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The early-20th-century sci-fi novel Earth Abides is about the lives of some of the remnants of humanity after a virus wipes out most of the population. Even then, California had a reputation for wildfires, and in the story large parts of the state burn after there are no people to fight the fires.

In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.

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Where California is concerned, there haven't been "natural conditions" for 12,000 years.

The indigenous people practiced a careful system of controlled burns, to prevent megafires and to keep the land healthy for hunting.

It wasn't a wilderness, it was a garden. Failure to understand this is a big part of what lead us to what we see today.

Any reliable source on this? I for one doubt that the population density could allow an exhaustive conversion of all wilderness into “a garden” with a complete absence of megafires. Sounds a bit like a “noble savage” romanticism.

https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/indi...

* NPR: To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-...

* Cap radio: The Racist Removal Of Native Americans In California Is Often Missing From Wildfire Discussions, Experts Say https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/09/16/the-racist-remo...

* Nature: Quiet Fire: Indigenous tribes in California and other parts of the U.S. have been rekindling the ancient art of controlled burning https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/indi...

Edit: formatting

Thanks for the share. I’m aware of these articles and aware of the age-old practices, which are not even exclusive to Americas or ancient times. But I don’t see any data on the whole wilderness being turned into a garden by these tribes and mega fires not being there thanks to it.

You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."

"Wilderness" is probably also more wild than would be intuitive, iff our sense of "wild" is based on a landscape that was actually actively managed to be an ideal habitat for hunting and gathering.

> You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."

Not really. The most common image of a garden is a controlled nature space tended for human enjoyment.

“As it would be with zero humans around” is the definition of a wilderness.

Even if you pushed the definitions to extremes they don’t overlap (a wildlife garden is still a garden).

Either way natives didn’t have that degree of control. Even today, in places where forests are assigned to villages for such caretaking, they don’t have that degree of control, even with all the modern aerial firefighting power it is a struggle, as evidenced by current wildfires in the Mediterranean.

The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden. Just that the landscape was already heavily transformed by the time Europeans arrived, but the Europeans didn't know that and assumed what they saw was its wild state.

It's not limited to California, either, as it's now suspected that North America's vast inland prairies were largely created by people setting fires and that we'd see something closer to forests if it were truly untouched.

It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.

> The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden

> It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.

It doesn't matter what kind it was, garden metaphor implies human control over a certain boundary.

And in this context (both from OP and the linked article) the control is specifically about preventing mega-fires through controlled fires. Prairies and uncontrolled fires are irrelevant.

There is little reason to question this technique was being applied locally with some success, but there is no evidence that this could be to an extent that made California their garden, in any meaning of the word you want to imagine.

If anything, I don't think the historical population vs landmass numbers can match up, hence my original objection. Disappointingly, only counter-arguments so far has been finessing over the definition of "garden" instead of working on the manpower and efficacy questions.

https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2020/10/29/indigenous-burnin...

Well, sure when you exaggerate what I'm saying into 'exhaustive' conversion and a 'complete absence' of megafires it sounds like romanticism. I guess.

The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing. Other posters were kind enough to link you to some references, so I won't bother.

But yes, West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could. They had 12,000 years to get good at it, that's a long time.

The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.

This looks quite different when hunting is the main source of protein, rather than animal husbandry.

> Well, sure when you exaggerate what I'm saying into 'exhaustive' conversion and a 'complete absence' of megafires it sounds like romanticism.

I merely made what was implicit into explicit; using the term "garden" implies a total control.

> The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing.

I'm not interested in the density over time. Do we know the acres of forest-land per capita and the total area a certain manpower can manage this way? Especially since you scale back to 12k years, I wouldn't be surprised if there are orders of magnitude mismatch between the work-load and the population's capacity.

> West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could

No question they did. Local village populations do this around the world today. "As much as they could" doesn't make it their garden though, nor guarantees that the methodology scales to today's land use practices. As a proof you can look at this month's Mediterranean wildfires in Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey.

> The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.

Roughly 25% to 45% of the world today is still wilderness depending how it is measured. It was probably 99% 12k years ago (I don't have data on this one).

People shape environments but not uniformly, nor necessarily forever. People being evil destroyers of nature is a last century outlook (and maybe rightly so) but in the times of those indigenous tribes, nature used to be the main adversary of humans, destroyer of populations. The idea of "wild man in harmony with nature" is a new age anachronism by people who probably haven't even camped in the wilderness, at least without a full-spectrum REI gadgetry of 21st century.

Ancient forests are fireproof. They take care for themselves. Sequoia forests were humid places.

The indigenous people lived in a different world than today. Not extensive agriculture sucking the earth dry. Not sparks from buildings or cars. Not gasoline spills. Not glass bottles around. Less people doing barbeques or smoking.

And less people. In general.

In my opinion, there's also the fact that very few people know what an old growth forest looks like compared to 2nd growth in the PNW. There's a profound difference in ecosystems with new growth having tremendously more undergrowth. If you spend enough time in the forests, you'll start to see it too. The 2nd growth stuff looks and feels imbalanced.

Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature. It can take centuries for the mix of tree species to develop to the point where the "apex" species of tree appears and then dominates the ecosystem. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex.

In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.

" Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature."

I can't be too many thousands of years. It doesn't take too many thousands to completely change the nature of forests (spruce to pine for example).

I'm rather confident very few in California "forgot" that their areas burn. Large parts of California burn down every year and have done so through the height of "excessive fire suppression". Also fire insurance premiums help jog the memory.

The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized.

And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.

No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.

All the more reason to focus on managing them, and remember the state's history of fires when deciding where and how to build structures and manage urban/wild interfaces in the future.

This really needs to be emphasized more. Just because a problem is caused by climate change doesn't mean that waiting for climate change to be stopped is the right solution. There is local action that can and should be taken.

And that action is? Government seizes control of any property that is on these interfaces and kicks the people out of their homes? Or maybe the less harsh: government buys all these properties with eminent domain, kicks people off and lets the lands go fallow?

What reality are you guys living in that you think any of this will happen and why do I feel that that same type of people placing forth such armchair planning and development mandates will be part of the crowd up in arms when people are being told they can no longer live where they do because we need to give the land back to the earth to burn in a peace.

The reality of the situation is far more complex as is the solution.

There's no need to jump to kicking people out of their homes. There are plenty of options:

Special taxing districts and/or community volunteer programs in high fire risk areas to fund fuel removal initiatives -- think a crowd of people with power tools clearing dry grass and underbrush.

Incentives and/or code changes for fire-resistant building. I know of someone in a fire-prone area who had to replace their cedar shake roof with a metal roof because the fire department told them they won't bother trying to save houses with wooden roofs.

Changing expectations and funding for controlled burns, and helping/expecting property owners to assist with clearing debris so that controlled burns remain controlled.

Ecosystem engineering beyond controlled burns -- it's a wicked hard problem, but it might be possible to breed, engineer, or import cultivars and species that are less prone to out-of-control fires.

So instead of kicking them out of your homes, you price them out with taxes? Mind you, I'm more mirroring the sentiment of the people who would be affected by your policy rather than simply dismissing it.

There are policies, lots of policies. State, county, local. All up and down CA, but none of them are moving at the speed of climate change. Controlled burning is there, fire resistant buildings are there (although if you ez-bake a house it's gone regardless), building defensible areas (green belts) around cities that fuel control is economically feasible, all on the table. You can look at cities like Paradise, which was basically destroyed, for what these policies look like.

The thing is, these policies take money, and time. Lots of both, and they already largely exist.

If someone builds a home in a flood plane... Oh wait they do.

Something has to give, subsidizing those who live in harm's way; to continue living in harms way; isn't the answer.

Mistakes were made with zoning and building code. The proper fix seems situation dependent, but probably includes some combination of local engineering changes to safety (materials, what's allowed how close to what, evac routes, etc) and abandoning indefensible positions as unsafe for habitation. It generally makes sense for society as a whole to make a one time payment to reclaim areas for nature.

Why do you think those proposals you suggest are ones I would support?

I actually know people who help fight these fires every year, and they seem to have some rather concrete ideas in mind of what should be done and I don't think it involves kicking people out of their homes.

Then share these concrete ideas with us all instead of going with, "just make local policies that fix everything".

A big one would be opening up more forest for logging.

Edit: but the main point here is listening more to the people who risk their lives to fight these fires, and the impression I get is that state politicians aren't doing that enough

> And that action is? Government seizes control of any property that is on these interfaces and kicks the people out of their homes? Or maybe the less harsh: government buys all these properties with eminent domain, kicks people off and lets the lands go fallow?

If a fire comes, just let their houses burn.

Climate change can't be stopped. Even if we magically slash CO2 entirely tomorrow we're still fucked. It's just mitigating the damage now.

> proscribed burns

"Proscribed" means prohibited. I think you must mean prescribed burns? I assume it's a typo but it conveys the opposite meaning.

Good catch, edited.

It may help your understanding a whole lot to realize that, in fact, the REAL problem REALLY IS the buildup of burnable stuff because of past wildfire policy.

Climate change explains why it is all catching on fire now. But if we had the forests that we had a century ago, and current climate conditions, we would have far smaller fires than we would if we had current forests and climate conditions from a century ago.

Did you know that in a healthy forest, most of the mature trees do not get killed by the fire when a fire comes through? It is easy to see that it has to be true - trees survive centuries and fires come through much more often than that. And the reason why it is true is that when you have minimal underbrush, it burns past quickly and doesn't catch the trunk on fire. But we have enough fuel that it burns, and stays burning long enough to catch the whole tree. Which generates such intense heat that you get local weather conditions that dry out the next area so that when it burns, its trees will catch fire more easily.

Guess what? Climate change may start the fire and make it hard to fight. But fuel load is the biggest factor in how intense it is. And that is the result of past forest policy.

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