Collection

Wildfires

Taylor Bledsoe

Maryville University

Student (NOT Journalism School)

This article talked about how in California fire has always been a big part of their landscape but before the vast Blazes they had, native American tribes held annual controlled burns that cleared out underbrush and encouraged new plant growth. Government officials have said because of the raging wildfires across Northern California tackling the fire is a problem which means they want to bring back good fire much like the tribes did before. When western settlers were removed from their land in their religious believes and ceremonies were banned cultural burning largely disappeared so the state and federal authorities focused on extinguishing wildfires. But the suppression of fire has only made California’s wildfire risk worse so without regular burns the landscape grow stick with vegetation that dries out every summer creating the fires that have recently destroyed California communities. Also climate change and warmer temperatures make those landscapes even more fire prone. So now tribal leaders and government officials are trying to forge new partnerships to help take care of the burning and reduce the risk of extreme wildfires. In Northern California the So now tribal leaders and government officials are trying to forge new partnerships to help take care of the burning and reduce the risk of extreme wildfires. In Northern California the Karuk and Yurok tribes have partnered with the Forest services to manage land for traditional values and wild fire management. Studies have shown these two goals I’ve been working hand-in-hand.

Also in this article the tribes Who wanted to gain access to control the fires for their believes but also for fire management had right to enter, right to withdraw, And right to manage. The constructive procedures that went on in this article would have been the government in the tribes coming hand-in-hand to help fire management and they both got their own thing out of it. The tribes got to help fire management but then they also did their rituals and ceremonies. The federal government got for management out of it. It was also constructive in the way that it was all safe and everybody’s getting something out of it it didn’t sound like anyone was going to get hurt or not gain anything out of it. There was one destructive thing from this article which would have been when the tribes were banned from those places in California and they couldn’t do the rituals anymore. This also turn into a constructive situation because now there’s a deadly being let back in to do those things.

The other article I read about had to do with California Wildfires. The title of the article said something to the affect of if California has so much money why aren’t the spending more of it on the wildfires. Even with the extensive budget and the amount of help California has that won’t always been quite enough. Experts have said that unless the federal government continues to spend billions of dollars on California communities to become more fire resistant that the wildfires will still be out of control. Another expert Micheal Wara said that the state is still deciding where more of the money should go: fighting fires or forest health, such as taking precautions and thinning overgrown brush and removing millions of drought killed trees. Overall there is no simple or cheap solution.