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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked this isn't being done already. But what on earth is the reasoning in this article? There are plenty of great reasons to do controlled burns, but for some reason the article says controlled burns are good because:

> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.

When talking about the reason for overgrowth, the article talks about how it's the fault of Europeans who said controlled burns are primitive. The person they reference is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They reference the "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".

Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?

View on HN

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a rather jaded take. The article covers the overlap of two newsworthy things:

#1 - To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years. This changed a few hundred years ago, and the result is the unprecedented fires we have been experiencing. The government is reacting by greatly increasing funding for prescribed burns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best solution at this time.

#2 - The state is bound by federal treaties with the sovereign nations that reside within its borders. The bounds of these treaties are hotly contested. The sovereign nations believe that the treaties grant them the right to the lifestyle they historically had. The federal government wants to curtail activities they believe, if unchecked, might cause lasting negative effects. One of the rights these sovereign nations had restricted were controlled burns, which they call cultural burns. These rights are being slowly returned now that the state and feds view controlled burns in a more positive light.

There is a 3rd indirect element to this article, which is that it is trying to address an audience that has been affected by years of the Smokey the Bear 'all fire is bad' mentality.

You should reread the article. I'm pretty sure you brought along the baggage you are complaining about.

Please make your substantive points without swipes, such as you crossed into at the end. Your comment would be fine without that bit (and maybe the beginning bit as well, though that wasn't so bad).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The messaging around managed fires by indigenous peoples is a smart narrative for California.

You will not persuade hardcore preservationists in California by listing out the economic/quality of life benefits of controlled burns. They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.

The key to changing preservationists minds is not to say "there are many benefits to controlled burns (for humans)" but rather, "the state we are creating in forests without burns is not natural."

This is exactly what is happening. People have been arguing for controlled burns for decades, and they're finally making headway now that that they have a relatively bulletproof argument: these fires are a newer development since humans settled this land, the original settlers had a tested and proven method for dealing with them, so let's go back to doing that.

> They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.

"Natural state" is a term with a debatable definition. Is it:

* how it was when the Native Americans lived on it and did whatever they did

* how it was when there are no humans around at all

And these aren't even necessarily the only definitions, or a binary choice (it could be a spectrum/tunable).

Oh it gets worse than that: we're in an interglacial period right now, coming out of an ice age.

When the Bering Strait ice bridge formed and the descendants of native peoples migrated down through the American continent, California was not a dry desert. It was probably covered by lush forests and wetlands with a much lower sea level than today so there's literally no way to return it to that "natural state"

With the Kelp highway hypothesis [1], humans were here for most of that transition so really there's a whole list of "natural states" to pick from (that we largely can't return to)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)#K...

You're looking for rationality in an irrational position. These "preservationists" are really just environmental Catholics. Underneath the environmental rhetoric, they've internalized a version of original sin and desire to submit themselves to punishment for said sin. To suggest modern solutions and forward progress would be to suggest that the sinners could erase the original sin by sinning more.

To convince them to take action you have to validate their self-imposed guilt with images of reverting to noble savages clapping hands and playing pan-flutes around a fire while the animals sway in time to the music.

There was a time I would have said these people need education, now I'll settle for using their guilt to herd them in the correct direction.

One could argue that anything that ever happens is natural, since humans are part of nature.

History of fire lookouts. https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r1/recreation/?cid=fsp5_03080.... What caused the wildfires of 1910 https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb54447...

...just because it is interesting.

Well technically, controlled burns aren't natural either.

Right, but people were engaged in burning since the glaciers retreated. So there's no possible pre-burning ecology to return to since the glaciers are LONG gone and the mega-fauna all died. So we can have either unpredictable, large-scale burns or we can have predictable controlled burns that the ecosystem had adapted to for the better part of 15k years.

There is also the fact that the natural state includes letting lightning induced fires burn out.

People have been pointing out the folly of not allowing regular burns for decades, no idea why it is only now getting traction with this weird take. It's not like the divide between those who wanted controlled burns and those who didn't was racial.

> They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.

Which is what's happening.

Its natural state includes devastating wildfires every so often when lightning touches off dry undergrowth that hasn't been cleared away for years.

> To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years.

"Native Americans" arrived here about 30,000 years ago. For all the time prior to that forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.

The idea that they somehow had some advanced knowledge that Europeans lacked has no scientific basis, they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.

> they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.

