Editor’s note: In the fall and winter of 2024, FAC Net hosted a learning series for Fire Networks members about fire practitioner mental health and wellbeing. FAC Net hosted similar opportunities in 2022 and 2023. Each series features presentations from mental health professionals and a variety of resources to support wellbeing on an individual, community, and societal level. One of the speakers from 2024’s series was Blake Ellis, who leads the Ecotherapy Program at Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve near Chico, CA. In this blog, Blake shares her experience of living through major wildfire events, and how it has inspired her to bring mental health support to her community through forest therapy. Blog cover photo credit: Jason Halley, University Photography, Chico State University.
I’ve been providing forest therapy to wildfire-impacted communities and this is what I’ve learned….
In our brief human lives, certain events transform us so completely that they create a stark division: a “before” and an “after.” For me and my Butte County, California community, that event was the 2018 Camp Fire. There is now a clear division between “before the fire” and “after the fire.”
On November 8th, 2018, the Camp Fire claimed 86 lives, burned more than 150,000 acres, and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. It was a day of immense trauma and loss that left an indelible mark on the mental and emotional well-being of my community. Since the Camp Fire, Butte County has been impacted by the 2020 North Complex, the 2021 Dixie Fire, and the 2024 Park Fire. The Camp Fire marked a profound shift in how wildland-urban interface communities experience fire—a harbinger of what some call the Pyrocene era.
For me, the Camp Fire is what inspired me to return to school to get my Master’s in Social Work, where I interned as an AmeriCorps Disaster Case Manager and supported survivors in navigating the complicated and arduous world of disaster recovery. Three years after the fire, my role was to help individuals rebuild their lives in some semblance of what they had before. Survivors I supported described a pervasive sense of loss and grief, mourning not just homes and possessions but the destruction of beloved landscapes, trees, and wildlife. A grief I would later come to know as “solastalgia.” Solastalgia, coined by Glenn Albrecht, describes the mental, emotional, and spiritual distress caused by ecological degradation and negative transformation to one’s home environment.
Understanding solastalgia compelled me to explore paths for collective healing. This journey led me to nature and forest therapy, which is inspired by the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or “Forest Bathing.” Shinrin-yoku was developed in the 1980s by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries as a remedy for the stressful ways of modern life and a means to reconnect people with natural landscapes and inspire protective action. In 2012, Amos Clifford adapted Shinrin-yoku into a trauma-informed framework for Western audiences, founding the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy.
The practice of Nature and Forest Therapy involves immersing oneself in nature and engaging all the senses to foster presence, relaxation, and healing. Studies show that forest therapy can lower blood pressure, reduce stress hormones, improve sleep, enhance cardiovascular and respiratory function, and even boost immune function. More importantly, forest therapy helps to foster a reciprocal relationship with nature, reconnecting participants with nature as a source of solace, belonging, and peace while inspiring stewardship and protective action. Discovering forest therapy gave me hope, and I immediately recognized the potential this healing practice might have in my community.
By some cosmic alignment, serendipity, or divine intervention, the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve had recently received funding from the North Valley Community Foundation’s Butte Strong Fund to certify 15 community leaders to become Nature and Forest Therapy Guides to serve folks impacted by the Camp Fire. Needless to say, I leaped at the opportunity and was fortunate enough to join a cohort of Butte County community members to become certified as a Nature and Forest Therapy Guide.
Together, we explored how this practice could help our community process grief and trauma and reconnect to a dramatically transformed landscape. We all came together to be in service to our community because of this crisis, but what forest therapy allowed us to do was to be broken open and transformed. We had all spent years trudging through the mess and pain of disaster recovery, but forest therapy allowed us to finally slow down, to attune, to metabolize our emotions and experiences, and to remember our relationships – with ourselves, each other, the places we love, and the natural world.
What I’ve learned over the years is that forest therapy can help.
It can help heal our trauma response.
As an invitational practice, forest therapy is trauma-informed. Participants engage at their own pace, choosing what feels safe and comfortable for them. This sense of agency is especially important for trauma survivors. During forest therapy walks, participants reconnect with their senses, helping ground themselves in the present moment rather than remaining trapped in past trauma or future anxieties. For wildfire survivors, whose sensory memories—the smell of smoke or the sound of wind—can be triggering, this can be life-changing.One Camp Fire survivor shared during a forest therapy walk, “Today is the first time since the [Camp] fire that I’ve been able to feel the wind on my face and have it be pleasant and pleasurable, instead of triggering. I can’t tell you how amazing that feels.”
Slowing down often allows for buried emotions to rise to the surface, but if we can stay grounded in the present moment, we are able to finally sit with these emotions and begin to make meaning out of our suffering.
