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.
* 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
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.