Or as much fixed and immobile infrastructure that would be endangered by fire-- if there is nothing you care about nearby, why not set a fire to aid in hunting or to clear out plants you can't eat in favor of ones you can?

Just because they intentionally set fires that doesn't itself make it environmentally good-- it's an extraordinarily racist view that the indigenous people weren't capable of environmental destruction just because they were less effective at it than industrial civilizations. The noble savage protector of the land is a racist fantasy of people raised on a diet of Disney movies, not reality.

Right. For some reason people have figured out that “noble savage” is racism, but there’s a bit of latency when it comes to “ignoble white man” flavor of racism.

>forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.

This is, by definition, not a controlled burn.

It is, just controlled in a larger macro sense than what humans are capable of.

What they knew was that it was easier to hunt and forage in forests after fire had removed the underbrush. They knew that they would be back next year chasing dear, so they decided to light a fire on the way out to make it easier. No advanced knowledge needed. As time went on, the practice became a ritual.

The cynical take usually wins. The public as a whole is ignorant of history, couldn’t care less about indigenous people, and is keenly worried about any sort of threat.

The first time the controlled burn goes out of control the initiative will be back to square one.

The article talks about the historical reasons that controlled burns weren't used in California by the settlers. They're talking to Native American historians because they're leveraging Native American preservation techniques. Addressing the root cause of the problem is important. Here's a good video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe43QK85448

I feel like other states could equally inform California of techniques for controlled burns because the techniques weren’t lost?

UC Davis didn’t empower ancient indigenous community practices uncovering mystical oral history, they went to people that just googled it like everyone else because there has been perpetual cross drift in how to do controlled burns in even more optimal ways. Gullible af wow. This is like the Blazing Saddles of fire control.

The only reason California wasn't doing controlled burns, according to the article, is because they didnt have hush money for when they inevitably burn your house down and lose the lawsuit, and now they topped it up with a paltry $20 million.

The rest of this article is quite a bit of deflection.

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.

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.

What are those specific techniques?

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

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.

Australia is learning the same lessons recently - consulting their aboriginal populations for how they always did controlled burns.

You’re shocked it’s not being done already, and uninterested in why that might be?

I’m of European descent, too. It’s ok. Our ancestors were imperfect. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that and to learn from this example where the so-called primitives had better practices than the self-described civilized people.

It’s not a personal attack if you don’t take it personally.

That seems uncharitable to the OP. Context is important. I think that in the present cultural climate, the OP's interpretation is entirely reasonable. He isn't saying European settlers or colonizers didn't make bad decisions (though often we are fed tendentious caricatures here), or denying that there might be something that can be learned from a native population. It's the forced emphasis.

Writing is not just producing a bag of atomic propositions. What is written must be justified and relevant. When something forced occurs within some piece of writing, it betrays a bias, or even an ulterior motive. In this case, controlled burns (or letting natural wildfires play out) aren't a new thing. They're older than agriculture, and they are and have been used across the world in modern times for some time. Look at a live map of forest fires and you'll notice how many are controlled burns. It's not as if we're considering the use of controlled burns for the first time and discovering some long-forgotten wisdom of the natives here. Frankly, what's weird is that California is just now doing this.

But I also wouldn't make a big deal out of this article either. I think learning about precolonial practices like this is interesting, regardless of the bias or motives of the article's author.

there's "forced emphasis" because controlled burns which had been occurring for 1000s of years were outlawed by european settlers, leading to the current catastrophic wildfires that we experience every year in california. historical context isn't some kind of "woke" gotcha - it's literally the history of controlled burns and why banning them has caused our current problems.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, most of the forests in California were clearcut and the large, spread out, old growth forests that the Indians (native americans, indigenous people, etc.) used controlled burns on don't exist any more. In 1000 years we could possible get back to that but until then we will have to discover how to do these burns in the forest as it exists and decide if they are a good idea.

One of my favorite hikes in Oregon is a cermonial white oak grove that was crafted by generations of controlled burns. It's starting to fade, but walking the paths it's humbling to imagine what it was like at its full glory. I was also taught to think of the American genocide as a fait-accompli but of course the reality is more complex and the history has not been erased.

I'm not taking it as an attack at all. The people who hated controlled burns for racist reasons (such as calling people "primitives") were being incredibly stupid. I am not denying that at all, that should be obvious. The point is, that in and of itself is not a reason to do controlled burns. The reason we do controlled burns is that they control wildfires, help make more of the state inhabitable, etc - we don't do it because it's the opposite of what racists did.

moreover people have been calling for controlled burns for decades (if anything, typically republicans). It's hard to believe at this point what's holding it back is racism.

