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Comment by csharpminor | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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