Periodic reminder of the Native American approach to minimizing the power of forest fires.
They say the California forests are not "natural." They were planted by humans, 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.
They learned that if you don't do controlled burns, that in
~100 years, you get fire tornadoes.😬
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mby72d2Vz30
It's difficult for many US people to accept that native Americans planted entire forests. They seem too big.
But just in the past 20 years, we've seen multiple examples in many countries, of one individual human creating entire forests. In India. Brazil. Indonesia. China. Etc.
Like this dude:
https://youtube.com/shorts/APL35AVtWqM?si=Zoqo8tJnKD4ptwuN
The Karuk tribe says, "Making forests is easy! Just plant a few trees every day for a few years. But some years are drier, hotter, and windier. You can't let fuel build up. If you don't do controlled burns, then 1 year within about 100, you will pay a terrible price. The sky will turn red."
Indigenous people learned this the hard way when they were starting out planting forests. They said that the biggest fires crossed entire rivers by raining burning embers for miles, and "created their own weather of wind and lightning." Entire villages disappeared.
Of course we didn't believe them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q92H5PHsWQY
I guess what I'm saying is, all those feel good videos of people planting entire forests in Brazil and India and China and Mexico etc, are probably making the same mistake that indigenous people in those same places made checks notes 20,000 years ago, before they figured it out.
Yes, we do some burns. No, we don't do enough. There's still too much fuel.
And we stopped burns for the better part of the past 100 years. We started limited burns again in large part due to the advocacy of people like Dr. Frank Lake, a Karuk person who also has a PhD in Environmental Sciences.👍🏿
https://research.fs.usda.gov/about/people/franklake#orgs-tab
To put it in perspective, in 2023, California treated 700,000 acres. That's a lot! But California has ~33 million acres of forest.🤯
For much of the past 20,000 years, many parts of that 33 million acres were treated regularly. Then for the most recent 100 years, they were mostly not treated at all.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/01/08/california-forest-management-hotter-drier-climate/
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@mekkaokereke In the Midwest, we do controlled burns of prairie land every year, because that's what we learned from Native American experience and practices.
It's mind boggling that despite the obvious price of not doing this, Western US states are overall massively underinvested in managing our forests
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@mekkaokereke @saraislet a large amount of the western states are owned by the federal government (esp Wyoming and Nevada). In this case, part of the issue is these hilly areas around LA are where houses have been built by the relatively wealthy citizens of the area, so even a controlled burn would be very close to top tier homes. Probably not a popular option.
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@leeCookson @mekkaokereke @saraislet I suspect you could get by with simulating controlled burns through non burn means. And that might be better for CO2 levels too.
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@dalias @leeCookson @mekkaokereke @saraislet for fire control sure, but not for ecological control
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@mensrea @dalias @leeCookson @mekkaokereke @saraislet
But if the fire burns down faster due to the return fire - wouldn't that be better for the environment?
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@edithmair @dalias @leeCookson @mekkaokereke @saraislet it's more tricky than that. socal, here in the western cape, and large parts of auz have the same issue. the plant life needs the fire to regenerate properly but it needs to burn through fast enough to not sterilize the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ecology
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@leeCookson @mekkaokereke @saraislet
Option B didn’t quite work out nicely either
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@mekkaokereke And lately, the problem with controlled burns is that the window to do them safely in is getting tighter every year (I wonder why (no I don't)). Even if you had the manpower and resources to do all the preventative burn-offs you needed to do, you probably still couldn't do it due to unfavourable weather conditions.
My wife is involved with these kind of burns in a small area here in Queensland, AU. Even they haven't been able to do as much as they reasonably needed this past year.
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@rainynight65 @mekkaokereke Similar thing is happening with electricity grid maintenance. Historically it's been done during "shoulder seasons" where heating/cooling isn't placing increased demand on the grid.
There are fewer months of stable moderate temperatures to do the maintenance in now
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@rainynight65 @mekkaokereke And in a lot of places around me there needs to be a BIG manual reduction in fuel before it's safe enough to do a burn. Which means it doesn't happen and the fire danger keeps climbing.
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@neckspike @rainynight65 @mekkaokereke
Classic case of the costs not being born by the right people. Just imagine how much forest management you could do with the $50 billion that the damage costs each year!
Edit: the estimated cost of the current LA fires alone has reached $150 billion, making the under-investment in forest management even more dumb.
