General Sherman stands in Sequoia National Park in California. It is the largest tree on the planet by volume, roughly fifty two thousand cubic feet of wood, and it has been standing for something like two thousand two hundred years. It was already old when the Roman Empire was young.

A giant sequoia begins as a seed the size of an oat flake. The cones that hold those seeds stay sealed on the branch for years, sometimes twenty, waiting. What opens them is heat. A fire moving 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 competing saplings. The ash feeds them. The open 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 twentieth century the park put every fire out as fast as it could. 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 the groves that had survived a thousand small fires were sitting inside a fuel load they had never faced.

Then the big ones came. The Castle Fire in 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 millennia. In September 2021, with the flames closing on the Giant Forest, crews wrapped the base of General Sherman in fire resistant foil and stood their ground. The tree came through. The park has since gone back to setting small, deliberate fires on purpose, the way the grove always needed.

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

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