Fascinating debate in Nature Sustainability about a seemingly arcane question: how much burning of the landscape did indigenous Americans do before Europeans arrived? Relevance: if they did a lot, today’s land mgmt goes against millennia of history and needs rethought. 1/10

Note: I have a small stake in this. The original paper that set off the debate, by uses my book, 1491, as an example of how people get it wrong. But they’re pretty nice about it. Anyway, here’s that paper, by @WyClimate and some other smart ppl:
https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/files/publications/pdfs/Oswald_NatureSust_2020.pdf 2/10

That paper says that native people had next to no impact on the land in New England, and hints that may be true for much of North America. Instead, the NE was mainly a wilderness, and parks, national forests, etc., should be managed that way. 3/10

Much of the discussion is technical, as in @croos_SMU’s complaint that the original paper worked at such a broad scale that it misses the heterogeneous activities of native people by averaging everything out to a smooth mush:
https://www-nature-com.silk.library.umass.edu/articles/s41893-020-0579-5 ($)
4/10

Some of it is more general, as in the rebuttal by Abrams and Nowacki:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0578-6.epdf?sharing_token=yAr3b7YXB1qGIa2U_3y7y9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PVpvdv2U91vikhE9iUT0LIxbwdNYky5VTFe76VNDNpRu9I4n9VlwSf4asgm7W0rsBQnFL4YAdzEan7Rx4uM3EoHL6K2Gi4phI9-o138EmS1BZchxUyt0YQ-NwynlEgJhw%3D 5/10

But the fascinating thing is that the debate is partly about what evidence people trust. One side, mainly natural scientists, likes physical data, and distrusts the many historical accounts of burning. If they see little physical trace of burning, they say the history's wrong. 6/

The other side, leaning a bit toward social science, works more with contemporary indigenous people and has more trust in historical accounts—people saw what they saw, is the idea. They think the empirical data is real and important, but readily misinterpreted. 7/10

One side sees the environment, unless proven otherwise, as being driven by natural factors like climate; the other has its default setting at human action. 8/10

I’m exaggerating and caricaturing things here to make my point. But these kinds of underlying assumptions and proclivities are rarely acknowledged or debated in the scientific press, and they should be. Instead, people mutter, “Oh, those guys *always* think that.” 9/10

Just to be clear: I’m not accusing anyone of being “unscientific”! But I am suggesting that this debate, like many other debates in environmental science, would benefit from more overt discussion of these assumptions. 10/10