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@rainynight65 @mekkaokereke I just saw today someone posting about places using goats to help clear things when it's not safe to do a burn. Goat mowers ftw. :-)
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@baishen @rainynight65 @mekkaokereke From what I've read, goats are a great fire risk reduction strategy.
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@klausfiend @baishen @rainynight65 @mekkaokereke
Goats rock and they're cute too.
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@rainynight65 @mekkaokereke
i didn't think controlled burns do much in so cal. It's chapparal, and non-native grasses and such.
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@mekkaokereke
An additional consideration is to use native species that are not planted as a monoculture.
Eucalyptus from Australia has been planted in many countries, and unfortunately it crowds out native species and burns like a torch.
Portugal has had some bad experiences with eucalyptus. Chile has recently ceased to plant it in reforestation programs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/24/eucalyptus-plantations-are-expanding-and-being-blamed-for-devastation-pedrogao-grande-aoe
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@donray @mekkaokereke I am still blown away that anyone would mass plant eucalypts like they have. I'm Aussie, and stuffing around with eucalypts and not doing enough controlled burns is a recipe for disaster. We still don't do enough, but I don't understand doing so little. There are rules in rural areas here on keeping areas clear near homes and building standards on fire-proofing. Eucalypts are a fact of life here, and necessary for wildlife, our very own oil-filled exploding trees. :/
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@YellowReadis @mekkaokereke
'
Interesting. And, yes, wildlife is another reason to plant native trees. Apparently, outside of Australia, eucalyptus is not good for most wild critters.
There are eucalyptus plantations in California, but I don't know if they have caused a lot of trouble there.
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@donray @YellowReadis
Now we need to introduce Koalas to eat the eucalyptus. 🐨
Look, I don't like it any more than you do! But we can't go backwards now. Only forwards to Koala town!
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@mekkaokereke @donray There are many Indigenous communities here that are also trying to promote traditional fire management practices. Settlers arriving initially described the landscape as park-like, and you could walk dozens of kilometres through Eucalypt forests with short grass. It was fire-stick farming - new grass encouraged kangaroos into the area for hunting. The whole landscape was a garden 40-60 thousand years old. We are only now slowly bringing this back. Many plants here only germinate after fire, and the adult trees are designed to burn at least the outer bark. (Alas on koalas, they are very fussy, and only like certain eucalpts in the right mix - queens of the bush, with similar regal appetites.)
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@YellowReadis@mathstodon.xyz @donray@mastodon.online @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io Oh FSM, the eucalyptus was one of the factors that made the Oakland firestorm in '91 so insane. It's considered an invasive species here, but it is everywhere all around the bay.
I was a little kid at the time, but this wasn't long after my parents had bought a house, and we ended up hosting my Aunt, Uncle, cousin, and their pet pot belly pig, as well as a family they were neighbors with. The neighbor family lost their home, my third grade teacher lost her home. The Aunt, Uncle, and cousin who stayed with us were like a block or so down from the fire line. Another Aunt and Uncle were like three houses down from the fire line elsewhere in the hills, and their neighbor across the street had all their windows opened when they evacuated, so the smoke damage ruined the inside of that house. My grandparents were a couple blocks away from the fire line in another part of the hills.
Fuck, it's crazy to think it's been over thirty years since then. I think Oakland Fire still remembers the lesson from that, but it's probably been long enough that home owners in the hills aren't doing the clearing and maintenance they should be. I wonder how many people who live in the Oakland hills now lived there at the time and remember?
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@deathkitten @mekkaokereke @donray @YellowReadis
For those of us going about our lives that day it was unbelievable. I was driving to my mom‘s, on the Concord side of the hills, from the Bay Area and marveling at the rainfall of ash. I first didn’t understand, then I saw the hills across the bay
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @deathkitten @mekkaokereke @donray @YellowReadis
all sorts of lessons.
the UC berkeley unix folks realized they didn't have off site storage for their source archive outside the possible fire range and hurredly starting FTP'ing to the east coast. the fire didn't get that far but i think that anyone involved at all starting thinking about disaster and disaster recovery in a whole new way.
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@YellowReadis @donray @mekkaokereke
lake tahoe had a problem where they weren't allowing controlled burns because they were more concerned with erosion making the lake muddy. wound up with a massive fire in south lake tahoe from all the overgrown underbrush, etc.
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@paul_ipv6 @YellowReadis @donray @mekkaokereke
Yep, so they got both problems massive fire storm and erosion.
