ring of fire

The Thomas fire has now swept through territory once lightly populated with Chumash Indians who regularly burned their food-gathering lands. As Kat Anderson has shown in Tending the Wild, Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2006, local Indians managed their wild food resources by burning the land to encourage their growth and to create clearings in which they could better hunt game. While the coastal Chumash relied heavily on sea food, inland groups harvested acorns as their staple supplemented with chia seeds, the fruits of the holly leafed cherry and small game. The untouched wilderness eulogized by John Muir was in fact a carefully managed environment, with swathes of chaparral charred in controlled burns where the plants had long co-evolved with regenerative lightning-sparked conflagrations.
    -- John Davis
urbanwildland/ring-of-fire