Photo credit: Jason Halley, University Photographer, Chico State University.
It can help heal our sense of place.
Forest therapy has helped me and people in my community fall in love with burned landscapes. There is something magical and life-affirming about noticing the electric green up through the black, the way the smell of smoke gently clings to a place, the intricacies of a Ponderosa Pine’s blackened puzzle pieces, how the fire scar quilts a patchwork across a landscape, and the way wildflowers burst through the ash in the spring after a fire.
On a forest therapy walk, another wildfire survivor remarked that they felt a kinship to a blackened tree stump they stumbled upon- after all, they’d been burnt out, too. Yet the longer they sat with the tree stump, they began to notice fungi, insects, moss, spiderwebs, and woodpecker holes. They began to notice that it wasn’t all loss but that in death, this tree had made way for new life. “There was beauty coming out of the pain.”
Forest therapy can help us remember.
At its core, the environmental challenges we face are about relationships. The dominant system has shaped our understanding of nature as something to be exploited, disconnecting us from the land and from one another. Fortunately, Indigenous ways of knowing offer a different perspective: one that recognizes the interconnected web of life and challenges the illusion of a separate “self.” From our bones to our breath, humans are nature. We are inextricably linked to the natural world. Microorganisms compose parts of our skin and fill our guts, we rely on pollinators to produce the food we eat and photosynthetic organisms to create the oxygen we need. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Recent research has shown that the smell of humus exerts a physiological effect on humans. Breathing in the scent of Mother Earth stimulates the release of the hormone oxytocin, the same chemical that promotes bonding between mother and child, between lovers.” As humans, we are biologically wired to connect with the Earth.
Forest therapy is one way to help us remember this connection. By slowing down and being fully present in nature, we begin to heal not only our individual traumas but also our collective trauma of disconnection from the Earth. When we set aside the fast and inattentive pace of our daily routines, when we step off the treadmill of modern daily life, we may find beauty and intimacy in the present moment and in doing so, shift our perspective of our place and time on this Earth.
It can provide us with time to grieve.
During a forest therapy walk, participants will often experience moments of grief. As Guides, we are there to hold space and bear witness, not to judge, analyze, or fix. Participants can give themselves permission to be fully present and witnessed in their grief, which can be an incredibly powerful and transformative experience. In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: The Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller writes “I consider grief a threshold emotion. In other words, when we step across that threshold and enter the room of grief, it has a way of opening up the rest of our lives.” Weller goes on to write that grief is the other side of love and that “when we compress the terrain of grief, we compress the territory of joy.”
Forest therapy offers an alternative to conventional mental health treatment.
Unlike conventional mental health treatment, which pathologizes, diagnoses, and prescribes outcomes, forest therapy is an open practice that welcomes and values all experiences and outcomes equally. The practice supports individuals’ unique discovery of how to relate with the land and trusts that people will have whatever experience they need to have.
Forest therapy embraces a relational model that contrasts with the reductionist medical approach, emphasizing collective healing by nurturing connections between humans and the more-than-human world. Viewing forests as sentient networks of plants and animals that interact meaningfully, it recognizes that when humans enter the forest, they become part of this web. By tending to this web of relationships, we gain a greater sense of belonging, purpose, and fulfillment.
As a mental health provider, I’m all too aware that most of our efforts are focused on helping people cope and become more resilient to the never-ending barrage of stress, trauma, and loss instead of focusing on changing the conditions that caused the stress, trauma, and loss in the first place.
If you’re struggling with grief and despair over the immense loss and suffering in our world, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means there’s something profoundly right with you. Our hearts should be broken. Grief is not a problem to be fixed; it is an expression of love. Anishnaabe author and social worker, Patty Krewac, writes in her book Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, “Grief is the persistence of love… Grief is also about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been.”
After the fire
Now, six years after the Camp Fire, I continue to provide forest therapy to wildfire-impacted communities across California and beyond. I feel called to continue helping communities mend their relationship with nature and wildfire-adapted landscapes so that we might find solace in these places once more.
I have also become a Type 2 Wildland Firefighter and am passionate about supporting those on the frontlines of the pyrocene era. I’ve even begun to combine the practice of forest therapy with prescribed fire and education on Indigenous cultural fire as a way to provide positive and therapeutic experiences with beneficial fire so that we might begin to repair our relationship with fire.
The fire has changed me—just as it has changed my community. But within that transformation lies an invitation: to turn toward the flames, to let them refine and reshape us, and to find healing in our connection to each other and the Earth.
After the fire, how will you be changed?
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