They didn't talk to anyone, they just used an article with more depth to support their little, less deep article.
>Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
What does this mean? You can't talk about wildfires in the west without talking about how westward expansion brought terrible forest management practices and suppressed traditional management practices that kept forests healthy. How are you involving racism in this topic?
It's not that I don't think that discussion has a place. It's that I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back. There are plenty of great justifications for bringing it back, and I'm glad they are, but "native americans used to do this" is not a reason.
That sort of reasoning is how you get people claiming that "alternative medicine" is better than the medical miracles we produce today. You need actual data and reasons to support things, not just "native americans did it and racist europeans rejected it".
That's not the justification. The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.
"Thanks to centuries of overzealous fire protection and the suppression of Indigenous cultural burns — which Europeans found “primitive” — forests have become overgrown, accumulating piles of underbrush and fallen trees. In trying to prevent wildfires altogether, we’ve been essentially storing up bigger and bigger piles of fuel. And with that extra fuel comes fires that burn more ferociously, exacerbated by drought and drier conditions from climate change.
“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning said in a University of California article. Areas that were once open valleys are now choked with conifers and other fuel sources that were not there when cultural burns helped groom the land."
The justification for controlled burns is written here
"Setting fires intentionally may sound like a paradoxical approach to fire control, but if they are done correctly, controlled burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, helping to prevent the catastrophically large, hot fires that overwhelm firefighting resources. They also are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem."
It sounds like you'd like to know more about wildfire and how indigenous burning practices suppress mega fires. I encourage you to read the linked materials, as this little article isn't going to go deep enough to answer your questions.
tl;dr Yes, we should do more controlled burns. No, our current situation has very little to do with "traditional burning practices".
Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.
_Was_ racism a reason? Sure, but the past is not the present. The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.
The greenies didn't just oppose "traditional burning practices" but also _modern_ burning practices that are used in other US states, and they have much more control over California's policy (and even Fed Interior policy) than racist bogeymen.
Even this correction is being driven by those politics, as a return to "traditional burning practices" after (real and imagined) historical injustice.
That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.
so still the people who colonized north america? you've turned this entire thing into a left wing vs right wing culture war issue when the article is just providing historical context. nobody is attacking the right wing in this article - not sure why you're perceiving it as one.
I'm sorry, this is just incredibly incorrect. Forest management on the federal level is owned by logging companies. The drive to put out fires, even in remote areas, is driven by a desire to not lose acres that could be logged. It's taken activist decades to convince the Forest Service and the BLM to do controlled burns and we *still* put out naturally-ignited fires in remote areas.
I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
Most of the forested land in California is owned by the federal government, who has historically managed the land based on the priorities of natural resource extractors like logging companies.
This article is about the PNW, but it functioned the same way in California
https://wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Ron-Vorderstrasse.pdf
>I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
You're complete lack of knowledge on this subject doesn't make me incorrect. Please go do some reading and come back with an intelligent argument.
The majority of the articles focus is on insurance liability.
Do any of you people actually read before you comment?
What's bizarre is that in spite of that non-sequitur, fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850. This isn't some ancient technique we're only just now rediscovering. It's been well-established practice for over a century, only recently eschewed in favor of assuaging irrational environmentalists.
> In a 1918 letter, a district ranger at Klamath National Forest wrote to his supervisor that the US Forest Service’s most important duty was to keep fires to a minimum, but “renegade whites and Indians” were setting fires “for pure cussedness”, not caring whether the fires harmed others.
> He suggested that the solution was “to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him”. He also suggested hiring a female missionary who had “gained the confidence” of Indigenous people to convince them to adopt settler theories about fire.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
Controlled burning has been used in the South by white people since the early 1800s: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/19091, where "it was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers".
One ranger in California in 1918 does not speak for an entire race for God's sake. That should be obvious.
/s
Is there any evidence of this? I mean, I know that the indigenous people did so to try to contain fires, because wildfires have been an issue for millions of years. But is there any evidence it was "more successful" historically? I'm not a huge believer that ancient cultures had these things figured out.
I'll let you go into the further reading section for more information.
Please explain the type of evidence you could gather that would tell you American Indians thought intentional burning was a good idea and part of their planned forest management.
From what I'm reading on your link the evidence is evidence of fires burning things down, thus the Indians had an advanced forest management system in place.
