Gavin Newsom has been funding “cultural burns.” No, not the Burning Man festival — though that might be a better use of the money — but rituals by Native American tribes that claim to be reviving indigenous practices of brush clearance.
The Manhattan Institute has revealed that the state of California is spending millions of dollars on grants through a “Tribal Wildfire Resilience” program.
Local tribes cite the ancient, precolonial practices of controlled burning that cleared brush and allowed for useful plants to be grown.
The state grants are part of an effort to revive those cultural practices, while also aiming to assist with wildfire prevention.
Perhaps it’s helpful to use indigenous brush clearance, since the state has been particularly bad at the modern kind in recent years.
Unfortunately, as Christopher F. Rufo and Austen Hufford point out, while some of the money is spent on legitimate projects, some of the burns are merely symbolic. And some of the cash is apparently being used for other purposes, as a “slush fund.”
That’s an insult to fire victims throughout the state, many of whom had pleaded for common-sense brush clearance on state-owned land near their homes — until it was, sadly, too late.
Sometimes the state’s policies on Native issues actually prevent fire management.
In the Palisades Fire, as The California Post reported earlier this year, the state had a policy of not allowing heavy firefighting equipment on state park land if there was any risk to cultural artifacts.
Crucially, the state policy banned “mop-up” techniques “without the presence of an archaeologist.”
That could have prevented fire crews from doing a thorough job in putting out the Lachman Fire, which was allegedly set by an arsonist on Jan. 1 last year, and which apparently rekindled as the Palisades Fire on Jan. 7.
A more sensible policy would allow aggressive brush clearance to protect communities — and to protect the very cultural sites that the state wants to preserve.
After all, if a wildfire breaks out, endangered plans and cultural sites are also destroyed.
And while some local plant species need fire to germinate, there are so many invasive species that sprout after a massive fire that the landscape is often changed forever.
Spending money on fire rituals is no substitute for old-fashioned brush clearance. And fire prevention funds should not be diverted for other purposes.
One suspects the precolonial inhabitants of California would agree.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
