this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Tough shit, don't build houses in disaster zones. (Flood plains, slide zones, Florida, dry pine forests)
Literally not what that means. Plants, entire ecosystems, evolved to depend on a rhythm of burns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte
LOL.
Plenty of houses in Australia have been burned which are not in "disaster" zones. Every property has a bushfire rating which determines required mitigation. Its a genuine risk in many suburbs.
Also, that's exactly what confirmation bias means. In making an assertion that ecosystems evolved to depend on regular burning, you're ignoring all the species which became extinct in prehistory due to regular burning.
The type of land managment practices in use in 18th century Australia are about as useful as the farming practices from that era.
Any suggestion that we should disregard the last 100 years of land management science, in favor if lighting up the nearest bush every other month, is just as absurd as it sounds.
I think you mean survivor bias, not confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is when you only remember things that reinforce the way you think or believe, like only remembering the bad things that happen to you on Mondays and not the good or the bad on other days. I don't know what fallacy you think you're invoking but it's not that one.
If you want to maintain the belief that Aboriginals are magical managers of the natural environment, you have to forget all of the species that disappeared when they arrived.
After 60,000 years of man-made fires, the only species left are those which were resistant, or could adapt. To consider those remaining species and conclude that native bushland benefits from regular fire is the textbook definition of a cognitive bias, because you have to disregard all the species which no longer exist.
That's how evolution works. That part of it is called natural selection.
That's not an accurate description of Indigenous fire science at all. I recommend learning the science before you try to critique it. But you are right that European primitives have only been studying the ecosystem for 100 years. They've been messing stuff up for 1/600 of the time Aboriginal scientists have been collecting measurements.
Its not "natural selection" when people are lighting fires and destroying the native flora and fauna.
Indigenous fire "science" is just like natural "medicine" - any that can withstand scrutiny is just "fire science".
One of us sure doesnt.
It is when they've been doing it for 65,000 years