Beginning with Seeds: Restoration in the Wake of Wildfires

Flames surged over the hills, crackling in a language older than the trees. I watched the news and tracked online maps as the Palisades and Eaton Fires spread, turning entire communities into kindling. Dark plumes of smoke rose from rooftops and stained the sky gray. From the photos, I could almost taste the air—sharp, bitter, and suffocating. The kind of stench that clings to your clothes and sits in your lungs, a plaguing reminder of the fire’s reach. Sunset cast an eerie amber glow. As I scrolled through the countless images, my heart heavy, I came across a story about a gardener in Altadena. In preparing to evacuate, the first thing she packed was her seed collection.

On Instagram, she posted a call for seeds: “The air quality will be poor, and temperatures will be higher without the lush greenery that protected us. If you have any seeds to spare—particularly native plants—please send me a message.” Almost immediately, people began dropping off envelopes, these hope-filled packets of poppy and brickellbush seed, oak acorns and more.

When I think of losing my home or watching the forests around it burn, untethered is the troubling sentiment that surfaces. Or perhaps even unmoored, adrift in a sea of devastation, unsure where to find food or shelter while grieving and navigating upheaval. I would struggle with the question of whether to stay or go. Whether to rebuild or find a new home elsewhere. I would wonder which pockets of this planet might still offer some sense of safety and stability, and if there is still any way to halt the unraveling.

“I don’t think the first thing people typically consider after fires is trees,” Brian Kittler, who runs the Resilient Forests program at American Forests, a national nonprofit that has been supporting healthy forests since 1875, told me. “If they were heavily impacted, they’re just trying to figure out what to do next to stabilize their lives and their communities.” But, as the fires were still spreading in Southern California, some people were already beginning to think about restoring the green from the ashes of profound loss.

Such an interest to expand the priorities may stem from the harsh reality of living through fire years instead of fire seasons—when the threat is constant, and the wreckage leaves lasting scars. California, particularly, has experienced the vast majority of its most deadly and destructive fires just since 2017: Tubbs, Atlas, Pocket, Thomas, Woolsey, Camp, Cedar, Dixie, McKinney, and more. There are many others that have occurred across the American West: Marshall, Almeda, Lahaina, to name a few. These are the names we’ve come to know, the names we carry with us. Even the term wildfire isn’t always accurate anymore. It’s the urban firestorm, as climate scientist Daniel Swain described, when homes feed the flames.

If I think back to the Black Summer in Australia, when the news reported three billion animals affected by bushfire and nearly sixty million acres burned, there is one image etched in my memory. A mother kangaroo stands on barren ground with charred trees blurred in the distance. Her joey peers from her pouch. The mother stands upright, ears perked, eyes locked in a steady gaze, as if she were also deciding whether to stay or go, or waiting for the answer from the earth itself.

Ecologically, regrowth begins with a seed or a sprout. Yet when fires burn hotter and deeper in our forests, they can destroy the seed bed in the soil too, making it more difficult for trees to regenerate. In recent years, planting trees to combat carbon emissions has gained momentum. And yet, growing more trees could be a futile effort if not done carefully. In a world facing increasingly frequent and intense fires, what is the best way to do this work? How can a fractured but unyielding community find the strength to repair and create anew?

I first learned about Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian agronomist and botanist, from a seed banking expert in Hawai‘i. In the late 1920s, Vavilov started the first global seed bank in Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg). As a child, Vavilov had lived through famines and witnessed the catastrophic effects of drought, insects, disease, and extreme temperatures on crops. Today, similar forces ravage ecosystems, their impact amplified by our warming world. Keen to protect food sources, Vavilov studied plant genetics and the causes and effects of plant diseases. From his research and observations, he noticed that wild crops could better withstand disturbances. He became dedicated to preserving agricultural biodiversity, the key to long-term food security.

Seed keeping stems from a long tradition of Indigenous people storing caches to plant for subsequent harvest. But building a global collection of diverse crop species and varieties that had been adapted to different environmental conditions was something new. Vavilov’s twenty-year quest to end famine brought him to more than sixty countries on five continents. Today, about a hundred years later, there are over 1,700 seed banks that are part of a global network for food security.

But what about native plant security? Or even forest security, if we’re focusing on trees? If Vavilov could see the fires, I imagine he would advocate for maintaining the diversity of trees as well.

