(light music) - [Narrator] As wildfires grow more intense, can the Pacific Northwest fight fire with fire?

For some, it's not a new idea.

- So fire history for the Kalispel Tribe is one that's, you know, sort of embedded deeply in our traditional cultural knowledge.

It's the one tool the tribe used from time and memorial to manage its landscape.

- [Narrator] Fire is a fundamental part of the western ecosystem.

It allows some plants to germinate and create the right soil chemistry for others to take root.

By setting regular controlled fires the Kalispel were able to maintain an ideal landscape for growing and collecting the Tribe's first foods.

But that changed with the arrival of white settlers to the region.

- For the longest time, the goal was really to try to keep fire out of our landscapes.

- Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.

- Try to protect those forests and protect those communities and the people that work in those forests.

What's happened in those, those landscapes have become overgrown with mature forest, with mature vegetation.

It just keeps more and more dense.

- [Narrator] The buildup of plant material in the forest acts as a fuel that supercharges fires, making them burn much bigger and hotter.

This can cause root and soil damage or lead to fire reaching the upper levels of the forest, destroying large trees, neither of which happen in controlled fires.

- Right along there.

- If we could get more acres burned we could definitely have, hopefully less catastrophic fires, less impacts on our environment.

- One of the things that fire would naturally do in here is come through at a low intensity and burn off all of these needles and a lot of the pine cones and these branches, and also take out a lot of the small diameter trees that have come up in the understory.

- [Narrator] This in turn would keep a subsequent unintentional fire from getting out of control, but burning the forest in the right way is a delicate process.

- Sort of like a prescription that a doctor would write for you, right?

And says like, what's the medicine that we need for this landscape?

What's the right parameters that will allow us to burn?

- [Narrator] Parameters like humidity and wind direction are carefully considered, and then once the right conditions are met for a burn, they set a small test burn.

- [Kara] We watch it and see if it's doing what we want to do.

After that point, we can say, no, it's actually not.

Even with these parameters, it's not enough.

And we say, we're not gonna meet what we're trying to do out here, and we put it out.

- [Narrator] Even still, the use of fire is not without risks.

For example, in 2022, a prescribed burn in New Mexico spun out of control.

- They lit it kinda the right time of year.

It was a little bit less snowfall during that year and then once April came, it was pretty dry, not as much snow pack, and that fire popped its head and ended up burning three or 400,000 acres, destroyed 900 plus home structures.

- [Narrator] Escapes like this rarely happen, but when they do it's a major setback for proponents of controlled burning.

Still, many believe it is the best way to manage the forest to prevent even more wildfires.

- It's going to be increasingly important as we move into a climate that's, you know, not as forgiving as our previous climate was, and not knowing exactly what's going to happen.

I think we can see the things, the signs, in the forest and in the vegetative community that tell us that fire resiliency is going to be more important in the future.

- [Dennis] Fire has been here forever.

We tried to get rid of it, we tried to minimize it.

That didn't work.

Now we're understanding that we have to bring this back into our way of managing things.

(light music)