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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

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This is very true, but also the Native Americans didn't build their houses in the forest (for this reason). The white man likes to have his cabin in the woods. This is perfectly fine in northern Europe and the NE U.S., because due to the different climate, wildfires aren't so common, and wood on the forest floor there is more prone to rot instead of burn.

Now that there are so many cabins in the woods, there's probably an opportunity for a startup that makes robots to clear out the forest floor. The only problem is that the forest ecosystem has evolved to have periodic fires, but perhaps this is still the best of a series of bad options.

All joking aside, there are tons of mitigation options for this, most of which wouldn't even require robots or startups, they just require the political will to allocate money to do a thing we know needs to be done. We don't need a company to do this. We can just say "to protect both our environment and tons of people who live in the forested areas most at risk, we need to implement a set of protection measures to mitigate the probability of disastrous fires." These can be some combination of clearing forest floors, probably revisiting construction guidelines for homes/businesses in these areas, and controlled burns in areas where that's required or necessary.

But no. We do nothing, and people's homes continue to burn, and we dump yet more masses of CO2 into the atmosphere and waste thousands of trees, and of course a requisite number of human casualties. Ridiculous.

> These can be some combination of clearing forest floors, probably revisiting construction guidelines for homes/businesses in these areas, and controlled burns in areas where that's required or necessary.

But that’s communism! You bureaucrats can’t tell me what to do! (You may think I am straw-manning but this is based on real, actual conversations that I have had with real, actual people in rural California. There is a terrible brain rot that has ossified in “conservative” culture in rural America and at this point I don’t think anything can actually be done about it. These people will happily burn to death with an ignorant smile on their face.

The only problem is that then their heirs will sue PG&E and before long I'll have a $3000 electric bill.

The last thing I want to be scared of is a self-driving brush hog.

When Fern Gully came out, were you hiding under the couch?

> It's infuriating to me that Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured out

Which tribes do you mean? Some were in the plains, some were in the forests, and many more were nomadic over vast areas. There were - and still are - many peoples with wildly different lives, cultures, and understanding encompassing the millions of square miles that make up North America. Don't call us "colonized" as you imagine we're all the same.

To address your specific point, the "figured out" part was the fact that fires could only be detected by sight (or smell if close enough) so they burned regularly without a massive build up of fuel. In present times, we detect and stop fires until we can't and then catastrophe occurs.

It's infuriating how people spread that racist meme. And to add insult to injury, consider themselves holy while doing it.

> for thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured out

Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s

IDK about 'outrageous', but it is kind of frustrating it has taken us so long to figure out that the people who lived here knew what they were doing, and adapting their methods to our current society.

It hasn't "taken us this long to figure out..." the issues around prescribed burning are fairly modern and related to overreacting/incorrectly responding to some major wildfires that killed lots of people in the late 19th and early 20th century. (See the formation of the USFS and the policies promoted by them, Smoky the Bear, etc.)

Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.

On the ranking of frustrations regarding wildfires and climate change, not doing controlled burns (like the native peoples were doing) is really really low for me, especially considering all the things I just listed.

I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west, so for me it is a real concern.

The speed with which this fire ripped through was no joke, as an example:

https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-...

And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it straight into the city.

So do you believe that the lack of controlled burning is the issue here or is it

> I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west

I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests?

I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..

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