticipated a lot of pushback,” he said. But, he added, his team didn’t foresee that the pushback would include “an accusation of racism.”
In late 2020, a group of Indigenous scholars, led by Kelsey Leonard, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo and a Shinnecock Nation scientist, pointed out an error in the original paper: A chart falsely suggested Indigenous people in the Northeast had gone extinct, which, the group led by Leonard argued, reflected a more insidious categorical flaw. In a paper posted to a preprint server (but never published in a journal), they wrote, “We could dismiss this omission of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and nations as a simple, straightforward error to be corrected, but it is only a particularly prominent example of the scholarly neglect that pervades the paper: neglect of Indigenous Peoples, their cultures, their histories, their past and present agency, and of whole fields of scholarship.” They called for a retraction. (Nature Sustainability has not retracted the paper, but did accept the authors’ correction of the figure.)
To some, the critique went too far. But others believed the scholarship could be used to undermine Indigenous rights and land sovereignty claims. “To say that there was no Indigenous population or Indigenous use of land in the Northeast directly fuels termination agendas of colonial governments,” Leonard said. In 2020, at the time of the paper’s publication, for instance, the Trump administration revoked the reservation status of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. “So that’s what led the call to action,” she added.
As such, others continued to cite Oswald’s 2020 paper in negative light. One paper, published in late 2022, claimed that the work aligned “with the doctrines of terra nullius (Latin for ‘nobody’s land’ or ‘territory without a master’) and discovery” — the legal principles that falsely claimed that the continent was unpeopled as a justification for dispossession and occupation. Oswald did not see it that way. “On the contrary,” he replied in an online forum hosted by Nature Sustainability, “we see our work as highlighting the longevity, continuity, widespread presence, social complexity, and diverse and sustainable land uses of the Indigenous societies of SNE,” referring to Southern New England.
Then, in 2023, Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an archeologist and Indigenous studies professor at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, and several colleagues, cited Oswald’s 2020 paper in a study on legacies of land use from several centuries ago. Armstrong and her colleagues claimed the 2020 paper erased Native peoples and resurrected racist tropes that “have been thoroughly debunked.” Oswald again took issue with the adversarial citation — only this time around, the co-authors on his original paper joined him in a letter to the editor, saying Armstrong and her colleagues fundamentally mischaracterized their research and their intent. The letter reiterated their findings.
Others believed the scholarship could be used to undermine Indigenous rights and land sovereignty claims, and continued to cite Oswald’s 2020 paper in negative light.
Foster contends that some of their critics had personal motivations, having staked their entire careers and their reputations on the cultural burning hypothesis: “Most of the outrage at our paper is coming from non-Native people defending their interpretation of kind of Native rights and situation.”
To underscore the present-day implications of prescribed burns, Oswald and his co-authors included a photo in their 2023 letter to the editor: It showed the result of a “barren restoration project” in Massachusetts where land had been cleared with chainsaws and herbicides — just one example of what they contend is a misunderstanding about pre-colonial impact and a misguided attempt to mimic these land use practices. The photo not only represented the wrong kind of disturbance, Oswald said in an interview, “it’s just that they shouldn’t be using disturbances if the goal is to approximate pre-colonial conditions.”
Chelsey Armstrong doing fieldwork last year. Armstrong, an archeologist and Indigenous studies professor, has published work critical of Oswald’s 2020 paper.
Visual: Courtesy of Chelsey Armstrong
Armstrong and several colleagues responded, in turn, adding Leonard as a co-author. They reiterated their critique, but conceded the contemporary practice almost certainly did not reflect whatever happened in the past. “We agree that broad stroke western implementations of ‘Indigenous management’ deserve critique, this is a longstanding issue in ethnoecology and historical ecology.”
In a recent interview, Armstrong said she thought the coverage of Oswald’s paper had taken enough air out of the room. If she had to do it all over, she probably would not fan the flames by calling the work straight-out racist. But Armstrong said she still fundamentally disagreed with the paper’s premise that Indigenous practices were overrepresented: “That is without question, unilaterally, unequivocally, when you look at environmental regulation and policy, Indigenous people are not even at the table. I mean, it’s just such an egregious straw man to then say, ‘aha, we have the data.’”
Oswald doesn’t see it that way. To him, critics had caricatured the work for minimizing the cultural impact in a politically problematic way. “I don’t think we were minimizing,” he said. “I think we were sort of contextualizing Indigenous impacts relative to that of European deforestation. Those are different questions.”
