this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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I love this topic but I feel like no one has a realistic solution for how we're going to manage huge ecosystems in a very labor intensive fashion. I don't think it's really possible in the current socioeconomic context.
The natives did it by having the entire community involved. We may need to move towards something like that.
Generally, good land management is lazy land management. Nature (and her ecosystems) got on just fine without us. The only reason we need to manage the fire cycle now is so that we don't have our population centers burnt by the natural fire cycle. However, we largely already fucked that part up by intervening in the fire cycle, and not allowing areas close to these centers to burn. As a result, you end up with conflagrations popping up where you don't want them to.
Exactly this. Most land management is focused on "how can we make this better for humans" not "how can we make this better for nature". The answer largely is "stop fucking with shit and let it do its own thing and self regulate again".
So you think do nothing and hope the fires even out? I have wondered about this but it's not clear what would happen since our ecosystems have not operated that way for tens of thousands of years--and had dozens of now extinct megafauna engineering them back then.
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
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.
I'm talking about indigenous land management practices. It's been a very long time since most places were not being managed by humans in some way.
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.
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.
Well it's a good thing we have scientists doing things like measuring carbon in layers of soil to tell us that no, the indigenous weren't altering the planet like that and were allowing the natural fires to burn regularly.
Stop "guessing" and do some actual research on the subject. They literally tried to teach us about it when we colonized, but "white man so superior" didn't listen. And this is coming from a white guy.
We know who caused the problems. Stop trying to shift this to the indigenous. There not the ones who built massive cities in fire areas and then refused to let any of the forrests there burn, nevermind who ran the industrial revolution.
We don't have to go back tens of thousands of years because we know when the effects happened because of this amazing thing called science, not "guessing and throwing halfbaked thoughts out and then arguing with people that you must be right". Moron.
I'm sorry but you're just totally ignorant on what you are talking about. I recommend reading Tending the Wild by anthropologist M Kat Anderson to educate yourself.
Indigenous land management was often more intensive than what we have been doing with uncultivated lands and indigenous groups in my local area have been trying to tell people for decades that it's partially our neglect of these practices that are causing some of the problems we see today. So ironically you are the one who has not been listening.
I'd recommend stop being a retard, but you seem pretty committed so I'll let you be.
Instead of mandatory military service have mandatory conservation service?
While I'm sure that would work, I don't support conscription.