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 22 hours 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 21 hours ago
I’m talking about indigenous land management practices.
fishos@lemmy.world 10 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.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 10 hours ago
I’m not saying they created issues, but I am saying they also had a fairly intensive system of land management. So if we move to a system of little or no human intervention, that’s not a state that has existed for tens of thousands of years and we don’t know what that looks like. Could involve major ecosystem shifts, species extinctions, major fires, who knows.