Miscellaneous
Catastrophic wildfires on the west coast feel like a very modern problem — one that’s a product of global warming, improper zoning policies, drought and more. Yet fires are also nothing new, and have been raging on these landscapes for hundreds of years. A new project from the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West attempts to tie together the history of Western fire with modern fire ecology. A large part of that history also surrounds Native American tribes who have lived on this land — and used fire as a tool to preserve it — for millennia. The project is called the West on Fire, and Match Volume’s Sean Flannelly sat down to talk with its lead investigator, Jared Aldern.