How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness. “When one revisits colonial accounts of North America, one finds a striking amount of evidence that Native Americans set fire to the landscape.”
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Comments 2
If you like this article, I strongly recommend the books Tending the Wild (focused on California) and Forgotten Fires which both cover this topic extensively. They are books that made me reconsider using the word “wilderness”. The podcast “Good Fire” is also great to hear from real practitioners and experts such as Australia’s Victor Steffensen, whose book Fire Country talks about these kinds of practices in detail, with compelling first person experience.
I'll add 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann to the recommendations, it goes over a lot of what they touched on in this article in regards to how Indigenous communities managed their land successfully.
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