Indigenous Fire Management

Living in Ca, the threat of fire is present, as summer is beginning to bake our grasslands. We’re all concerned and trying to do our best preventative maintenance. However I’m puzzled by what seems an unnecessarily tenuous and arduous situation. I dove into some local history and was challenged by what I found. For over 10k years prior to 1820, the region I call home was managed much differently by the people who lived here. They deliberately burned all dry organic matter, staying ahead of catastrophic fires, and in the process creating a highly livable, beautiful and easy to manage landscape. The past 150 years of arrogantly ignorant mismanagement has manufactured this crisis. Moreover our current prevention practice depends on problematic fossil fuel based machines. Though today we cannot set fires as they did, we can still learn from and put in practice indigenous landscaping techniques, and empower individual households to safely burn off refuse on site.