Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

As always happens in these threads - and for good reason - let's be sure to mention the book "Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources", by M. Kat Anderson. I learned about this book here on HN and it has transformed the way I think about this topic.

I particularly recommend the superb audiobook.

Through a series of interviews, this book makes the case the practice of basketweaving by indigenous people living in present-day California - and the massive and well-organized trade of hundreds of different types of baskets - is/was not merely a mechanism of subsistence, but actually a brilliant wildfire control strategy.

Anderson and her many stunning interview subjects - indigenous people recalling the practices of grandparents and their siblings - make a compelling case that by encouraging the hundreds of different species which went into the creation of baskets to grow in certain places and not others, ancestors sculpted the landscape into one in which fires burned out in predictable patterns rather than scorching a significant portion of the continent.

Eh.

There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests - which is largely what the US Forest Service manages and have been in the news for megafires.

Indigenous Californians lived, overwhelmingly, in chaparral and grasslands near coastal areas and foothills rather far away. There is evidence that burns happened there (mostly burn scars in nearby coastal redwood forests, but also various written accounts by the Spanish).

That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here - so whatever wildfire management practices happened still resulted in far more land burning than today and months of smoke filled skies - which matches up with early written accounts.

Interesting.

Was the smoke less toxic?

With lower populations, the smoke impacted less population?

Is a large part of this the fact that fire supressiondid did not occur on industrial scale?

How comparable is the situation? I've heard that it is possible that california has been abnormally wet for the last 500 years. Could be a case of settling cities on a volcano. Ie: it erupts frequently on a geologic scale, but on a human time scale it is a complete surprise

> That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here

What's the source for that? It sounds insanely high - enough to burn the entire land area of California every decade or two if the fires did not overlap (I assume they must have in this model)

They specifically mentioned "grasslands" which covers a range of not forrest type lands, from waist high dense grass to sparser knee high grass bush land.

It's common enough for indigenous people to burn off dry grass ranges every year or two, often in chequered patterns to lessen the chances of wind picking up and fanning a full front across unburnt grasslands.

That's likely the 10% referred to, repeated burning of grasslands along with the livable fringes and common paths of forrest areas.

Add onto that "natural" fires from lightening strikes, etc. Some of these would start in ares with little human management and years of built up leaf litter leading to big burns that reduce large areas to ash on the ground and a few scattered trunks .. many would start in areas that have had fires in past five years or so and would result in "cool burns" through leaf litter, some tree trunk climbing, but essentially leave big trees standing and alive with clear floors for new growth.

> There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests

My impression from the book was that there was. They specifically mention burning in around Yosemite and for the harvesting and health of pines whose nuts were used for food.

Also "Eh" seems somewhat dismissive of a really thorough and well researched book. I'm curious if you've read it.

Was there any evidence that fire control was intentional or just a happy side effect of the basket weaving practice?

They used fire for much more than just promoting plant growth for baskets, I don't think OP did a very good job of explaining that.

Fire was used to promote plant growth to encourage game, keep meadows open and clear to aide hunting, select for fire tolerant plants which native preferred, and even harvesting of grasshoppers.

I'm sure the natives had some idea that frequent fires helped prevent more catastrophic burns, they would regularly schedule burns from every year to every few years depending on the landscape. But I doubt they could have predicted the kinds of catastrophic fires we've seen after decades and decades of severe fire suppression.

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