written by Stephany Wilkes
photography by Paige Green
“We have this idea that land is untouchable, that to touch land is disturbance,” brontë velez says. “Well, we need to become comfortable with disturbance. Everything that’s happening is disturbing.”
In relationship with the Kashia Pomo Cultural Department, to whom they are accountable, and in community with sheep, cotton plants, poetry, friends, neighboring ranchers, and dance, brontë velez and Jiordi Rosales are co-stewarding The School for Inclement Weather, also known as bellweather. They are working to heal land with skillfully practiced fire and grazing. At the school, land-tending is not just a practical matter: it is spiritual, philosophical, communal, and ancestral, and brontë and Jiordi embrace and celebrate its complexity.
Healing Through Fire and Grazing
“We need the spiritual aspects to fortify us in the climate emergency,” brontë says.
brontë, Jiordi, their fellow resident Nathalia Scherer, and seasonal bellweather residents tend 365 acres – many of them heavily forested and too steep to mow – at the very south end of the Coast Range, in northwest Sonoma County, California. Creeks and streams run west toward wetter hills from bellweather’s dryer, hotter ridge, the fir, oaks, redwood and bracken fern dense in areas that have not burned in a long time, fed by two winter seasons of record-breaking rains.
Jiordi points north, to a hillside so steep it is nearly vertical. “These ravines are so steep they are hard to walk, and also very difficult to run mobile fence through. You couldn’t prep them for grazing if you wanted to. Riparian areas like that can get really overgrown. In those areas, fire is a more appropriate form of maintenance than grazing. And with the logging history in the region, the displacement of Indigenous peoples and knowledge, especially in the Coast Range, the land is in a deep state of suppression and disrepair.”
While grazing and prescribed burns have become more common in Northern California since the devastating wildfires of 2017-2018, which took the town of Paradise and a substantial part of nearby Santa Rosa, fire is a less common practice on individual properties than is grazing. Fire is a necessity to the health of California ecosystems, but prescribed fire can also seem complex, bureaucratic and intimidating.
Over the past year, bellweather has had three burns, in three adjacent areas: one in October 2023, when grass and vegetation were dryer; another in May 2024 when the grass was green and shorter; and the third in early June 2024 through the night, when humidity levels were higher than they would be during the day. About two dozen trained ‘firelighters’ and holding resources tended each fire: a certain number of people and resources must be present, to monitor and address any concerns. Planning a prescribed fire in advance is difficult without the wide web of relationships necessary to fulfill the necessary prescription. There isn’t much advance notice because conditions have to be exactly right – low wind, specific temperatures, and humidity – and conditions are always changing.
Fire’s Role in Ecosystem Health
“We don’t get a perfect burn,” Jiordi says, smiling. “Not yet. That first re-entry burn is not always pretty — we are walking a fine line with these prescriptions. We are both aiming to lighten the fuel load phase by phase, over the course of many years, and at the same time contending with an intensely clogged forest and the need for a fire hot enough to consume some of the dead, heavy fuels that are blocking light from reaching the forest floor. If we attempted to do it all at once with a big fire, we could easily damage the trees we are working so hard to protect. Too soft of a fire and nothing would ignite. This 60-acre area took three attempts before we got the conditions just right, which involved some higher flame lengths and an immense amount of perimeter preparation. Some people expect low-intensity fires in steep, high-density forests, from what they’ve been shown on social media of gentler environments, and they see our mountainous re-entry burn and say, ‘What you’re doing is excessive.’ I’d say it’s more appropriate to think colonialism was ‘excessive’. The commercial logging industry, Sudden Oak Death and now these annual bomb cyclones are ‘excessive’. So these fires are going to feel intense for people, at first. Maybe if we keep working, the next generation gets a perfect burn.”
“I watched the Park Fire daily briefings,” Jiordi adds, “and not once did they mention the correlation between land-use and fire behavior, like the impact clear-cut logging has on fire severity and rate of spread. Instead it’s read simply as ‘a lot of down and dead fuels.’ That leads people to conclude it wasn’t affected by industry or a specific style of land management. If we can’t name and piece these things together, connect a fire running through this, we won’t change our behavior or the behavior of fire.”
“But care is not always pretty either. We want care to be idyllic and sometimes it’s grotesque,” brontë says. “We take life to give life. There’s hesitation there. It’s edgy. But, after a burn, it’s like the land can breathe again, when the forest gives way to the meadows that held their boundaries so well here, when they were living under the consistent fire return intervals of the Kashia. The plant life completely changes.”
Jiordi has spent the past five years studying and practicing to become a California State-Certified Prescribed-Fire Burn Boss. It is an enormous – and rare – responsibility. As of August 2024, there are just 43 actively State-certified Burn Bosses in a state with 39.5 million people. What exactly does a Burn Boss do?
Jiordi says, “We perform prescribed-fire planning, obtain all the state and local approvals and permits, develop and implement burn plans, bridge all the people from land-owners to fire agencies to tribal members that need to be involved with a burn.” They also monitor fire effects, maintain prescriptive requirements, and conduct an After-Action Review. There is initial certification training and required, annual Continuing Education.
