That reset is what fire has always been in ecosystems shaped by it. Lodgepole pines — the dominant tree in Yellowstone — produce what botanists call serotinous cones: cones sealed shut with resin that only melts in the intense heat of a wildfire. The tree has spent millions of years engineering its own reproduction around fire. It does not merely survive flame. It requires it. When the 1988 fires passed, the forest floor was blanketed in lodgepole seeds. The density of new seedlings in some areas exceeded 100,000 per acre. The forest did not have to be replanted. It replanted itself, in an eruption of life that the fire had made possible.

The problem in the twenty-first century is not fire. The problem is that fire is changing, and the forests haven't evolved to keep pace.

The Black Summer

In the spring of 2020, the extent of what Australia had just endured finally came into focus. The fires of the 2019–2020 "Black Summer" had burned more than 46 million acres — an area roughly the size of Syria — across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. The scale was incomprehensible. The fires had burned through more than 80 percent of the habitat of approximately 50 threatened species. The entire range of some animals — among them the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a marsupial carnivore no bigger than a house mouse — had been obliterated in a single season.

Australia's eucalyptus forests are famously fire-adapted. Many gum trees can survive being burned, throwing out new buds and shoots within weeks. But the mountain ash — Eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering plant on Earth, with individuals reaching 300 feet — is among those that cannot. And the mountain ash was already depleted by over a century of logging and land clearing before the Black Summer arrived. According to National Geographic's reporting on the crisis, some areas of mountain ash forest had now experienced four separate fires in 25 years. To recover, mountain ash need between 75 and 125 years between burns. They need 15 to 30 years of growth before they can produce viable seed. Burned four times in a quarter century, these trees had no path back.

David Lindenmayer, an ecologist at the Australian National University, described to National Geographic what happens when the fire interval collapses: "The ecosystem has effectively collapsed, it's transitioned into something else … more likely to be colonized by generalist, weedy plants." The old-growth giants that took centuries to reach their full height — and that housed the sooty owl, the greater glider, the giant burrowing frog — were gone. What replaced them was a different kind of landscape, quieter and less complex, with fewer keystone species and less capacity to support the next generation of fire.

The New Fire

What is happening in Australia is a reflection of what is happening everywhere. According to research cited by National Geographic, over the past 40 years the length of global fire seasons has increased by 20 percent across more than a quarter of the world's vegetated land surface. In western North America, the fire season is now two to three months longer than it was in 1990. Where a decade might once have passed between major fire events, researchers are now documenting catastrophic fires every other year in some regions.

The mechanism is straightforward: as the atmosphere warms, it draws more moisture out of soils, vegetation, and the air itself. Dryer fuel burns hotter and faster. Hotter fires kill trees that would otherwise survive a low-intensity burn. And the Ponderosa pine forests of the American West — perfectly adapted, like Yellowstone's lodgepoles, to high-frequency, low-intensity fire running through the understory — are now experiencing canopy fires so intense that the mature trees themselves are dying. Ponderosa pine seeds disperse no further than about 500 feet from the parent tree. Where intense fire kills trees across thousands of acres, the seeds simply cannot reach the center of the burn. Those areas convert to shrubland. They may not return to forest in our lifetimes.

The climate change trajectory compounds this further. Across Australia, researchers found that the Banksia hookeriana — a shrub that holds its seeds in woody cones that only open after fire — had experienced a 50 percent reduction in the number of seeds it produces since the 1980s. The very trait that evolved to make Banksia fire-resilient was being undermined by the changed conditions in which fire now occurred. As fire ecologist Joe Fontaine put it: "Numbers like this take climate change from theoretical to a slap in the face."

