By Paul Homewood
Although the University of California feels obliged to partly blame climate change for wildfires, they then devote the rest of the article to the real reasons:
Two hundred years ago, someone walking through Yosemite would not have seen the densely packed forests we now associate with the Sierra Nevada.
They would have passed through broad meadows and perhaps have even been drawn to comment, as the Spanish did, on how the land appeared like a “well-tended garden.”
In fact, that is exactly what Spaniards were seeing: Indigenous people native to Yosemite and other parts of the world for millennia have used fire to promote healthy forests. Today, the wisdom of that approach is seen as one of the keys to unraveling the deadly cycle of California wildfires.
It’s easy to assume that the impenetrable forests we associate with the mountains of California have always been there. Many of the popular images of Yosemite, for example, were taken decades after federal agencies moved to suppress fires in the region and removed native tribes.
But ecological records and oral Indigenous history alike describe how fire, sparked by lightning or planned by tribes, played a vital role in shaping California’s landscape for thousands of years. A recent UC Berkeley study found that forest biomass in the Klamath Mountains region used to be approximately half of what it is now, and that burns carried out by the Karuk and Yurok tribes played a significant role in maintaining forest structure and biodiversity.
Ask the Honorable Ron W. Goode, Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, what’s missing from the land and he will tell you it’s fire.
It may be a contentious subject, especially given California’s recent traumatic wildfires. “But I need to talk to you about fire,” Goode says.
A side-by-side comparison of Yosemite in 1872 versus 2020. Tree cover in the area has greatly expanded. Credit: University of California
Read the full article here.
Regardless of the climatic impact, and we know from tree-line studies that California was much warmer than now in the Middle Ages, there is nothing we can do about that.
But there is plenty we can about forestry management.