Part of what's holding it back is expensive multi-year environmental reviews for logging projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li_Rv4t2htc

Yes, selective logging and controlled burns have to be paired if the forest has ever been clear cut.

Where I live (Santa Cruz Mountains) the vast old growth redwood trees were extensively logged (via clear cutting) into the early-to-mid 20th Century.

Then widespread logging just stopped. And for at least the past 50-60 years there has been intense hostility to logging. Everywhere, doesn't matter if public or private land.

The redwood groves that have grown back are all extremely densely packed, relatively small diameter trees mixed in with tan and coast live oaks and lots of smaller shrubbery. Lots of low branches on all trees. Lots of redwood needles and dead tan oak and coast live oak leaves laying thick on the forest floor.

Perfect tinder.

About 3 years ago a lightening storm sparked a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of acres.

Controlled burns would have helped remove the forest duff. But the trees themselves are perfectly set up to respond to fire, unlike in an old growth forest.

The regulations that ban the practices is the racism here

The point of bringing it up is because one of the natural questions is "why did we stop doing controlled burns?". If you don't address this, people will think there was a good reason when, in this case, it doesn't seem like there was.

This article is not written as a way to explain to the world the fact that California will begin backing intentional burns, it's written to explain why that wasn't already the case from a historical perspective.

Controlled burns are being done already by the government. The government owns most of the forested land.

This is about a major expansion of the concept, and includes (1) an insurance scheme so that private landowners can do a burn without fear of bankruptcy and (2) restoring cultural burns that Indians performed to manage land before they were banned by people who didn't understand them.

What is particularly harmful about the take you cite is that its not even relevant. What is relevant is the opposition to controlled burns today are more or less the exact same as they've always been I'd guess: local people who have no interest in breathing shit air for two or three weeks. By focusing on this other narrative we misunderstand today's stances on the issue, and how they might be rectified. For example, I'm sure local residents in impoverished rural areas wouldn't mind a stipend for the poor air quality during the burn period, for instance, which might make these burns more politically palatable.

> I'm shocked this isn't being done already. But what on earth is the reasoning in this article? There are plenty of great reasons to do controlled burns, but for some reason the article says controlled burns are good because: >> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.

Don't be shocked. Part of the reason they're couching it this way is to avoid acknowldeging yet another Sacramento Policy Failure

"In California, two different approvals are needed for a burn — an air permit and a smoke management plan from the California Air Resources Board or a regional air-pollution district. In some cases, Cal Fire has to sign off, too."

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24934569...

Yes, welcome to 2023 politics, when there's one reason that's the universal argument for or against anything.

The article mentions for one sentence that Europeans thought it was “primitive”.

The majority of the articles focus is on insurance liability.

Do any of you people actually read before you comment?

"Europeans" thought it was "primitive", universally? Or some white person somewhere in the annals of time wrote down that opinion once?

What's bizarre is that in spite of that non-sequitur, fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850. This isn't some ancient technique we're only just now rediscovering. It's been well-established practice for over a century, only recently eschewed in favor of assuaging irrational environmentalists.

no, early europeans who first settled in California believed the practice was primitive. later generations would continue:

> In a 1918 letter, a district ranger at Klamath National Forest wrote to his supervisor that the US Forest Service’s most important duty was to keep fires to a minimum, but “renegade whites and Indians” were setting fires “for pure cussedness”, not caring whether the fires harmed others.

> He suggested that the solution was “to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him”. He also suggested hiring a female missionary who had “gained the confidence” of Indigenous people to convince them to adopt settler theories about fire.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...

Again, pointing out to an opinion by one group or individual among white people is not a universal thing. It might shock you to hear this, but white people commonly disagree about various approaches to problem solving and politics.

Controlled burning has been used in the South by white people since the early 1800s: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/19091, where "it was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers".

One ranger in California in 1918 does not speak for an entire race for God's sake. That should be obvious.

Well this isn't as fun as a narrative, so I'm not listening!

Arson wasn’t invented until Ronald Reagan was elected so surely setting “fire for pure cussedness” couldn’t have been a reference to arson in your n=1 anecdote which nicely proved to parent point you seem to take issue with.

