So you think do nothing and hope the fires even out? I have wondered about this but it’s not clear what would happen since our ecosystems have not operated that way for tens of thousands of years–and had dozens of now extinct megafauna engineering them back then.
Comment on The fifth pocket
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 1 day agoGenerally, good land management is lazy land management. Nature (and her ecosystems) got on just fine without us. The only reason we need to manage the fire cycle now is so that we don’t have our population centers burnt by the natural fire cycle. However, we largely already fucked that part up by intervening in the fire cycle, and not allowing areas close to these centers to burn. As a result, you end up with conflagrations popping up where you don’t want them to.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
fishos@lemmy.world 1 day ago
California wildfires have only been “managed” for the last ~200 years at most. How old do you think the country is? We’d be going back to the way things were a century or two ago, not tens of thousands of years. Tho yes, a lot of megafauna is gone, and we did it in that short of a time. Puts into perspective how damaging humans can be to the environment.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 22 hours ago
I’m talking about indigenous land management practices.
fishos@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The indigenous allowed natural burns to happen. They were managing it much closer to correctly. They didn’t create the issues. Industrialization/colonization did most it and you can’t blame that on indigenous peoples.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 21 hours ago
No, I think we have painted ourself into a corner again. You now HAVE to do controlled burns since our previous management avoided any fire at all costs and built up huge fuel stores that would have normally burnt.
Also, sidebar: our ecosystems today are not those that were present thousands of years ago. I can hear the keyboards clacking already, but what I mean is this: ecosystems will come together and then fade away as conditions change - your pine dominant forest may not have even existed as you see it today and instead had a different canopy and/or different understory species. Ecosystems live, breathe, and adapt just like a giant organism and I think that’s super cool.
Your soil moisture regime changes? A new community moves in. You have a global cooling or warming? That original community may go extinct, or only some species will remain and those species may not have the same dominance they once had as they are now operating at the edge of their niche conditions rather than under optimal ones.
Look at that, you got me monologuing you sly dog
fishos@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exactly this. Most land management is focused on “how can we make this better for humans” not “how can we make this better for nature”. The answer largely is “stop fucking with shit and let it do its own thing and self regulate again”.