Native Perspective of Wildland Fire
This is a good article regarding the Native American perspective on the use of wildland fire to maintain healthy forests (from the Missoulian).
Wednesday, Nov. 14, 1792: Traveling the borderland between modern Montana and the endless expanse of what's now known as southern Alberta.Still smoking all around, the explorer notes: ”grass having been lately burnt,“ ”grass nearly all burnt,“ ”grass yet burning.“ For days, his journals are filled with fire, no end in sight.
Yet there hadn't been a lightning strike in who knows how many weeks.
When Hudson's Bay Co. fur trader Peter Fidler first laid eyes on the wide wild West, it seemed to him a pristine wilderness, a garden shaped from on high and never yet bent beneath the clumsy hands of men.
”But it's a myth,“ said Germaine White. ”This idea that it was a ‘natural' forest, that you can restore ‘natural' fire, it's a myth. For thousands of years, this has been a landscape formed by native people.“
It's a long article, but well worth the time to read it.
