In the western imagination, knowledge is often cast in the sterile light of laboratories and satellite arrays, data points measured, charted, and dissected. But as the Earth warms and the forests burn with a frightening regularity, a quieter, older form of knowing is pressing against the edges of this world, asking to be heard. Indigenous knowledge, rooted in centuries of observation, spiritual interdependence, and custodianship, is emerging not merely as a cultural artifact but as a vital tool in the age of climate crisis.

Consider fire. In California, megafires consume landscapes once shaped by routine, low-intensity burns. These “good fires,” as many Indigenous communities refer to them, were part of traditional land stewardship for generations. Tribes like the Karuk and Yurok set deliberate burns to clear underbrush, maintain biodiversity, and prevent larger infernos. These practices, criminalized under colonial forestry laws, have only recently been revisited by state and federal agencies, too late for some of the forests that now lie in ruin.

Indigenous science is not anachronistic, but dynamic, empirical, adaptive. It has survived despite the systematic suppression of Indigenous cultures and languages, a testament not just to resilience but to its efficacy. The Sámi in Scandinavia still track reindeer migrations with uncanny precision. The Aymara of the Andes monitor glacial melt with rituals entwined with meteorological insight. In the Pacific Islands, wayfinders traverse hundreds of miles of open ocean guided only by stars, waves, and memory. These are not quaint customs, they are modes of knowing the world deeply and usefully.

Climate change, at its core, is not just a scientific problem but a relational one. It’s about how we live with the world, how we listen to it. Indigenous epistemologies, often dismissed for their spirituality or “unscientific” language, are rooted in a relationship with place, a worldview in which rivers have rights, and mountains are ancestors. Such ideas are uncomfortable for technocratic systems built on extraction and ownership. But perhaps it is precisely this discomfort we need. There is a danger, of course, in the sudden vogue of Indigenous wisdom. It risks folded into the same extractive logics it seeks to resist. The knowledge cannot be divorced from the people who hold it.

As we search for solutions in climate models and geoengineering schemes, we might also sit by the fire and listen to those who’ve lived with the land longest. Not because they offer a silver bullet, there isn’t one, but because they remind us that the earth is not a problem to be solved, but a relationship to be repaired.