Fire Management -- Two Approaches: Native and Non-Native

We own land on both sides of the little road we live on, and we recently hired the redoubtable Huerta Brothers crew to partly clear a ten foot strip along the far side of the road, thus completing the major chaparral thinning we are doing in order to make our home more defensible.

Above: Before.

Above: Same view, after.

Above: Looking back along the road.



But the native Americans who lived here for upwards of 10,000 years took a different approach: they used controlled burns to stimulate the regrowth of food plants. I'll leave you with some extensive and very interesting quotes about how the native Californians managed the land, taken from California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction by Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish. It's an academic introduction from UC Press - and I'll review it one of these days in this space. According to the authors, California indians were not "simple hunter gatherers who passively collected food from a wild, unmodified landscape." They were "nurturing land managers who constructed anthropogenic landscapes through controlled burns, tillage, pruning, seed broadcasting, irrigation, and weeding."

"[T]he cornerstone of Native California management practices revolved around fires. From the outset, we need to recognize that the Mediterranean climate of California is a classic fire-enabler. .. California Indians recognized many centuries ago that fires can augment the growth and diversity of many economic plants, including roots, tubers, fruits, greens, nuts, and seeds, as well as provide forage that attracts both small and large birds and mammals. Fires control insects and pests, remove detritus from the ground surface, open up pathways in forests and woodlands, and fertilize the soil with nutrients. Fires encourage young, straight sprouts and other useable raw materials that can be incorporated into the production of cordage, baskets, and other household materials. Periodic fires also can facilitate the collection of many resources, such as acorns and mesquite beans, by burning off the underbrush. … California Indians began to enhance and modify these natural fire regimes by the strategic setting of prescribed burns. … The upshot of systematic programs of controlled burns was the creation of fire mosaics that contained a diverse patchwork of habitats containing resources of critical importance to California Indians…. Vegetation in the local region –grasslands, chaparral, oak woodlands, montane meadows, conifer forests—might be burned at different intervals to augment a patchwork of distinctive habitats with different succession rates of plants and animals."

“Multiyear rotational cycles would have enhanced biological diversity and productivity through the creation and enhancement of environmental mosaics—complex quiltlike environments with multifaceted habitats—teeming with varied kinds of food, medicinal, and basketry resources. The already incredible diversity of the natural world of Native California would have been multiplied many times over by Indian communities regularly burning many small separate parcels at different intervals.”

“[S]ome scholars claim that several of the signature plant types we know and love in California, such as the coastal prairies, valley oak savannas, open montane forests, and montane meadows, were created and maintained largely through Indian intervention over many hundreds or thousands of years. The termination of indigenous management practices, because of demographic decline, the removal of Indian groups to reservations, government policies prohibiting prescribed burning, or by restricting Indian access to private and public lands, typically resulted in the breakdown of these vegetation types, as other, less-desirable plants colonized habitat areas.

"Because of the devastating effects of colonization on the native population, the small remainder are not aware themselves of the richness and diversity of their ancestors’ practices, and thus our image of native Indian life is also impoverished. We think of them as eating salmon, deer, and acorns and not much else. Also because burning was prohibited by the mission fathers and other incomers, the Indian’s whole land management strategies were disrupted (to say nothing of the effect of missionization of the Indian population)."

This was not kind of “proto-agriculture.” Agriculture focusses on a relatively few plants and animals, but the Indians used an astonishing variety of plants and animals. They are better described as “complex hunter-gatherers.” The book uses this quote from a Karuk elder:

“Our kind of people never used to plow, they never used to grub up the ground, they never used to sow anything except tobacco. All that they used to do was to burn the brush at various places, so that good things will grow up.”