Editor’s Note (updated 2025): Originally published in 2016, this piece has been lightly updated to reflect current language around Indigenous fire stewardship and the growing movement to restore cultural burning as a practice of ecological and community care.
Controlled burn in Sequoia National Park. By James Fitzgerald via Unsplash.
I’ve had the pleasure of supporting some important work happening through The Nature Conservancy’s Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. According to the FAC website, a fire-adapted community “acknowledges and takes responsibility for its wildfire risk, and implements appropriate actions at all levels.” Actions in these fire-threatened communities “address resident safety, homes, neighborhoods, businesses and infrastructure, forests, parks, open spaces and other community assets.” In addition, it is noted that every community is unique in terms of its circumstances and capacities, so that local action may vary from place to place.
While there may be differences from community to community in the FAC network, it is also united by a common belief that there is a need for more of the right kinds of fire that support the regenerative capacity of ecosystems. As I’ve learned from members of these communities, “controlled fires” can be used to help build resilience into forests, feeding and encouraging new growth and diversity.
Indigenous fire stewards have long practiced cultural burns to support the long-term health of the forested landscape, enrich the soil, clear pathways for fauna, and promote biodiversity, all of which contribute to the health of their own communities. However, these cultural fire practices were criminalized through colonization and U.S. fire suppression policy, severing communities from their stewardship traditions. The result of the new management practices was a decline in the health of the forests and a rise in the vulnerability of those living in or near them. As one community leader put it, they are working to “reclaim prescribed fire and give fire back to people.” Today, cultural fire leaders and public agencies are collaborating to restore these Indigenous-led practices at scale – not as an emergency tactic, but as a path toward resilience and ecological justice.
This idea of giving fire back to people metaphorically resonates with the network-building and democratic engagement work we do at IISC. Much of our capacity building focuses on creating processes and structures that are more inclusive, specifically for those who have been historically marginalized, to support more just, healthy, and sustainable communities. And increasingly, we see the need for more distributed, diverse, flow-oriented approaches to social change as both the means and ends of our work. At IISC, we see “regenerative networks” the same way: when power is shared and flow increases, resilience grows.
Energy network sciences suggest that focusing on diversity, flow, and intricate structures in human networks can be a foundation for long-term and equitable prosperity. In many ways, this is about extending the lessons from fire-adapted communities regarding what it means to tend to the holistic health of the forested landscape – the importance of considering and conserving biodiversity, choosing strategic interventions and disturbances that encourage resilience and new growth, and empowering those who know local landscapes the best to act.
The “cool burns” of human networks might be thought of as “disruptions” in the form of learning, truth-telling, resource sharing, power building, and prototyping that allow new possibilities to spring up. The lessons from fire – distributed power, shared stewardship, and regenerative disturbance – may be exactly what our movements need now.
How are you tending the regenerative “fires” of learning, power sharing, and collective care in your networks? What might become possible if we did this together?
For more on “good fire,” listen to this podcast hosted by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew Kristoff, watch this short video, or check out the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network website.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Michigan to do a presentation and discussion with representatives from a number of inspiring networks focused on local food production, food access and public health. I was invited by my gracious hosts at the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University to share a bit of network theory, tell a few stories and cover key concepts around network thinking and action to help advance and cohere some of the good work happening around the state.
Towards the end of that morning session, a couple of the participants mentioned that their heads were swimming and a few acknowledged that along with their excitement, they were struggling with how complex and difficult “net work” can be.
I felt their pain and was moved by their honesty, and offered something along these lines, with a bit of post-event embellishment. … Read More
Image by Judy Gallagher, used under provision of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.
The following is a slightly modified post from a little over a year ago. In recent months, the notion of puttingcare at the center of “net work” – to ground it, make it real and people accountable – has surfaced a number of times and strengthened. The original post included the phrase “the empathic turn.” Since that time I’ve come to see “caring” as a more appropriate word, rather than “empathy,” as it evokes for me not simply feeling but action. This re-post is inspired by the activists and thought leaders who are about to gather in Oakland, CA for the “Othering and Belonging” Conference, hosted by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
In an essay that I continue to revisit, the poet/essayist/novelist/farmer/ conservationist and champion of sanity, Wendell Berry, talks about what he calls “the turn towards affection.” Having spent many years reflecting on and pushing back against the unfortunate demonstrated human capacity to despoil landscapes and demonize “the other,” he takes a strong stand for both deep rooted connection and . . . imagination:
“For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.”
In other words, by his assessment, imagination thrives on contact, on an intimate form of knowing that is not simply intellectual, but intimate and holistic. For Berry it is only this kind of knowing that can lead to truly “responsible” action.
