But if there are specific techniques the indigenous nations within California's borders used, those are likely to be more relevant, because California's forests are not New York's forests are not Georgia's forests etc.

What are those specific techniques?

No idea. That's why I said "if". I'm neither indigenous nor a firefighter or forestry expert.

Not to discount the indigenous techniques, but the forests in California are effectively new:

* 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.

This bad take comes up all the time and I try to educate people every time it pops up:

> 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...

What does it matter? California is getting hotter and dryer regardless, and this still amplifies all the previous mentioned problems of invasive species, and decades of forest mismanagement.

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.

the earth will be fine its the humans we are worried about

Honestly, at this point I've given up on worrying about humans surviving. Our "leaders" have made it pretty clear that "long-term survival" is just not on their agenda, and we've allowed them to amass enough "wealth", "power", and weapons to make changing their minds pretty much impossible. What I worry about now, more than anything else, is that humanity has reached a level of destructiveness that we may trigger something literally catastrophic to this planet's ability to support life at all. What an incredible loss that would be.

sure, if.

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.