Kayley Walker is no stranger to fire.
It’s a force that’s painted all parts of her life — like as a kid, when she’d watch her grandfather light piles of dried sticks and brush at the family ranch. That’s a good memory for Walker, and one she counts among her first experiences with fire in an Indigenous context.
Fire in Hand, Healing Lands - 5 years of funding for TERA's Lake County based Beneficial Burning program!
As fire risk escalates heading into summer, Lake County is getting some help in taking preventative measures for residents through a $16 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The federal money will enable the county to stretch existing resources across multiple communities, including Clear Lake, Seigler Springs and Scotts Valley, officials said.
Clear Lake, the state’s largest freshwater body of water, is fouled each year by algal blooms, one of many assaults endured by the battered ecosystem. Can a multipronged plan help it recover?
On a cold Thursday morning toward the end of October, some 70 people from Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians, Cal Fire, Lake County Cal-TREX, the United States Forest Service, and the Tribal Eco-Restoration Alliance (TERA) gathered to kick off a cultural burn on Robinson Rancheria lands. As TERA Crew Lead Stoney Timmons explained, part of the goal for that day’s prescribed fire was to tend to the slope’s legacy oak trees and cut down on the weevil population in acorns, a traditional source of tribal subsistence.
In early November, a unique crew of U.S. Forest Service-certified sawyers from the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, or TERA, helped harvest more than 20 indoor-sized Christmas trees to decorate federal offices throughout the U.S. Capitol, as part of the Forest Service’s U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree initiative.