My understanding is that it was being done until relatively recently when CA politicians leaned so heavily left that burning small fires to prevent bigger ones was somehow a threat to the environment and global warming. I haven't confirmed this personally, but if lawmakers are passing laws to ban gas powered leaf blowers and kitchen stoves, it's not hard to believe.

You should read the article. It is about how they are limiting liability and encouraging more burning.

Burning is allowed, has been allowed, and has been an active part of California forest management for decades.

Bans on small off-road engines and new indoor gas burning appliances are generally driven by health concerns (smog, indoor air quality, and noise pollution), and backed by pretty solid science. Not that global warming isn't also a damn good reason to ban these things.

I'm perfectly fine with politicians who ban convenience devices that cause extreme externalities to other people like smog, excess noise, and childhood asthma. That doesn't seem like a radical left position.

The article doesn't explain why this wasn't a problem before, I mean at least I don't remember having "fire season" a decade ago. Maybe it's some other cause but I'm still doubting the reasons behind what I would call "society engineering" in politics instead of incentivizing alternative technologies so that they are better and cheaper.

At the end of the day politicians weigh the opinions of their constituents who vote them in more than experts. Given two politicians in an area, one who listens to expert advice about controlled burns, and one who buckles to public pressure surrounding local air quality or forest closures, the latter is always going to be more likely to remain in office.

> The person they talk to is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They talk to "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".

They didn't talk to anyone, they just used an article with more depth to support their little, less deep article.

>Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?

What does this mean? You can't talk about wildfires in the west without talking about how westward expansion brought terrible forest management practices and suppressed traditional management practices that kept forests healthy. How are you involving racism in this topic?

Thank you, corrected.

It's not that I don't think that discussion has a place. It's that I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back. There are plenty of great justifications for bringing it back, and I'm glad they are, but "native americans used to do this" is not a reason.

That sort of reasoning is how you get people claiming that "alternative medicine" is better than the medical miracles we produce today. You need actual data and reasons to support things, not just "native americans did it and racist europeans rejected it".

>I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back

That's not the justification. The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.

"Thanks to centuries of overzealous fire protection and the suppression of Indigenous cultural burns — which Europeans found “primitive” — forests have become overgrown, accumulating piles of underbrush and fallen trees. In trying to prevent wildfires altogether, we’ve been essentially storing up bigger and bigger piles of fuel. And with that extra fuel comes fires that burn more ferociously, exacerbated by drought and drier conditions from climate change.

“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning said in a University of California article. Areas that were once open valleys are now choked with conifers and other fuel sources that were not there when cultural burns helped groom the land."

The justification for controlled burns is written here

"Setting fires intentionally may sound like a paradoxical approach to fire control, but if they are done correctly, controlled burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, helping to prevent the catastrophically large, hot fires that overwhelm firefighting resources. They also are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem."

It sounds like you'd like to know more about wildfire and how indigenous burning practices suppress mega fires. I encourage you to read the linked materials, as this little article isn't going to go deep enough to answer your questions.

> The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.

tl;dr Yes, we should do more controlled burns. No, our current situation has very little to do with "traditional burning practices".

Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.

_Was_ racism a reason? Sure, but the past is not the present. The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.

The greenies didn't just oppose "traditional burning practices" but also _modern_ burning practices that are used in other US states, and they have much more control over California's policy (and even Fed Interior policy) than racist bogeymen.

Even this correction is being driven by those politics, as a return to "traditional burning practices" after (real and imagined) historical injustice.

>Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.

I'm sorry, this is just incredibly incorrect. Forest management on the federal level is owned by logging companies. The drive to put out fires, even in remote areas, is driven by a desire to not lose acres that could be logged. It's taken activist decades to convince the Forest Service and the BLM to do controlled burns and we *still* put out naturally-ignited fires in remote areas.

We’re talking about California. Are you saying California is owned by the logging companies? That seems rather dubious.

I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?

>We’re talking about California. Are you saying California is owned by the logging companies? That seems rather dubious.

Most of the forested land in California is owned by the federal government, who has historically managed the land based on the priorities of natural resource extractors like logging companies.

This article is about the PNW, but it functioned the same way in California

https://wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Ron-Vorderstrasse.pdf

>I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?

You're complete lack of knowledge on this subject doesn't make me incorrect. Please go do some reading and come back with an intelligent argument.

From 2017 to 2021, an average of 60,000 wildfires occurred each year, and about one-fifth of them were on federal lands.

