Submitted by Ria Del Montana (not verified) on Fri, 03/22/2019 - 14:01
The above was a response to my essay from elsewhere. Here's another response:
"Nice article. I think I more or less agree with you. Certainly I think that a focus on cooking/eating animals is a root-cause of oppressive/hierarchical behavior. Fire certainly played a role in that.
Overall, I tend to have mixed feelings on whether to critique indigenous lifeways that incorporate the use of fire in land "management". I'm not sure I believe that there would be purely egalitarian communities in the absence of fire. And I do think that many indigenous cultures who have utilized fire are/were so much more egalitarian than my own culture that I have to pause before I question their history.
Its a curious situation: if fire had never been harnessed, maybe we would never have seen the rise of colonizing cultures. But given the use of fire for millennia, some outcomes and cultures seemed much more desirable than others.
I also think its interesting that fire-prone ecosystems have co-evolved with anthropogenic fire over the past 10,000 or so years (since the last ice age). In terms of restoration, this presents a problem: do we restore to a condition that assumes no anthropogenic fire, or are indigenous cultures and their intentional fire-setting a characteristic mechanism of disturbance? I tend to go with the latter while quietly questioning whether we should be allowing the lofty characterization of our species as an ecological "keystone". "
The above was a response to my essay from elsewhere. Here's another response:
"Nice article. I think I more or less agree with you. Certainly I think that a focus on cooking/eating animals is a root-cause of oppressive/hierarchical behavior. Fire certainly played a role in that.
Overall, I tend to have mixed feelings on whether to critique indigenous lifeways that incorporate the use of fire in land "management". I'm not sure I believe that there would be purely egalitarian communities in the absence of fire. And I do think that many indigenous cultures who have utilized fire are/were so much more egalitarian than my own culture that I have to pause before I question their history.
Its a curious situation: if fire had never been harnessed, maybe we would never have seen the rise of colonizing cultures. But given the use of fire for millennia, some outcomes and cultures seemed much more desirable than others.
I also think its interesting that fire-prone ecosystems have co-evolved with anthropogenic fire over the past 10,000 or so years (since the last ice age). In terms of restoration, this presents a problem: do we restore to a condition that assumes no anthropogenic fire, or are indigenous cultures and their intentional fire-setting a characteristic mechanism of disturbance? I tend to go with the latter while quietly questioning whether we should be allowing the lofty characterization of our species as an ecological "keystone". "