Jiordi is quick to point out this was not a solo endeavor: the Kashia Pomo Cultural Department sponsored his study, as well as events at The School for Inclement Weather to help more people obtain Fire Fighter 2 (FF2) certification. The FFT2 certification is the entry-level qualification for wildland fire suppression, prescribed fire use and safety. Jiordi was also supported in learning by Fire Forward, which mentored him through the additional trainings and state-evaluation process.
Professionalism and certification does not mean any of this is easy. It changes you.
“These practices change us, our sensory experience and what we perceive,” Jiordi says. “My practice has given me something I call ‘fire eyes’. After doing this work for awhile, it becomes impossible not to see how fire would move on the landscape. There’s a lot more happening on the fire line than first appears, like the relationships. I’m still sitting with the experience with an elderberry tree I’ve visited multiple times.”
Last October, a huge elderberry tree was burned as part of a prescribed burn training for the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education. Jiordi says “The elders were excited about having it burned, and even though I knew ‘scientifically’ that the elderberry would grow back – I had read that elderberry loves to burn – I felt this weight in my chest. I was scared seeing such an immense and old being go completely to char. I kept going back, visiting it. I was terrified that I had done something wrong. But there was so much life in the roots when I came back in winter. By this summer, there was five times more elderberry biomass in the sky. Now the knowledge lives in my body, as nine months later we all get to witness the deep green forest of a tree that the elderberry is returning as. But that knowledge can’t land until we experience it. The land needs upwells of dying in order to persist.”
When it comes to prescribed fire, it is hard sometimes to remember that it’s not about a single tree but the entire ecosystem, Jiordi says. “A Doug Fir dying is a form of the forest’s fire adaptation. So is the fire-resistance of Redwood bark, or the resprout of Tanoak or Madrone. But in a world of so much dying, people don’t want to burn a tree. It’s compassion, really. I have the hardest time burning a redwood stump, even though it’s technically dead. They are an archive, a testament. Witnesses. I feel the most grief when a stump is going. It’s a last funerary rite. It’s closing something.”
brontë says, “We’re in a messy, post-colonial burn era. This is not the same forest it once was. This is not the same ecosystem. We ask ourselves: Is this disturbance beneficial? Listen for that, accept it. Have the culture of looking at the effects of your labor. Accumulate evidence of disturbance. Listen for that. Accept it. Accept being corrected if you’re told it’s harmful. Have the culture of looking at the effects of your labor, like with the elderberry. If we don’t, we can’t recognize patterns of new life over time and see that work as fruitful disturbance.”
The Role of Sheep in Land Management
Fire is not the only thing changing the bellweather landscape. Sheep play a role, too. “It’s been a blessing to see the land change with them,” brontë says. “Land management with animal companionship, land care with creatures has – like fire – been suppressed by industrial agriculture. We have a nascent flock that feels like an apprenticeship. We’re stumbling into grace and a lot of comedy out here, like when we noticed their manure had the thistle coming back stronger.” brontë shakes their head and smiles. “That’s one of our most vital practices here — discerning when to use fire and when to use grazing, or how to move between the two methods to create a more resilient and complex system. For example, after our first couple burns we realized that fire increases the presence of bracken fern, which is inedible to most ruminants and already encroaching on the meadows, so we learned it’s preferable to keep fire out of those systems and run the sheep there instead.”
“The mistakes and teachings are all part of it. We want to make it safe for people to restore ancestral relations to land. Growing Sally Fox’s saffron cotton, as a Black person, was so powerful. But none of these things are coming to completion on our timeline: the cotton planting, the shearing, the timing of a burn, healing the soil. We have to move on the land’s time. We have to move with the question: ‘What is the land asking for?’
“People seeking a solution say the burn is the solution,” Jiordi adds, “but it’s a multigenerational commitment. One successful burn is a huge accomplishment but it requires a culture of ongoing fire-use every few years to truly take care of the forest and manage the infinite renewal of the fuel load. The lands here are thirsty for fire and people are thirsty for memory and knowledge. I pray to support those reunions in as healthy a way as possible.”
brontë says, “I feel excited about what’s possible, to make beauty from land care. In the way that Portugal and Spain have a “good fire meat certification” that honors meat that emerged from animals who assisted with fire management. I want to grow fiber that acknowledges we cared for fire. I want to make garments that emerge from the beauty of healing with the land. I want to honor the practice of healing across time with my ancestors who were traumatized by crafting beauty. This is also what it means to work with fire for me.”
Learn More
If you would like to learn more about the process, training and certification for returning land to beneficial fire intervals, you can get in touch with Jiordi at jiordi.rosales@gmail.com, who is happy to support or try to connect you with someone in your area.
You can also find brontë and Jiordi on Instagram at:
@littlenows (brontë)
@jio.rosales (Jiordi)