It turns out that people that lived in fire country for hundreds/thousands of years built up practices of burning when fires would remain calm rather than explode into conflagrations. "Advanced" is relative in this sense.
Between this and natural fires the landscape had a patchwork quality that acted as natural fire breaks.
UC Davis didn’t empower ancient indigenous community practices uncovering mystical oral history, they went to people that just googled it like everyone else because there has been perpetual cross drift in how to do controlled burns in even more optimal ways. Gullible af wow. This is like the Blazing Saddles of fire control.
The only reason California wasn't doing controlled burns, according to the article, is because they didnt have hush money for when they inevitably burn your house down and lose the lawsuit, and now they topped it up with a paltry $20 million.
The rest of this article is quite a bit of deflection.
* There used to be a number of old growth trees spread out intermittently which don’t exist anymore.
* Decades of mismanagement and clear cutting have resulted in forests being a lot denser today then they were a couple of centuries ago, a monolithic area where all the trees are close together, similar in age, and of the same species, is a new environment, in California (the Redwood forest in the North Coast has tightly compacted trees of the same species, but of varying age; also note that Redwood has evolved to withstand fires, probably because of this growing pattern).
* There are number of invasive species, including Eucalyptus and the California Silver, which disrupt native species access and compete with access to water and sunlight
* And worst of all there are a number of pathogens including the invasive bark beetle which is killing old growth giant sequoias in and around Yosamite.
* And to top it all off, California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe, which amplifies all these problems.
Controlled fires and better forest management in general is definitely a good thing, and California is doing the right thing by re-establishing it, and including indigenous communities is for sure for the better. However, what worked in the past is only gonna have limited (though positive) effects. Expect California to keep burning at accelerated rate. Even if these efforts work perfectly—which they will—the state will still keep burning. The damage is simply too great.
> California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe
California in the 20th century was very abnormally wet and mild. Using scientific data and looking back 2000+ years one gets a picture of centuries long droughts, and of extreme weather as very normal. This is the status quo and the past 100 years of mild and wet climate is the weird abnormality(which people think it always should be like).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-histo...
Also California does not exist in a vacuum. The earth is getting significantly warmer. West Coast USA will become dryer as a result, if this is the “natural state” of California (whatever that means for a dynamic climate system) than California will become hotter and dryer still.
but read the article again. there is no procedural mystery on how to do a controlled burn. California expects to burn your house down and didn't allocate money for it and now they allocated a little bit.
"the fear of liability for unintentionally starting a wildfire is one key reason holding back more prescribed burns."
the rest of the article, read it again, the rest of the article is a grift specifically done by CAL FIRE to convince allocating money to the fund at all.
they wrapped it in an indigenous veneer to make it sound like they know what they're doing.
"so private insurance companies will enter the market."
it has kind of nothing to do with the arguments happening in this comment section. the approach is amusing. the problem is hilarious. California wasn't doing controlled "or cultural" burns because they're going to lose all the lawsuits when they burn your house down, and now they're still going to lose all lawsuits but they allocated money to that, but only $20 million and they're hoping the private insurers are like "ooooo" "aaaah" "cultural fire practitioner fire bends for special California flora" and insures with waaaaay more money than $20 million, because so far its a pathetic amount.
At what point does the Fed Gov say, "wait a minute, if you want disaster funding you've got to clean up your act." And certainly the insurance industry has lobbying power, and nothing from them either?
This has a foul smell. I'm rarely pro-litigation but CA residents should start a class action suit again the state for what looks like negligence.
the narrative "we bad , they good" always sells
You can see this from ignoring food forests and insisting on farming when the soil was just throwing up rocks year on year in north east U.S.
The fact that you're trying so hard to explain that away says a tonne about you. I recommend that you take a long, hard look at yourself and try figure out why you feel the need to justify bigotry.
It wasn’t out of stupidity, it was out of malice and bigotry.
It’s also a culture of domination that has stuck with us to this day.
I’m of European descent, too. It’s ok. Our ancestors were imperfect. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that and to learn from this example where the so-called primitives had better practices than the self-described civilized people.
It’s not a personal attack if you don’t take it personally.
Where I live (Santa Cruz Mountains) the vast old growth redwood trees were extensively logged (via clear cutting) into the early-to-mid 20th Century.
Then widespread logging just stopped. And for at least the past 50-60 years there has been intense hostility to logging. Everywhere, doesn't matter if public or private land.
