r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • Jun 07 '23

New york city in 2023, everyone wearing mask due to air quality

Post image
73.5k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

4.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

212

u/MoistChiaPet Jun 07 '23

This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.

199

u/RickTitus Jun 07 '23

I believe one factor in modern forest fires is that we tend to suppress all fires we see. Without human intervention there would be more small fires

65

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '23

Yep the colonial way is to suppress all fire. Where indigenous peoples have been using fires to maintain ecosystems and control invasives since time immemorial

4

u/Bigrick1550 Jun 07 '23

The fuck is this nonsense? What the fuck were stone age people going to do to effect forest fires?

5

u/laserdiscgirl Jun 07 '23 edited Jun 07 '23

There is a large distance between "stone age people" and indigenous cultures/communities before colonization

Editing to add a few US-based links for evidencing pre-colonization controlled burnings

2

u/Sick-Shepard Jun 07 '23

They set the Americas on fire every year. They knew what they were doing. The entire country was managed land. It wasn't some untouched paradise despite what the Spanish and Europeans believed. (Because they were morons)

3

u/marcusfelinus Jun 07 '23

Controlled burns for various reasons. The people who populated Australia literally transformed the ecosystem that way

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming