Comment by nthcolumn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nthcolumn | Hacker News Reader

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A huge problem in Australia as you probably know where we do get quite a few bush-fires is down to the huge build up in combustible materials. This'd be a fairly modern problem in that the indigenous peoples used to do a lot of the house-keeping by actually setting controlled fires and managing the bush in a sustainable way for themselves. Would that also have been the case for your own indigenous population? It's so bloody dry and the bush is like a tinderbox, lightning strikes certain times of year now cause incredible destruction where years ago they'd have burnt out a few hundred acres and been done with, creating sort of natural corridors and that. I can certainly attest to the speed at which fires move having watched them leaping gorges and seeing sparks dance like sprites across the highway in front and back of my car from a fire a half mile away, fair near shat my pants I can tell you. The fire itself creates its own great wind - you can feel the heat in it. It drives itself along as fast as a car. Far as I know, native animals run towards the fire rather than away from it, and many if not most do escape out the back.

Some years back, the federal government in the US decided to get strict about protecting certain natural areas. This resulted in a build up of dry brush because people were not allowed to do things like collect firewood. The end result was some of the worst forest fires in US history.

Humans need to be good stewards to the land and stop framing themselves as somehow not a part of "nature."

Yes, the native populations often did the same in the Americas. But in the early 1900s, the U.S. decided its forests were an important resource—both as a source of timber for military use and to have timber sales to raise money, and declared war on wildfire with full suppression tactics universally applied. Now recognized as a mistake, tactics have changed, but we'll be suffering the consequences of 100 years of fire suppression for a long time.

The Native Americans of the Appalachians used to burn the brush down in the forests and otherwise cultivate the land, yes.

I'very always wondered how you tease that apart from the native people simply not having the ability to combat naturally caused wildfires. When we suppress them, we employ a ton of technology (from chainsaws to C130s full of red dust) that weren't available back then.

First Nations in Western Canada would deliberately set fire to areas. There is a very old tradition of having "fire keepers" who were responsible for burning areas and ensuring that it was done safely. Traditional wisdom was that every part of the forest should be burned at least every hundred years. Here's[0] an interesting article from the CBC on the topic.

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-fighting...

If you aren't attached to stuff that is attached to the ground or too heavy to move, you don't really need to combat fires, do you?

You either walk around the fire carrying your belongings, or you light a fire downwind from where you are and move onto the burned down ground before the original fire reaches you.

Uncomfortable, but (unless you are really unlucky) survivable.

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