The redwood groves that have grown back are all extremely densely packed, relatively small diameter trees mixed in with tan and coast live oaks and lots of smaller shrubbery. Lots of low branches on all trees. Lots of redwood needles and dead tan oak and coast live oak leaves laying thick on the forest floor.
Perfect tinder.
About 3 years ago a lightening storm sparked a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of acres.
Controlled burns would have helped remove the forest duff. But the trees themselves are perfectly set up to respond to fire, unlike in an old growth forest.
There is a trend that glorifies native populations over colonizers and it has been going on for years now, said trend is pretty often just thinly veiled racism. I don't think it's insecurity as much as awareness.
After all, European history, culture, and heritage is still being celebrated even as its foibles criticized, so I fail to see how one culture's sharing of the limelight with another's constitutes racism.
Yes, race matters a lot to many people. It certainly matters a lot more than it did until 2008—to all "racial" groups, that is—and I can't help but notice that a lot of freshly minted "experts" are, fifteen years later, profiting very, very handsomely from providing "solutions" to a problem that has perversely only grown in proportion with the size of the industry itself.
You mean when a significant minority of the population was saying that Obama was a secret Muslim trying to impose Sharia law on the United States and McCain (whatever happen to people like him?) had to constantly squash it in his own party?
Writing is not just producing a bag of atomic propositions. What is written must be justified and relevant. When something forced occurs within some piece of writing, it betrays a bias, or even an ulterior motive. In this case, controlled burns (or letting natural wildfires play out) aren't a new thing. They're older than agriculture, and they are and have been used across the world in modern times for some time. Look at a live map of forest fires and you'll notice how many are controlled burns. It's not as if we're considering the use of controlled burns for the first time and discovering some long-forgotten wisdom of the natives here. Frankly, what's weird is that California is just now doing this.
But I also wouldn't make a big deal out of this article either. I think learning about precolonial practices like this is interesting, regardless of the bias or motives of the article's author.
#1 - To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years. This changed a few hundred years ago, and the result is the unprecedented fires we have been experiencing. The government is reacting by greatly increasing funding for prescribed burns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best solution at this time.
#2 - The state is bound by federal treaties with the sovereign nations that reside within its borders. The bounds of these treaties are hotly contested. The sovereign nations believe that the treaties grant them the right to the lifestyle they historically had. The federal government wants to curtail activities they believe, if unchecked, might cause lasting negative effects. One of the rights these sovereign nations had restricted were controlled burns, which they call cultural burns. These rights are being slowly returned now that the state and feds view controlled burns in a more positive light.
There is a 3rd indirect element to this article, which is that it is trying to address an audience that has been affected by years of the Smokey the Bear 'all fire is bad' mentality.
You should reread the article. I'm pretty sure you brought along the baggage you are complaining about.
You will not persuade hardcore preservationists in California by listing out the economic/quality of life benefits of controlled burns. They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.
The key to changing preservationists minds is not to say "there are many benefits to controlled burns (for humans)" but rather, "the state we are creating in forests without burns is not natural."
...just because it is interesting.
"Natural state" is a term with a debatable definition. Is it:
* how it was when the Native Americans lived on it and did whatever they did
* how it was when there are no humans around at all
And these aren't even necessarily the only definitions, or a binary choice (it could be a spectrum/tunable).
When the Bering Strait ice bridge formed and the descendants of native peoples migrated down through the American continent, California was not a dry desert. It was probably covered by lush forests and wetlands with a much lower sea level than today so there's literally no way to return it to that "natural state"
With the Kelp highway hypothesis [1], humans were here for most of that transition so really there's a whole list of "natural states" to pick from (that we largely can't return to)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)#K...
To convince them to take action you have to validate their self-imposed guilt with images of reverting to noble savages clapping hands and playing pan-flutes around a fire while the animals sway in time to the music.
There was a time I would have said these people need education, now I'll settle for using their guilt to herd them in the correct direction.
When two conflicting woke ideas meet, which one wins?
Here it sounds like white guilt beats environmental virtue signaling.
Which is what's happening.
Its natural state includes devastating wildfires every so often when lightning touches off dry undergrowth that hasn't been cleared away for years.
The first time the controlled burn goes out of control the initiative will be back to square one.
"Native Americans" arrived here about 30,000 years ago. For all the time prior to that forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.
The idea that they somehow had some advanced knowledge that Europeans lacked has no scientific basis, they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.
