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> 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

by cmh89 3y ago

> 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?

alexb_ 3y ago
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".
- cmh89 3y ago
  >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.
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    > 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.
    - TimTheTinker 3y ago
      > The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics. That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.
    - test098 3y ago
      > 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.
    - cmh89 3y ago
      >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.
- deleted 3y ago
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by cmh89 3y ago

alexb_ 3y ago

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".

cmh89 3y ago
>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.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > 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.
  - TimTheTinker 3y ago
    > The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics. That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.
  - test098 3y ago
    > 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.
  - cmh89 3y ago
    >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.
deleted 3y ago
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