> The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.

so still the people who colonized north america? you've turned this entire thing into a left wing vs right wing culture war issue when the article is just providing historical context. nobody is attacking the right wing in this article - not sure why you're perceiving it as one.

> The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.

That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.

Funny, because back in Europe (or just the UK really), controlled burns would be more strongly associated with the "landed gentry" and their grouse shooting.

> I'm shocked this isn't being done already.

Unfortunately, we didn't just stop prescribed burns, we stopped natural burns as well.

> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.

https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

So we have forests laden with nearly a hundred years worth of unburned fuel.

the article is about being read and help the publisher make money.

the narrative "we bad , they good" always sells

> I'm shocked this isn't being done already.

What's more shocking is why it wasn't being done.

> Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?

We are talking concrete reasons. We have to first understand the concrete reasons why it wasn't being done already first. You yourself said it is shocking. Don't you want to know why? What were the reasons against controlled burn? Then we can figure out if we should do it. Just because the concrete reasons upset you doesn't mean they aren't worthy of being discussed.

There are many things to be upset about. I don't think controlled burns are it.

> I don't think controlled burns are it.

it's not being upset about controlled burns, but the "you're racist yet again and you didn't even know it!"

This is the Successor Ideology that's infecting everything. The managerial class views the world through this fashionable secular religion that's based on original sin, self-flagellation, and believes in the noble savage myth.

It doesn't call Europeans stupid, talks about westward expansion, or racism. I think you are so on edge looking for anti western bias that you extrapolate what the article said so that it fits your narrative.

I don't have a narritive here. I don't even think they are wrong it what they say - europeans WERE being racist idiots by completely disregarding what natives did because they thought they were better. What I'm saying is, that in and of itself is not a reason to bring back controlled burns. The reason you bring back controlled burns is not because Europeans rejected it due to racism. The reason you bring back controlled burns is because they work.

but the article doesn't say any of that at all... so where are you getting this? can you actually quote a portion of the article that calls europeans "racist idiots" (a term which you've used multiple times throughout this thread), or provide a quote that states that we should bring back controlled burns because it's anti-racist? the entire article is literally saying that we should bring back the burns because they work, not for the reasons you're listing.

No where in the article does it suggest that

"Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists? "

This article is weird because forest management became an extremely partisan issue recently. Do you remember the whole "rake the forests" thing?

Specifically, no of course we don't rake the forests. But generally, yes, accumulated fuel and forest management is at fault. Great pains are taken to redefine policies in progressive terms to avoid the appearance of agreeing with one's political opponents.

Both sides do this btw.

The article may be needlessly framing forest fire management as a racial issue. But it shouldn’t surprise or offend anyone that the people who are from here and have a deep respect for nature as part of their culture would have a better understanding of how to maintain the forest. That professor has valuable knowledge to share and for a long time, people weren’t willing to listen.

The TL;DR of why is that without ground clearing fires there is a build up of trees and debris, resulting in what would have previously been a patchwork of groves of trees turning into thick continuous forest coverage with no breaks. In addition to this the ground gets cluttered with fuel like dead trees, needles and the like, and there is a build up of intermediate trees that help carry any fire on the ground into the canopy of the larger trees.

Paul Hessburg of the Forest Service and University of Washington has a good TEDx talk on this that helps explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas

But why burn something - trees that can be used for useful purposes, ie. house building and paper products? For a sensible approach it would be - do select logging and then let small controlled fires happen in the area that has been logged. That way you get into situations where you don't have these tinderbox situations and are extracting 100% renewable resources.

The dead trees left behind are a huge boon for insects and the animals that feed on them. Focusing on extracting resources are missing the point of managing a healthy forest. As many leftovers of burns and logging as possible should stay in the ecosystem.

What about global warming? If you believe burning fossil fuels is damaging (it is), then shouldn’t we try to minimize that?

I've seen controlled burns being done in California in past. Not sure what is new. Maybe state vs federal properties?

Nobody wants to accept liability if a fire gets out of control.

If it happens naturally, it's nobody's fault. If it happens because the state is doing a controlled burn, the state foots the bill.

Take a look at how many of the wildfires are due to unmaintained power lines if you REALLY want to blow a gasket.

Ditto. Every wildfire season we hear about how controlled burns would help mitigate the risks and...they haven't been doing that?

At what point does the Fed Gov say, "wait a minute, if you want disaster funding you've got to clean up your act." And certainly the insurance industry has lobbying power, and nothing from them either?