There are some 73,000 known species of trees yet only about a hundred or so that people plant commonly around the world. A recent report on global seed banks documented only about four hundred around the world that can support restoration efforts with native plant species. Scientists estimate about four million acres of U.S. National Forest land require reforestation due to fire damage. More broadly, there are about 148 million acres of opportunity for reforestation across the contiguous country, a total area about the size of California and Washington States put together. The gap between the seed we have and the seed we need to renew all the land that has been cut, carved, and cindered is far too big.

Critics of reforestation argue that planting more trees in our warming world may be a futile effort. But fire begets fire. In the absence of intervention, forests that have burned intensely from ground to canopy may convert to grasslands and shrublands with native and non-native vegetation. Dead trees could still burn again. The new fire regime is far from the old one, where the heat from low-intensity fires triggered cones to open and release their seed in a harmonious relationship. Rather than facilitating forest regeneration, thick grasses on desiccated lands can ignite easily as flashy fuel. Fountain grass, for example, an invasive plant in Southern California, recovers quickly from fire and may dominate a grassland in a couple years.

Achieving any alternative is hard work: removing some of the dead trees and managing the vegetation. Jad Daley, the CEO of American Forests, told me, “Walking away is the opposite of what we need to do—wildfire means we need to lean in more.” Leaning in means meeting the flames not with resignation, but with action. The growing prevalence of wildfires, or urban firestorms, should serve as a loud cry to accelerate restoration efforts—using climate-informed approaches that anticipate the hotter, drier world ahead. It’s not enough to rebuild; we must rebuild in a way that withstands the future we’ve created.

I look to the people from Butte County, California, and beyond who came together in the wake of the 2018 Camp Fire; who helped identify what seared forests might recover on their own, with seed somehow spared; who decided what to plant and prioritized where to plant, carefully selecting a diversity of species and populations that might withstand the persistent heat and drought. I look to the many people who searched for masting trees in California and climbed into canopies this past year, ramping up collection of conifer cones to build capacity for restoration. I look to the seed collectors in Altadena, living with loss but also leaning into efforts that extend beyond individual repair.

Recovering green in our backyards and growing forests on tree time—the lifespan of long-lived trees—is a long-term investment in reclaiming balance in more than just the atmosphere. New growth must come from a vision beyond the embers, a belief in resilience, and a recognition that the fate of forests and all other life is intertwined.

Twenty days after the Eaton and Palisades Fires ignited, I spoke with Nina Raj, the naturalist and gardener who’d fled her home in Altadena with her seed collection. In her requests for seed donations, she’d asked for phytoremediators, plants that remove or reduce toxins in the soil and water. Residents delivered envelopes of bush sunflower, deer weed, and telegraph weed. They donated California buckwheat, a spreading bush that grows well in dry conditions. Buckwheat also absorbs heavy metals, and its pink and cream-colored flowers attract butterflies and bees. “These plants can kickstart an ecosystem again,” she told me. “If we bring the birds back, they’ll bring more seeds, too.”

Nina had also started receiving seed requests from people who wanted to plant on private lands or in community gardens. She says the regrowth in natural areas and public lands may move more slowly. People need to be patient, to see what plants emerge again, and then decide how best to help the healing process. In our developed areas and backyards, jumping in and getting started early offers a path to recovery—not only for the plants and trees but also for ourselves.

Before the fires, Nina had created a network of seed libraries—these little colorful cabinets for neighbors to take and leave seeds, exchanging nature like novels. Typically, in seed banking, seed is the property of the landowner. When another party requests to use seed, it can be a lengthy review process. Many banks don’t even distribute seed to the public.

“Owning any part of nature just feels wrong to me,” Nina told me. “I want there to be as few barriers as possible to people picking up and planting native seeds in their own backyard.” Like a modern-day Vavilov fighting for green security, not just food security, she has a vision for many more libraries distributed throughout Southern California and perhaps beyond.

When I asked Brian Kittler at American Forests what motivates people who live in fire-stricken lands to reforest or replant, he said, “People involved feel a sense of hope, dedication, and stewardship. It’s a sense of responsibility to a landscape and each other. That’s different than saying I want to see trees again. It’s saying, ‘I want to help.’”

The seed libraries in Altadena still stand amid the ash and rubble. Some people take from them. Others add to them. On many streets, lone chimneys jut from the blackened land like rock spires in a desert. One seed library at an elementary school remains unscathed, but across the street, the entire block burned.

As if even the fire knew to let hope live on.