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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> "It's the concept of maintaining country - central to everything we do as Aboriginal people. It's about what we can give back to country; not just what we can take from it."

Aboriginal practices should not be romanticized. There is evidence that it actually had severe environmental impacts, in particular shortening Australia's monsoon season and lengthen the dry season: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/did-australian-abori.... There is also evidence that they caused the extinction of the Australian megafauna: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate-australian-mega....

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On top of this, this year's conditions are nothing like the "natural" burning of Australian forests. The fires are burning hotter and faster due to the dry conditions.

A massive part of Australian forests have already burned too, they don't regrow out of nothing, and they are the only thing keeping deserts at bay in many cases.

Yep, it’s the noble savage fallacy https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage

The article is about controlled burns.

What's the name of the fallacy where you dismiss something that has has been successful for centuries or more just because it doesn't have a Latin/Greek-derived name granted by a European?

I agree with the criticism, and disagree with your counterpoint.

There is no evidentiary record of this being "successful for centuries." After all, there are no written records.

On the face of it, if you start a fire in a bushland which is 100s of kilometres in breadth, how are Aboriginal people going to communicate and control such a blaze? They don't have access to:

- water pumps - hoses - irrigation - telecommunications - horses

There's some mythmaking going on at the moment in Australia about this.

I find it hard to take the claims at face value.

> What's the name of the fallacy where you dismiss something that has has been successful for centuries or more just because it doesn't have a Latin/Greek-derived name granted by a European?

I bet that Ice age survivor Europeans were perfectly aware of fire and all its possible uses, a few thousands of years before 1606.

The idea of Australian aborigins teaching Europeans about how to use fire in that new thing called agriculture is very funny.

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