PARADISE — The Camp Fire has prompted the Mechoopda Tribe to set in a motion a plan to improve forest management in Butte County using its sovereignty and its traditional knowledge.

Ali Meders-Knight, a member of the Mechoopda Tribe and an artist and educator, has been spearheading the plan, which is in its early stages. It is just one of several projects to improve forest health in Butte County that range from replanting a woodland more suited to an era of rising temperatures to removing small trees for biomass energy. But Meders-Knight’s pitch is gaining momentum. Community members flooded her with questions after a presentation at Butte County Fire Safe Council’s annual wildfire safety planning summit in Paradise on Friday.

“We’re talking about a paradigm shift,” she told them. “This is an all hands on deck moment.”

Part of her vision is educating Butte County residents in traditional ecological knowledge. The term refers to the science and technology developed by indigenous peoples through long-term observation, experiment and maintenance. The knowledge is anchored in a place — in this case, the woodlands of Butte County. For example, Meders-Knight has learned a lot about redbud, willow and sedge roots because she has used them to weave baskets for 25 years. That’s motivated her to promote the healthy growth of the plants and provided insight into the ecosystem.

“Basket weaving is a technology developed thousands of years ago with these materials, and requires the community to do large scale land management,” she explained.

She’s been teaching kids in the area about the local knowledge of indigenous people for a long time. Now, she wants to ramp up her efforts. She is in the middle of developing a certification the tribe could give to community members, from Chico State students to property owners to foresters, after training in traditional ecological knowledge. It would pull from the long experience Indigenous people have with cultural fire.

Her dream? A large, trained workforce of local residents would cut down unhealthy growth and set prescribed fires. They would focus on promoting holistic forest health instead of timber sales. Resources would stay local. The work would lower the risk of catastrophic wildfires by decreasing fuel load, but also bring about important ecological benefits like water quality improvements and native species restoration.

That brings in the other part of the plan, which aims high. She proposed the tribe could lead a large collaboration to work Butte County’s forests through a stewardship agreement with federal land managers, trading goods like forest products for services like ecosystem restoration. The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have used the agreements with local governments and tribes to increase restoration and include community members across the Western U.S.

“We are at the leading edge of the climate catastrophe here, and that’s well-positioned Butte County to develop a sustainable local economy using the sovereignty of tribes,” said Meleiza Figueroa, an agro-forester and a doctoral student at UC Berkeley who has been working with Meders-Knight to develop the proposal. “It could help jump start not just fire recovery, but real resilience.”

The 2018 farm bill, signed into law by President Trump, allowed the length of stewardship agreements to extend to 20 years. Earlier this year, a nonprofit corporation fostered by rural California lawmakers called Golden State Natural Resources signed one of the first agreements with the Forest Service under the new program. It will eventually turn forest product into wood pellets to sell to Asian countries, with the overall goal of stimulating the economy in rural Northern California.

Other groups like the Butte County Fire Safe Council and the Sierra Institute have been working on strategies to put local forest product to use in biomass energy, local timber and building materials or other wood-based technologies. Meders-Knight wants the tribe to be part of it with prescribed fire.

“Each tribe around here has a fire story, and there’s always a bird or animal that takes the fire back, because fire is power,” Meders-Knight said. “That’s us. We are helping the community steal the fire back. … This crisis brought us together.”