Or as much fixed and immobile infrastructure that would be endangered by fire-- if there is nothing you care about nearby, why not set a fire to aid in hunting or to clear out plants you can't eat in favor of ones you can?
Just because they intentionally set fires that doesn't itself make it environmentally good-- it's an extraordinarily racist view that the indigenous people weren't capable of environmental destruction just because they were less effective at it than industrial civilizations. The noble savage protector of the land is a racist fantasy of people raised on a diet of Disney movies, not reality.
This is, by definition, not a controlled burn.
Paul Hessburg of the Forest Service and University of Washington has a good TEDx talk on this that helps explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
This is about a major expansion of the concept, and includes (1) an insurance scheme so that private landowners can do a burn without fear of bankruptcy and (2) restoring cultural burns that Indians performed to manage land before they were banned by people who didn't understand them.
The cynic in me sees this as a PR move to take a somewhat contentious issue and make it more palatable for people that think "all fire"="bad" or that it's some sort of contrived forest management practice which makes it bad. Most liberals opposed to controlled burns probably don't want to think of themselves as having a colonizer mindset either.
What people really need to be discussing is how the USFS burn practices need to be changed. They like to burn in warmer weather when fuels are drier, because it saves money on personnel. This also makes them more likely to jump containment lines and get out of control.
Interestingly, a right-leaning college “friend” on Facebook uses (and links to articles that use) the same “Indians have been doing it for thousands of years” argument to complain about Democrats, California, and conservationists.
> Why burn on purpose? It admittedly seems counterintuitive — or even dangerous — but purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
This is what you’re getting hung up on when you should really be focusing on the highlighted (and enlarged) quote:
“Setting fires intentionally may sound unusual, but if done correctly they reduce the fuel available for wildfires and are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem.”
The logic is sound in my opinion. Group X of people were doing things a “better” way, have continued to want to do things the “better” way but were prevented by Group Y, and it’s been _proven_ that their “way” was and is indeed “better”.
I will acknowledge that the article is lacking in the _proven_ sense. But it’s still there.
The reason why this article even mentions Native Americans though is because the new program that is being sponsored specifically targets cultural (i.e. Native American) burns.
It is being done already, and has been for over a century. It's just facebook boomers got it in their heads that it wasn't.
Burning is allowed, has been allowed, and has been an active part of California forest management for decades.
Bans on small off-road engines and new indoor gas burning appliances are generally driven by health concerns (smog, indoor air quality, and noise pollution), and backed by pretty solid science. Not that global warming isn't also a damn good reason to ban these things.
I'm perfectly fine with politicians who ban convenience devices that cause extreme externalities to other people like smog, excess noise, and childhood asthma. That doesn't seem like a radical left position.
It's pervasive and infecting everything.
What's more shocking is why it wasn't being done.
> Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
We are talking concrete reasons. We have to first understand the concrete reasons why it wasn't being done already first. You yourself said it is shocking. Don't you want to know why? What were the reasons against controlled burn? Then we can figure out if we should do it. Just because the concrete reasons upset you doesn't mean they aren't worthy of being discussed.
There are many things to be upset about. I don't think controlled burns are it.
it's not being upset about controlled burns, but the "you're racist yet again and you didn't even know it!"
If it happens naturally, it's nobody's fault. If it happens because the state is doing a controlled burn, the state foots the bill.
Take a look at how many of the wildfires are due to unmaintained power lines if you REALLY want to blow a gasket.
Unfortunately, we didn't just stop prescribed burns, we stopped natural burns as well.
> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.
https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
So we have forests laden with nearly a hundred years worth of unburned fuel.
Don't be shocked. Part of the reason they're couching it this way is to avoid acknowldeging yet another Sacramento Policy Failure
"In California, two different approvals are needed for a burn — an air permit and a smoke management plan from the California Air Resources Board or a regional air-pollution district. In some cases, Cal Fire has to sign off, too."
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24934569...
This article is weird because forest management became an extremely partisan issue recently. Do you remember the whole "rake the forests" thing?
Specifically, no of course we don't rake the forests. But generally, yes, accumulated fuel and forest management is at fault. Great pains are taken to redefine policies in progressive terms to avoid the appearance of agreeing with one's political opponents.
Both sides do this btw.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
When talking about the reason for overgrowth, the article talks about how it's the fault of Europeans who said controlled burns are primitive. The person they talk to is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They talk to "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".
Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?