Lighting the Future: Good Fire in Carolina’s Forests

Ceremony, Medicine, Memory, and Restoration

Jun 25, 2025

The first time I stepped into a freshly burned longleaf stand in the Sandhills, the ground still warm beneath my boots, I felt a strange calm. Charcoal-black wiregrass curled around the bases of pines, and a Bachman’s sparrow darted across the understory, already reclaiming its patch of earth. That morning reminded me why I keep returning to the subject of fire ecology in the Carolinas: Good fire is not destruction. It is ceremony, medicine, and memory… and the forest knows it.

From Suppression to Stewardship

For most of the twentieth century, federal and state agencies framed all fire as an enemy. Smokey Bear’s stern gaze taught generations of North Carolinians to fear every flame. The ecological costs have been staggering: shaded-out wiregrass, collapsing oak regeneration in the Blue Ridge, and an understory so choked with fuel that today’s wildfires burn hotter and taller than the ancient longleaf or oak ecosystems ever experienced.

The 500,000th acre was burned on February 22 at Sumter National Forest in South Carolina. TNC’s Southern Blue Ridge burn crew will often assist on burns in South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The strengths of the U.S. Forest Service partnership has allowed us to work across state lines and assist where forests need fire the most.

From the Nature Conservancy Report

Recent numbers tell a different story. In February 2025, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) celebrated its 500,000th acre of prescribed fire in North Carolina, a milestone that would have sounded impossible when the organization’s crews lit their first 81 acres in 1989 (nature.org). That pace, now more than 40,000 acres per year, signals a cultural shift from suppression to stewardship.

Longleaf Pine and the Art of Burning

Longleaf pine savannas once dominated the Coastal Plain, shaping everything from naval stores to local folkways. Their revival depends on regular, low-intensity burns that knock back competing shrubs and open the canopy to sunlight. Burn Boss Angie Carl puts it plainly: “Burn baby, burn” is the only recipe that brings back the grasses, forbs, and birds that define a healthy longleaf system (nature.org). Within weeks of a spring burn, wiregrass returns emerald green, Venus flytraps reopen their traps, and red-cockaded woodpeckers find fresh cavities in fire-scarred trunks.

Indigenous Fire Is Still Here

The story is older than forestry manuals. Waccamaw Siouan, Lumbee, and other coastal tribes have long stewarded their homelands with cultural burns, low flames timed to berry ripening, hunting needs, and spiritual calendars. TNC now supports programs like the Hoohee Cultural Burn and the Lumbee Cultural Burn Association, pairing modern equipment with ancestral knowledge (nature.org). These partnerships echo what my own research calls “ecological intentionality”: the practice of entering reciprocal relations with land, fire, and community rather than managing “resources” from above.

Blue Ridge Experiments

Fire belongs in the mountains, too. At Silver Run Preserve in Jackson County, TNC is coupling selective thinning with prescribed burns to jump-start oak and hickory regeneration across 900 acres. The approach feels experimental only because we forgot how often lightning and Cherokee fire once swept these ridges. Greg Cooper, who leads the project, calls each burn “an annual check-up” that follows a one-time “surgery” of mechanical thinning (nature.org). Early plots already show reduced fuel loads and sunnier forest floors where trillium and firepink bloom again.

Community Fire Culture

Prescribed burn associations are spreading this work beyond conservation lands. Since 2016, Jesse Wimberley’s Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association has mobilized volunteers to help private landowners put good fire on their acreage, filling a crucial gap in training, equipment, and liability coverage. These grassroots crews remind me that fire isn’t just a management tool. It is a social practice that knits neighbors together around shared smoke, coffee thermos dawns, and stories of quail returning to old fields.

Spiritual Ecology of Flame

Thomas Berry often wrote that “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Fire makes that communion visible. Flames release pine resins in a fragrant hymn; smoke lifts nutrients into the sky; charcoal shelters mycorrhizal fungi beneath the ash. In process-relational terms, each burn is an event, a moment of becoming where soil microbes, drip-torch crews, and red-crowned woodpeckers participate in a single unfolding. Practiced with humility, prescribed fire becomes liturgy: a ritual of letting go so that life can begin again.

Climate Resilience and Digital Tools

As Carolina summers grow hotter and storms become more volatile, good fire also acts as climate adaptation. Burns reduce the explosive fuel that turns lightning strikes into megafires and open gaps that buffer forests against drought stress. Emerging AI models, fed by drone imagery and historical burn data, now help crews predict smoke plumes and choose windows when humidity, wind, and ecosystem needs align. Technology alone will not save us, but it can widen the burn window and keep crews safer when paired with Indigenous insight and community labor.

A Path Forward

We in the Carolinas stand at an inflection point. We can cling to suppression narratives that leave forests tinder-dry, or we can cultivate a renewed fire culture that honors tribal knowledge, empowers local associations, and sees each controlled burn as an act of ecological hospitality. I choose the latter, because I have seen the green shoots rising through ash, heard children gasp at a wiregrass glowworm two weeks post-burn, and felt the pulse of an ecosystem remembering itself.

If you have access to woods, whether five backyard acres or a church-owned lot, consider joining a prescribed burn workshop, volunteering with a local burn association, or simply visiting a recently burned site to witness rebirth. Good fire is ancient, but its future depends on our willingness to intentionally enter the smoke together.