Last month, at Fort Hill in Eastham, a fire crew carried out the first prescribed burn in the Cape Cod National Seashore since 2021. It’s a moment I’ve been watching and waiting for.
Two years ago, I got certified as a wildland firefighter. My interest in fire started in a roundabout way: I learned that humans can eat acorns, and then I learned that many of our keystone nut trees have been staple crops — vital human foods — all over the northern hemisphere for thousands of years. I was intrigued.
Keystone species get their name from the keystone in a Roman arch: a piece so critical that without it the entire structure falls apart. I wondered how we could help these trees that offered us so much.
What I learned was surprising. To keep many of our keystone nut trees dominant on the landscape, we need to burn the woods periodically. The same prescribed or “cultural” fires that make our sandy pine and oak forests less likely to succumb to catastrophic burns also help species like oaks, hickories, and hazels thrive. These trees are “fire-adapted”: they share traits including thick bark, the ability to resprout vigorously from deep roots, resistance to rotting after fire scarring, and seeds that germinate well in fire-created seedbeds.
Living in an oak and pine forest whose lack of agricultural possibilities I’d long bemoaned, I was glad to find there might be a skill I could learn to support the food-producing nut trees all around us. I watched a prescribed burn in Truro in 2021 with David Crary, the fire management officer for the National Seashore. “At least 300 people have struck a match out here in the woods legally for the first time,” he said with eyebrows raised conspiratorially. I wanted to join them.
After 40 hours of online coursework, a day in the field, and the “Arduous Pack Test” — hoofing it three miles in 45 minutes carrying a 45-pound pack — I got my wildland fire certification. But then burns in the Park were put on hold. I volunteered at burns for the town of Orleans and the Mass. Div. of Fish and Wildlife, but soon after the burn I followed Crary on, he retired, and his position still hasn’t been filled.
It’s encouraging that Seashore Supt. Jennifer Flynn managed to hold a burn at Fort Hill in March. But in the current climate of cost-cutting, she’s going to need a lot more local support to accomplish anything close to burning the 500 or so acres a year called for in the Park’s fire management plan. The burn in Eastham was carried out largely with fire staff from out of state and totaled 14 acres. Over the long term, our Park needs a local fire management officer and crew to carry out the regular burns it needs.
What can we do? In the short term, we can fund and volunteer with local organizations like the Friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore, the Friends of Herring River, and the Association to Preserve Cape Cod that support the Park in caring for our public lands. We can be vocal in support of prescribed burns, and we can pour new energy into volunteer efforts like the Woodchucks, a group that historically cut and piled downed brush and helped with burns inside the Park.
In the longer term, we can think about the skills and resources our public lands need to stay in good health and mobilize to meet as many of these needs as possible locally. With the threat of firings of National Park staff, the shrinking of national monuments elsewhere, and the administration’s promise to “monetize” federal land holdings, it’s clear that we can’t rely on people in faraway places to care for our public spaces. It’s time to see this work for the sacred job that it is — the job of those of us who live here.
Elspeth Hay’s book Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food will be published in July. She lives in Wellfleet.
