The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough for basketry, pruned oaks, dug bulbs in a way that propagated them, sowed grass seed. Twenty years of interviews with elders and tribal practitioners sit under it, plus the ecological data. Yosemite Valley is the case in point — those open black oak groves in the old photographs were maintained, and once the burning stopped the valley filled in with conifers and brush.
Tending the Wild