A giant sequoia begins as a seed the size of an oat flake. The cones that hold the seeds stay sealed on the branch for years, sometimes twenty, waiting. What opens them is heat. A fire passing through the grove dries the cones, the scales pull back, and thousands of seeds fall onto ground that the same fire has just cleared of brush and rival saplings. The ash feeds them. The opened canopy gives them light. Without fire the seeds mostly stay locked in the cone and the grove stops making new trees.

For most of the last century the park put out every fire it could reach, as fast as it could reach it. It seemed like the responsible thing to do. The groves went quiet. Young sequoias stopped appearing. Brush and dead wood piled up on the forest floor year after year, until groves that had lived through a thousand small fires were sitting inside a fuel load they had never seen.

Then the big ones came. The Castle Fire of 2020 and the fires of 2021 burned so hot that they killed an estimated fifth of all the large sequoias in existence, trees that had shrugged off fire for two thousand years. In September of 2021, with the flames closing on the Giant Forest, crews wrapped the base of General Sherman in fire-resistant foil and held the line. The tree came through. The park has since gone back to setting small fires on purpose, the way the grove always needed.

There is a kind of caution that looks like care and works like slow strangulation. Protect a thing from every small shock and you leave it helpless before the big one. The sequoia is built to take heat in doses. So is a business. So is a person.

Let the small fires through. They are how the next generation gets its start.