Indigenous cultures evolved within their environments. What they learned was built on generation after generation, shaping their environment as the environment shaped them.
As a child educated in the American public school system, I was taught that North America had been a vast untamed wilderness, through which small bands of primitive people roamed, and that the White Man had brought culture and civilization to that wilderness. Among the things that the White Man brought was fire suppression. Fire was seen as an evil enemy of the forest, one which must be stopped at all costs. With the Forest Fires Emergency Act in 1908, which authorized limitless spending on fire suppression, the U.S. Forest Service focused its firefighting efforts on ensuring that no wildfire be allowed to burn.
Unfortunately, this response was based on a misinterpretation of the land. Prior to their removal by the United States government from the landscapes in which their cultures evolved, many of the Native Americans practiced controlled cultural burns to manage the forests and prairies, encouraging the growth of specific flora they found useful, reducing pest populations, and providing increased growth of fodder for the animals they hunted.
The federally implemented fire suppression practices prevented traditional land management by cultural practitioners. This allowed over a century of overgrowth of tinder-production which, combined with global warming, has created the literal firestorm of deadly burns we see in so much of the western USA today.
What can we, as individuals and small business owners do to make positive change? We can start by taking lessons from the past. A first step: Support our cultural practitioners who still retain the traditional knowledge of how to manage landscapes in a way that benefits both the environment and the people within it.
How can we support them?
- Source our materials / products from local indigenous practitioners
- Push for legislation to include indigenous practice in land management
- Spread awareness through our communities with our activities and websites
- Review our own business practices to be sure they are in alignment with our heart-values and culture