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Comment by uwagar | Hacker News Reader

if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine.

the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.

Actually they did something like slash and burn agriculture, but they apparently rotated sites, allowing forest regeneration.

Which is extremely common in native traditions pretty much around the world. Aboriginals from Australia have a concept of "cool fires" and Californians famously had very careful "cultural burns". Fires were always carefully managed not to burn too hot and kill seeds

I thought the Australians did burn entire forests to the extent that much of Australia is the result of millennia of that practice.

Is that vaguely related to slash-and-burn?

Did it also change the ecological system of Australia? Some articles said that Aboriginals might have caused the extinction of a lot of larger animals in different ways, arguably superficially similar to how the mammuth was made extinct and how lions were hunted to extinction in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#History . Was the plant diversity changed or lowered by the Aboriginals over the years?

Is there a difference in the approaches between "fire-stick burning", and the advanced farming or agricultural practices of for instance the Aztecs? Did Aboriginals and some of the Amerindian peoples north of the Aztecs do "fire-stick farming" by simply burning a region and then move in and simply primarily hunt and also gather from certain plants a bit, slightly organized; or did they have large-scale, high-density farming of crops like the Aztecs? Would Pueblos' farming techniques, and those doing Three Sisters farming techniques, be closer to that of the Aztecs than to fire-stick burning? Was fire-stick burning typically more nomadic, and the Aztecs' and others' techniques more sedentary?

> While this practice is often cited as a way to improve small gardens for individual use, its historical value lay in larger-scale implementations designed to nurture and sustain entire communities.[14]

they also maintained cattle? i dont think 3 million people would have used only 3% of the forest area if their main diet was bovine heavy.

> and clearing for beef production

I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest.

You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.

i prefer you fix your bugs instead.

So some countries have more forest than grassland?

a) There's way more grassland in the world than forests. (On all continents.)

b) Cows walk as they graze, the meat even delivers itself. You just need a herder.

Shrimple as. The scheme worked for millennia with zero problems. Nobody had a problem with beef production until tariffs and other fuckery was invented.

But apparently we need to switch to eating bugs instead of fixing the root of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Beef should not the the main meat in some places. There is a particular problem in the Americas with cattle. Tariffs do sometimes reduce imports from places where cattle are not a great fit - i.e. the very places where forests are cleared too grow grass.

All the beef (and most other meat too) I eat is grown in the same country. For a premium you can get higher quality local (i.e. same county) meat.

eat your bugs bro. dont fix them.

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