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@mekkaokereke I remember being taught that particular area is chaparral. and chaparral vegetation adapted to fire so much it actually thrives afterwards.
Humans ignoring nature is always a horror movie waiting to happen.
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@jdm2 @mekkaokereke I’m willing to bet that it’s adapted to low intensity fires. And these aren’t.
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@jdm2
Lots of vegetation are adapted to thrive after fires, including the few remaining redwood forests. Illinois prairies aren't all that different from chaparral (and dry, overgrown prairies may be even more prone to fires than chaparral), which most of Illinois does controlled burns on regularly.
I'm with you: it takes attention and care and investment in the nature around us to prevent it from turning into a nightmare that destroys humans (especially after the decades of us destroying nature)
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@mekkaokereke there's also increasing evidence (I don't have the study at hand, but I could probably track it down if you haven't seen it) that regions with high "natural" biodiversity in the Amazon are actually heavily cultivated areas, maintained over thousands and thousands of years by the folks living there.
(Who, incidentally, have been saying that the whole time.)
The forests just don't look like European-style row crops, so we don't see them.
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@cliffle @mekkaokereke like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta ?
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@jlargentaye @mekkaokereke yes!
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@cliffle @mekkaokereke this is the central thesis of Seeing Like A State. Strongly recommended.
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@cliffle @mekkaokereke
I'm pretty sure I've heard of this too, in a slightly different form -- I've seen a claim that there are patches of the Amazon that have anomalously high densities of human-edible plants, which are thought to be a botanical remnant of prior cultivation.
I've never actually run it down for critical assessment.
Edit to add, might be this one (Nature paywall, but abstract is readable):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0205-y
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@cliffle @mekkaokereke
They made biochar. That's the only reason there is anything edible in the Amazon. The ancient people engineered it.
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@cliffle @mekkaokereke this is interesting. I wonder whether it is easy to model mathematically. Maybe I should write a paper about it... 🤔
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@mekkaokereke
Far too many prescribed burns become uncontrolled disasters. New Mexico has suffered much in this regard.
"Prescribed burns in New Mexico triggered two major blazes in 2022, including the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, the largest in state history. That led Congress, for the second time in 23 years, to pass a law to compensate victims of a wildfire triggered by the federal government. Both occurred in New Mexico."
https://sourcenm.com/2024/02/23/they-lost-everything-in-new-mexicos-biggest-wildfire-now-theyre-sounding-the-alarm-for-others/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_New_Mexico_wildfires
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@KrajciTom
For these, the problem is "controlled burns that are really uncontrolled burns." 🙂🙃
Doing a controlled burn safely is hard. It gets even harder when the weather is drier hotter and windier, and when there are decades of accumulated fuel.
But the solution can't be "don't do controlled burns." The solution has to be, "don't let your controlled burns escape."
Because there is a 100% chance that all of that fuel will burn one day. The only thing that we have control over, is when it burns, and how it burns.
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@mekkaokereke
I concur, but that's easy to do when it's abstract theory.
Like the Yogi Berra quote ("In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is."), the horrible practices that created the largest fire in New Mexico make lots of folks less eager to perform prescribed burns. Now we have a steeper uphill battle to get good practices implemented.
Hmmmm, I wonder how much the Trump administration will fund prescribed burns? Or will he just grab a sharpie, wave his hands, bloviate and downplay the problem?
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@KrajciTom @mekkaokereke there’s 20,000 years of experience in how to do this. All we have to do is listen to non-white people.
So basically California will burn because we’re racist idiots.
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@KrajciTom @mekkaokereke Rakes for all!
Most of the affected area is federal land, so he'll probably just auction it off to Chevron or Exxon-Mobil and pocket the change.
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@KrajciTom @mekkaokereke he'll likely just repeat his asinine prescription for raking the forest. History tells us not much changes his mind, especially once he has entrenched himself in his own farce.
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@mekkaokereke
Before the European colonizers even started fighting the fires or thinking up Smokey Bear, genocide stopped the burns because so few indigenous people were around to light them.
So the fuel buildup in some areas of the US goes back more than 200 years.
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@violetmadder
Yup.
As an analogy: I could pass a law making it illegal to mow your own lawn. After a few months, everyone's lawn would be overgrown.
Or, I could evict everyone in a neighborhood from their homes. After a few months, everyone's lawn in that neighbourhood would be just as overgrown.
