Meet the Founder of Tender Fire
Mason Hyland (he/him) is the founder of Tender Fire and the facilitator of the Backyard Orchard Mentorship Program. Mason has always had a deep connection with the Land and brings over 25 years’ experience pruning fruit trees.
His mentorship style is rooted in the philosophy that we are deeply interconnected with the living world and have a choice in how we show up within those relationships.
Mason has spent years educating others and has a kind and gentle way of inspiring deeper connections with the Land, through education programs on plant ecology, integrated pest management, fire ecology and the practice of returning fire to the landscape.
Mason holds a Bachelors degree of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
As a career, Mason has worked in the field of Environmental Science (specifically vegetation management and fire management) since starting at California State Parks in 2006. Most recently, previous to moving to Australia, Mason had been a senior level scientist with the department, and was the lead person for a fire management program that covered some 120,000 acres of Land. In this program he proudly used his influence to partner with and work to return stewardship to the Indigenous Tribes of the area who were the Traditional Custodians of the Land. He directed the program’s vision, and implemented cool burning over the course of several years to areas that had not seen fire in several decades. This work was done alongside the Indigenous Tribes, where both parties were learning together how to build a healthier relationship to the Land and to Fire in a new and changed landscape. This position allowed him the unique opportunity to be both a data-driven scientist who designed studies and analyzed the results, and a practitioner who implemented the burning in ways that correlated Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the rigid data collected on the ground.
Mason brings over 15 years of experience as a fire practitioner to his work here at Tender Fire. His expertise in fire science, ecology, navigating permitting processes, fire planning and fire leadership give him a unique and valuable skill set to help others plan and implement burns on their own land.
