Comment by onlypassingthru
13 days ago
Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.
The national park service does controlled burns in Yosemite and has for a couple decades at this point. You can argue they don't do enough but they're limited by bureaucracy, safe conditions, and manpower rather than willingness.
National parks are a small percentage of California’s land area. Does the state do controlled burns outside of the national parks? If not, national parks doing controlled burns do not do very much.
Yes they do. It's a completely different set of government agencies with different policies though.
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