Others, past and present, hold the truth and power of this kind of fuller bodied knowing to be self-evident, in environmental conservation and social justice efforts and in what it means to be a responsible human. Professor john a. powell writes in his book Racing to Justice:
“There is a need for an alternative vision, a beloved community where being connected to the other is seen as the foundation of a healthy self, not its destruction, and where the racial other is seen not as the infinite other, but rather as the other that is always and already a part of us.”
“In principle, empathy can override every rule about how to treat others.”
-Frans de Waal
Photo by Vamsi Krishna
Yesterday’s post considered the importance and power of the empathic turn in networks-as-change, to ground people in deep connection with living realities, for the sake of greater imagination, justice, resilience and responsibility. Taking cues from experience and the work and studies of others, here are some thoughts for how to cultivate radical “affection” (to quote Wendell Berry) in networks:
Go beyond abstraction to interaction – go to and meet in real places, explore them, consider how life happens there (see for example Story of Place and Heart and Soul)
“Creating a culture of trust in a network can have a big payoff. Why is this so? First, when trust is well-developed in a network, people are willing to get involved in high-risk projects where their reputation and resources are at stake. These kinds of projects usually have a lot of impact. Next, high levels of trust usually make decision making easier and less time consuming. Finally, a culture of trust enables people to accept and work with people who are quite different from them, which increases the number of people working on network activities.”
|Photo by Mike Baird|http://www.flickr.com/photos/72825507@N00/6827018401/in/photolist-bphfHP-ayA7wy-bKZzec-e4iaNi-aaixFs-bKZArr-e58faj-e52zee-e58ah1-e5838j-e586eo-e58cR5-e584Hq-8Wcf9Q-csNfzU-dftPtq-dZTbw9-bWm4ku-d6vnvU-d6vg8U-awDsBx-dz9vRu-7CW4pj-acYjbQ-agyEHk-9XrqN1-9XouvF-9XowsD-9XrpRj-9XrorW-d6vBWJ-d6vpE5-d6vFUQ-d6voKN-d6vJaN-d6vuLJ-d6vRoQ-d6vUZW-d6vxbE-d6vDLf-d6vSBq-d6vvPL-d6vWoA-d6vXLJ-d6vybf-d6vqN1-d6vQrY-d6vGTA-d6vma9-d6vzeb-d6vKqG|
The importance and power of trust in networks for social change cannot be overstated. Time and again, and despite what might show up as initial resistance, being intentional about getting to know one another beyond titles, official positions, and transactional exchanges reaps tremendous benefit, for all the reasons June Holley mentions above and more. Taking time and making space to build trust helps people to do the important work of social change and is in many cases an embodiment of the change we are trying to make in the world – when we expand our circles of compassion and inclusion; when we create new patterns of opportunity, exchange and resource flows; when we see and validate previously unrecognized or undervalued assets.
|The Alchemy of Wholeness by Armanda Moncton|http://www.flickr.com/photos/armandamoncton/1705798622|
On Sunday, Gibran Rivera and I facilitated a workshop at Connecting for Change/Bioneers by the Bay about change practices for a networked world. Another way of thinking about what we were exploring was to put it in terms of “practices for wholeness.” Part of our premise was and is that we are suffering from a worldview that leads with and to fragmentation and fixity. This is part of our inheritance from the industrial age that strives to understand through division and an associated mindset that believes we can make a separation between observer and observed with no associated impact. For certain tasks, of course, it makes sense and is possible to divide, diagnose and put back together. But this does not make sense, nor is it possible, in the case of complex living systems. Furthermore, we have gotten ourselves in a bind because our habits of thought have led us to thinking that the divisions and categories we have created are in some sense primordial. And so we are hard pressed to believe, or remember, that what we do to our “environment” or “others” we do to ourselves! Read More
|Photo by Coach Cassandra Rae|http://www.flickr.com/photos/cassandrarae/4494566573|
“The process of coming to terms with vulnerability is one that necessarily shifts a person’s values focus to one that emphasizes self-transformation and interdependence.”
-Greg Jemsek
The word “vulnerability” seems to be up in many parts of my life. On the home front, there is a lot of discussion about vulnerability as being key to building stronger relationships with my wife and daughters. What this generally means is being more in touch with feelings of not being in control, of concern for those most dear to me, and of desiring greater closeness. At times I seem to be good at ignoring these either because I perceive them as painful or inconvenient, and subsequently create a buffer to my ultimate aim which is depth and richness of connection. Read More
Registration is Open!Join us April 20 – May 10 for the FSNE 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge: a daily practice to build the skill, will, and courage to advance racial equity in our food system and beyond. $21 for 21 days.
