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Fire agencies across the US have adopted these tactics. Some are drawing on Native American oral history and traditional ecological knowledge to revive them. Native Americans in California and Australia have known the risk of overgrown forests for millennia and used these tactics to prevent wildfires and encourage beneficial plant growth.
Native Americans frequently used fire to manage natural environments in a way that benefited humans and wildlife in forests and grasslands by starting low-intensity fires that released nutrients for plants, reduced competition for cultivated species, and consumed excess flammable material that otherwise would eventually fuel high-intensity ...
Some American civilizations, like the Maya, have used slash-and-burn cultivation since ancient times. American Indians in the United States also used fire in agriculture and hunting. [16] In the Amazon, many peoples such as the Yanomami Indians also live off the slash and burn method due to the Amazon's poor soil quality. [17]
Fire started by lightning has always been a part of the natural life cycle in the Western U.S., and for centuries Native Americans also carried out controlled burns, referred to as cultural burns ...
From the 16th century on, the massive depopulation of Native Americans caused by the arrival of European settlers meant an end to burning and farming across large areas. [ 6 ] ... by the time the first European observers were reporting the nature of the vegetation of the region, it is likely to have changed significantly since the regional peak ...
The 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season led to increasing calls by some experts for the greater use of fire-stick farming. Traditional practitioners had already worked with some fire agencies to conduct burns on a small scale, with the uptake of workshops held by the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation increasing each year.
Lower elevations tended to have more frequent fire return intervals, whilst higher and wetter sites saw longer intervals between fires. Native Americans tended to set fires during fall and winter, and land at higher elevations was generally occupied by Native Americans only during the summer. [67]
The control of fire by early humans was a critical technology enabling the evolution of humans. Fire provided a source of warmth and lighting , protection from predators (especially at night), a way to create more advanced hunting tools, and a method for cooking food.