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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit sad to see (nearly) no discussion of indigenous peoples in this article. I think it would have fit in quite nicely, and added a less fantasy-world based angle.

The author hints at them twice though, but very lightly:

> Both kinds of magic are partially known to humans [...]

and

> Humans (at least, us in the modern West) are obsessed with their own sense of agency.

I'm personally about as far from "indigenous" as can be, but from what I've learned through various readings & watching interviews, the idea of "becoming one with" or "being inseparable from" ones surroundings is very much part of many indigenous peoples' lives. Not to romanticize them, but this angle could really serve as a reminder in this particular discussion: the "elvish" notion of thinking is not limited to the fantasy world; some of it is very much anchored in real humans' world views.

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One thing I've taken to - to spur thought, mostly - is likening the fire situation in California to the difficulties of securing the detritus of nuclear power generation. We have evidence to suggest that Californian Native Americans practiced a sort of semi-passive land management, including controlled burns, which helped to prevent large fires and kept natural areas sufficiently cleared for their uses. This practice would have steered the ecological evolution of those areas towards requiring such maintenance. Then those caretakers died (admittedly, this is putting that situation VERY shortly), took the knowledge of how to maintain their land properly with them, and European pioneers settled the same areas.

And now, California suffers from massive wildfires every year (worsened, of course, by climate change). Essentially, modern Californians are living in a sort of post-apocalypse, suffering from ancient technology run amok, which they do not understand and so which afflicts them with impunity.

Just a note, the fire management techniques were employed by indigenous people to mimic how the world already worked with natural fires. Your not wrong in saying it was a technology but it was not the cause of the current situation as they did not practice that tech long enough to impact the ecosystems reliance on it. All the species in that environment already relied oh fires. Small example, sequoia trees who's seeds only germinate after a fire. This evolution occurred millions of years before indigenous peoples where even around. Not to take away from the brilliance of the tech but it was discovered from how the world already worked it did not create a new niche.

> sequoia trees who's seeds only germinate after a fire.

Maybe trees are the real elves - naturally long lives, incredible technology/magic that we barely understand, if we see it at all (e.g. mycorrhizal networks between trees [1]), adaptation and harmony with their environment, etc. The Overstory by Richard Powers is a wonderful exploration of this idea in fiction.

[1] https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal...

I would like to push back in the spirit of inquiry: ecosystems surrounding rivers that are dammed are shaped over millions of years by the presence of an estuary, and then modified nigh irrevocably by a few years of human intervention. That is to say, even after the destruction of the damn, the landscape will be permanently affected, and by extension the ecosystem. I can see human adoption (and modifcation) of natural annual burn patterns having a similar effect. We have a habit in the West of undue skepticism of indigenous peoples' agency and ability (see: 100 years of Egyptologists denying that Egyptians actually built their ancient structures).

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