The dispute leaves open many questions. The first concerns history. “If you were parachuted down into the northeastern U.S. randomly,” Stephen Tulowiecki, a biogeographer at SUNY Geneseo, said, “there’s a high probability you’d come across some evidence of land management. There’s a lot of description in southern New England from these early Europeans from the 1600s talking about how easy it was to travel through these landscapes — descriptions of park-like environments and even some descriptions of fire observed firsthand.”
Oswald did not discount these anecdotal accounts, but, in one of the letters responding to critics, his group argued that the accounts of European settlers were potentially “influenced by economic and sociopolitical agendas.” (As Oswald elaborated in an interview, they were appraising the land’s value and “trying to market North America to Europeans.”) But, in 2024, Tulowiecki mapped the accounts and found that they tend to overlap geographically with the composition of forest as recorded by surveyors. “There’s a pretty good alignment between the two, where you see all these accounts of fire in areas that are oak and pine,” he said. (Oswald said the study reflected a zoomed-out view, and that describing “eastern North America as an environmental, ecological, and cultural unit loses all of that nuance about what happens at the scale at which people actually live.”)
The fact that vegetation and fire respond to climate makes it difficult to disentangle the two. As Martin Girardin, a researcher at Natural Resources Canada in Quebec City and a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire, explained, “It’s not possible at the moment to say, okay, is it like a natural fire that occurred during a very dry year and it was ignited by lightning, or is it like a campfire that escaped, or that is simply not really possible.” In the boreal forest, Girardin’s work has found that the main driver of fire activity was climate, which did not exclude the possibility that communities lit fires on a local or regional scale for such things as cultivating blueberries. Girardin said he often came across government reports and scientific papers stating that Native peoples made use of fire, as if it were incontrovertible fact, without specifying the region or context. “I think that is a bit problematic,” he said, “because it’s probably not the case everywhere.”
The question was not: Did fires exist? Researchers acknowledge that they did. In many places, most notably the West, they had been suppressed. But now, as fires spread and intensify, the questions about the significance and scope of the ways people historically influenced a region’s fire regime — and ecology more generally — has become bound up in other debates: How should the hard biophysical sciences be combined with longstanding cultural beliefs and knowledge? What’s the right approach going forward to mitigate fire and manage forests?
“We find ourselves at a point where we, as a society, are struggling with all sorts of, I don’t know, wicked problems. Climate change is high on that list,” Oswald said in an interview. “If there are ways in which we can harness natural processes to help our cause, I think we ought to be doing that. And that includes managing, or maybe better to say not managing, the forests of New England in a way that they continue to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the biomass of the trees and in the soils in such a way that it’s not in the atmosphere contributing to global warming.”
To intervene or not intervene, that is the question. One side says the continent faced a fire deficit, and contends the Northeast “has the greatest relative increases in fire activity forecasted for the conterminous U.S.”; the other side thinks that’s at best disputed and at worst outright propaganda.
The fact that vegetation and fire respond to climate makes it difficult to disentangle the two.
Michael Kellett, the executive director of the nonprofit, RESTORE: The North Woods and author of a review questioning forest clearing, has argued that the purpose of the unrelenting alarmism is to scare up public funding — a strategy employed out West that has drifted East. As such, Kellett sees a silver lining to potential federal cuts that follow Project 2025’s recommendations, which, he said in an email, “will be at the expense of greenwashed logging and burning programs. That is good.”
But these views are hardly universal. Researchers suggest that there is a continent-wide fire deficit, and others predict that “the greatest relative increases in fire activity” would be in the northeastern U.S. Many questioned Oswald’s 2020 conclusion (and questioned the research as the basis for continued fire suppression). They saw forests starved of disturbance, loaded with hazardous fuel, and raised exactly the opposite question: Would the Northeast be more prone to fires? These were burning questions, and the basis for a debate that remains deeply unsettled.
If nothing else, Leonard said that the cultural missteps and systemic injustices in scientific publishing had led to positive results. “When we talk about land back, when we talk about water back, and now when we talk about fire back, it is also a return of our relationality to the land, to water, to fire, through the research and science that we do. We don’t need non-Indigenous scientists telling our stories anymore,” she said, citing the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the Status of Tribes and Climate Change (STACC) reports. The prescribed burns across the Northeast did not yet reflect the wealth of cultural knowledge, but, she said, “I’m excited because I think more than I’ve ever seen before in my lifetime, folks are interested in having conversations about fire.”