This has a foul smell. I'm rarely pro-litigation but CA residents should start a class action suit again the state for what looks like negligence.

The federal government has full control over much of forest land in california and could have done burns there whenever they wanted.

Then name them in the suit as well. But this we have a helpful tool but we're not going to use it is absurd.

>purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.

Is there any evidence of this? I mean, I know that the indigenous people did so to try to contain fires, because wildfires have been an issue for millions of years. But is there any evidence it was "more successful" historically? I'm not a huge believer that ancient cultures had these things figured out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...

I'll let you go into the further reading section for more information.

No native writing system was known among North American Indians at the time of first European contact.

Please explain the type of evidence you could gather that would tell you American Indians thought intentional burning was a good idea and part of their planned forest management.

From what I'm reading on your link the evidence is evidence of fires burning things down, thus the Indians had an advanced forest management system in place.

Instead of being argumentative about this, look where we actually have documentation, which is aboriginal burns in the AU.

It turns out that people that lived in fire country for hundreds/thousands of years built up practices of burning when fires would remain calm rather than explode into conflagrations. "Advanced" is relative in this sense.

Between this and natural fires the landscape had a patchwork quality that acted as natural fire breaks.

Europeans weren’t stupid. They just labeled native populations as primitive and decided what they do is how everything should be.

You can see this from ignoring food forests and insisting on farming when the soil was just throwing up rocks year on year in north east U.S.

Saying they weren't stupid then providing a list of stupid things they did kind of under minds your point.

It's not out of stupidity, its out of feelings of superiority.

Which is stupid.

But not stupid in a racial way.

Their bigoted mindset dismissed how the indigenous people did things because they saw themselves as better than them. It absolutely was racist. And stupid.

History is more nuanced than people want it to be. If you think that white skinned people specifically are or were all racists in a unique way that sets them apart from other nations, creeds, tribes, then yes that is both stupid (demonstrably ahistorical) and itself racist. If you want to compare the relative intellectual achievements of different races, it sounds like you do, that to me is inherently racist. Grouping people of a different historical epoch based on the color of their skin and assigning some judgement to that group, beyond obvious historical fallacy, is literally racism. But I don’t see that sort of racism as being unique or even uncommon. It’s just the racist thinking that’s fashionable today. Don’t follow fashion, that’s the lesson history should teach us. Natives respect their ancestors you should too, but all of them not just the dark skinned.

It isn't a stretch, by any means, to point out the racism of colonizers that viewed and treated the indigenous people of the Americas as savages.

The fact that you're trying so hard to explain that away says a tonne about you. I recommend that you take a long, hard look at yourself and try figure out why you feel the need to justify bigotry.

Hubris. It’s not a fault exclusive to whites. We favor the latest greatest “trust the science” of the moment over traditional but non-scientific (in our estimation) public policies. Expand your mind. There’s much more to learn from history than white peoples were racist. Of course they were. Hubris still exists and it’s better for you if you aren’t blind to it.

This is correct.

It wasn’t out of stupidity, it was out of malice and bigotry.

It’s also a culture of domination that has stuck with us to this day.

> I'm shocked this isn't being done already

It is being done already, and has been for over a century. It's just facebook boomers got it in their heads that it wasn't.

In my opinion, you seem to think there’s some sort of left-leaning political agenda in this post.

Interestingly, a right-leaning college “friend” on Facebook uses (and links to articles that use) the same “Indians have been doing it for thousands of years” argument to complain about Democrats, California, and conservationists.

Okay? I don't care what "side" someone is on when they use this argument. I still think that's not a valid argument. Just because I agree with the conclusion he reaches (controlled burns are good) doesn't mean the logic was sound.

Ok. It was hard to tell based on the language you used.

> Why burn on purpose? It admittedly seems counterintuitive — or even dangerous — but purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.

This is what you’re getting hung up on when you should really be focusing on the highlighted (and enlarged) quote:

“Setting fires intentionally may sound unusual, but if done correctly they reduce the fuel available for wildfires and are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem.”

The logic is sound in my opinion. Group X of people were doing things a “better” way, have continued to want to do things the “better” way but were prevented by Group Y, and it’s been _proven_ that their “way” was and is indeed “better”.

I will acknowledge that the article is lacking in the _proven_ sense. But it’s still there.

The reason why this article even mentions Native Americans though is because the new program that is being sponsored specifically targets cultural (i.e. Native American) burns.

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