00:00Fire has been a powerful part of the North American ecosystem for thousands of years,
00:10even before humans arrived.
00:12Forests and fires have co-evolved for millions of years.
00:15It's only a problem because we want certain things from our forests, we want certain things
00:20from the land.
00:22The first humans to interact with forest fires developed an understanding of how to use it
00:27and manage it.
00:29Native Americans were burning the landscape for active land management.
00:33Fire would create a patchwork of young forests among old forests that actually survived the
00:39fire.
00:40The arrival of European settlers changed this dynamic by disconnecting the land from its
00:44historic native managers and by misunderstanding how these forests functioned with fire.
00:50Once we saw Euro-American settlement take hold and widespread alterations in the forests
00:56where you had the hybrid logging and then the livestock grazing kind of created these
01:01more dense forests then that were historically.
01:06It seemed to be a lack of understanding about the value of fire.
01:09To some degree I'd say a lack of tolerance, of fear.
01:12There was this natural tendency to put them out.
01:17Once Native American fire use was removed, we started losing a lot of those natural fire
01:23cycles that cleared out a lot of the underbrush.
01:28Now we have these overstocked forests that have a lot of fuel in them and they're ready
01:33to burn and Mother Nature's making a correction.
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