New ferns push through charred soil against the base of a burned trunk. For ecosystems that evolved with fire, recovery can be explosive — when the interval between burns is long enough to allow it. The problem is that interval is shrinking. — Pexels

The Oldest Solution

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians prevented large, catastrophic fires by setting frequent, intentional small burns. Moving through Country — as they called their ancestral land — they reduced dry grass, leaf litter, and brush with controlled fires that cleared fuel before it could accumulate into a weapon. The burns were not random. They were targeted, seasonal, and guided by generations of observation about which plants needed fire and which did not, which animals sheltered where and when, and how the land recovered from different intensities of heat. The result was a mosaic landscape — patches of recently burned ground, recovering shrubland, old forest — that supported higher biodiversity and dramatically reduced the risk of a single fire consuming everything.

European settlement ended most of that practice within decades. And in the United States, more than a century of fire suppression policy — the belief that all fire was damage and all damage could be prevented — created forests so dense with accumulated fuel that when fire eventually came, as it always does, it came catastrophically. Scientists at Colorado State University have described the paradox clearly: today, 98 percent of fires that ignite in the U.S. are suppressed before they grow large. It is only that remaining 2 percent that makes the news. But if more of the 98 percent were allowed to burn in managed, prescribed conditions, the fuel loads that feed the 2 percent would never accumulate. The tool was always available. We chose not to use it.

That is changing. In California, Indigenous-led prescribed burning programs are being formalized and expanded. The Karuk and Yurok tribes, whose ancestral territory runs along the Klamath River, have long practiced cultural burning and are now partnering with state agencies to restore it at scale. In Australia, Aboriginal rangers are leading fire management programs across millions of acres of northern Australia, applying knowledge that was never lost — only suppressed. As one Finnish proverb, cited by wildfire researchers, puts it: "Fire is a good servant, but a bad master."

Left: Green grass returns to the floor of a burned forest — a sign that the soil survived and the seed bank remains intact. Right: A hillside of scorched trees months after a fire’s passage. The copper color indicates the trees are dead but still standing — in fire ecology, these "snags" are critical habitat for woodpeckers, owls, and cavity-nesting birds. — Pexels

What Comes Back

Even in the most severe burns, life does not wait for permission. In the months after Australia's Black Summer, researchers documented a surge in populations of monitor lizards, birds of prey, and other predators that thrive in the exposed, shelterless landscape left by fire. The black-backed woodpecker, whose dark plumage evolved specifically to camouflage it against burned trees, saw population rebounds across the American West as fire frequency increased. Deer and elk move into opened forest and feed on the shrubs and grasses that burst from the cleared ground. Fireflies, fire-chasing beetles, and a cascade of pioneer insects colonize the ash. The ecological machine does not stop. It shifts into a different gear.

The question is not whether fire creates life. It does. The question is whether the post-fire landscape that emerges can support the species that evolved in the old-growth forest it replaced — the spotted owl, the Canada lynx, the greater glider, the mountain ash itself — and whether those species have anywhere left to go while the burned land recovers. In a world where fire intervals collapse from centuries to years, the old-growth refuges shrink. The animals that need them run out of room.

And yet Yellowstone stands as evidence that the forest can return when given the chance. The lodgepole seedlings that burst from the ash in 1989 are now mature trees. The wolves reintroduced in 1995 — drawn back into a park that fire had made ecologically rich enough to support them again — reshaped the behavior of elk herds, which changed grazing patterns, which allowed riverbanks to stabilize, which brought back songbirds and beavers. The fire started a cascade that is still moving through the system thirty-five years later. This is what recovery looks like when the conditions for it exist: messy, non-linear, full of surprise, and ultimately more abundant than what came before.

The forests of the world are not fragile. They are ancient and, in many ways, resilient beyond anything we can fully measure. But resilience is not the same as invincibility. It requires time — time between burns for seeds to mature and disperse, time for soil chemistry to rebuild, time for the species that disappeared to find their way back. What climate change is removing, one decade at a time, is time. What Indigenous fire management offers, painstakingly, is a way to buy some of it back.

After every fire, the question the land asks is always the same: Will you give me what I need to come back? For most of human history, in the places where people understood the question, the answer was yes. We are learning — slowly, with urgency — to answer it again.