Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by PaulDavisThe1st on Thursday August 05, 2021 @11:31AM (#28075121)

> "We forget ..."

We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by fathompinball on Thursday August 05, 2021 @11:35AM (#28075193)

>They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s

I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by throwaway0a5e on Thursday August 05, 2021 @11:58AM (#28075551)

They also had a few thousand years of practice figuring out what works in the local environment.

Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by wizzwizz4 on Thursday August 05, 2021 @01:36PM (#28076951)

> The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.

If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western ... by PaulDavisThe1st on Thursday August 05, 2021 @12:13PM (#28075775)

The estimates of the human population of north America in 1491 (the year before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean) are in the range of 7-18 million.

[ Parent | on HN ]