Years later I could say, "My mistake! I now realize that lawns need to be mowed! It's still illegal to mow your own lawn, but fear not! The government has spent $2.3B mowing people's lawns for them! But more manpower is needed, and much more funding!"
People might wonder, "🤔But... why is the government mowing people's lawns for them? Why don't you just let people move back into their homes and mow their own lawns?"
I would answer, "What?! No civilian has mowed their own lawn in years! Everyone has forgotten how to mow lawns safely! Lawnmowers can be dangerous! No, no. Best leave it to the government."
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@mekkaokereke
There are a few places where the old methods are being taught and some communities cooperating to get it done. I've heard it called "social forestry".
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@mekkaokereke
.
So crazy to realize - but the Euros, for real, took off to conquer the world, certain that people were created when and where the Bible said, and so that wherever they went everything had to be "new," the garden of Eden, or some wilderness God has forsaken.
.
It is unbelievably pathological, if it was one person and not millions, they would surely be diagnosed and locked up.
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@mekkaokereke what you say is misleading.
California’s forests predate native americans.
Native Americans reshaped the forests and managed the burns which were already happening.
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@Subterfuge
If someone looks at a corn field and says "That's not natural! A farmer planted that!"
I could say, "What you say is misleading. That field contained plants before the farmer arrived. Maize predates American farming. You should only say that the farmer shaped the plants that are available now."
I don't feel like going deep into pedantry or having a back and forth on this, so I'll just say that I agree with this part of your statement:
"Native Americans reshaped the forests and managed the burns which were already happening."
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@mekkaokereke you could say that sure, but it has nothing to do with what I said to you.
gonna ignore you going forward. you're hugely ignorant about what you are talking about.
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@mekkaokereke In BC they put out news articles every season on how we have messed up the forests for the last 100 years by putting EVERY fire out, leading to really bad fuel build up.
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@mekkaokereke Australia has been ignoring the same advice and it shows :akko_badday: we even have types of trees and plants that depend on forest fires to propagate.
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@mekkaokereke
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@mekkaokereke When Europeans first visited the Australian continent they saw what looked like great farming land - wide green pastures, and colonisation proceeded on that basis.
What we've discovered since is that, if you preserve the "natural bush" untouched for a few years, it degenerates into a tangled, impenetrable mass, full of flammable material.
Now we understand that First Nations traditional "firestick farming" is what maintained the wide green pastures, to encourage kangaroo and make it easier to hunt them.
After 200 years of dispossession, there aren't many people left with the firestick knowledge, but there is lots of training happening, so hopefully this knowledge will penetrate the volunteer firefighting service that does " fuel reduction" burns. They're usually too hot and prone to getting out of control.
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@mekkaokereke I feel like people have forgotten that people are also part of the ecosystem… that human activity is an important factor in the environmental conditions in an area, and different species are adapted to different levels and kinds of human activity… a lot of biodiversity, and sometimes entire ecosystems depend on it. So of course, removing human activity, like any kinds of sudden extreme changes in ecosystems in many places leads to a huge loss in biodiversity and the ecosystem will be less stable. So it’s only natural that colonization itself leads to ecosystem collapse as indigenous people who have for a long time lived off of and taken care of the ecosystem in ways that are adapted after huge amounts of time of experience to that area are forced by colonizers to abandon that way of life, and the forests and other ecosystems change and become less stable as a result.
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@mekkaokereke Indigenous people here (Australia) did a lot of burning. Fairly carefully targeted in most cases I think, not necessarily big burns. But some peoples also avoided staying in fire-prone areas through dangerous times of the year. California might need a combination of those approaches.
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@mekkaokereke the Smokey the Bear approach the last 50 years is really biting us 😬 I don't live in a fire prone area but I've even started thinking about clearing underbrush
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@mekkaokereke Can't find the source, since it's been a while I read it (might in a Jared Diamond book), but I remember it's well documented through dendrochronoly that for millenias forests burned regularly, effectively removing the undergrowth and preventing massive fires.
When people started building houses near/in forests, they started controlling fires more, and the undergrowth kept growing until it fueled more sporadic but bigger fires.
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@remi @mekkaokereke If this is regarding southern CA, it's not forest that's burning. It's all "undergrowth".
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@devlord @remi
Fair. But a few things:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/vEo7O71o4RU
It's too large and that wind is deadly. It fuels the fire. In a dry enough area, any of those embers could start a new fire.
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