Indian burning was, in fact, successful in maintaining a longstanding model of the "natural" forest. What then is the nature of the current controversy surrounding the use of fire and what does this controversy reveal about the present state of tension between locals and the Forest Service?    In comparison with the rather extensive fire-related functions listed by Bessie Tripp, the Forest Service conception of Indian burning in relation to forest ecology is conveniently modest, preserving the fiction of the Forest Service as the first and only true managers of the land.  Until recently the management strategy of planting plantations consisted of large plots of closely planted even-age trees to mimic nature. These managers saw fire as the enemy of their conception of the forest.   In some cases, plantations have been destroyed multiple times without ever reaching harvest age.  Locals, Indian and non-Indian, associated aboriginal burning with a cleared, park-like forest floor and greatly reduced danger from out-of control crown fires.  Their sense of the intentionality and consequences of Indian burning practices is in contrast to the perspectives of those who play down the range of conscious intentions motivating the aboriginal burners, and who object to allegations that these fires played a significant role in determining the nature of the aboriginal forest.   

 The following comments by a Forest Service employee present a model of Indian intentionality restricted by their lack of training in modern forestry techniques

You can't make me believe that Indians burned the forest to improve the forest.  The Indians burnt the forest.  They would in the fall of the year go up in the high country and they would light on fire a big brush field and they would get around on the other side of it and hunt and kill deer when they run out.  That is why they burnt. 
When the white man came he burnt the ground, not to improve the forest, but to remove this litter so they could prospect, … what type of rock was laying under there. They [miners] lit off a whole hillside, then at their leisure they could see the ground that was under all that duff and brush.     The Indians on the Klamath River down here inadvertently caused a lot of fires burning their basket brush (hazel).  They'd light that off and it would get away from them.  There it'd go and the drainage would get wiped out.  But it didn't make any difference; nobody was into timber harvesting at that time.     I do feel they did become aware of the problem that was created in later years when they quit burning and allowing fires to burn uncontrolled and said 'Hey, we used to keep that burnt off.'  But they didn't do it on purpose.

These comments deny what is seen as an unrealistic, romantic, possibly "liberal" conception of Indians as possessing a full awareness of the effect of fire on the ecology.  There is also an implicit objection to suggestions that such an awareness might offer a more adequate model for human relationships to complex natural systems than does the Forest Service management model presently in operation.  Aboriginal burners are granted the power of a startled, somewhat bemused hindsight, but then only in relation to the role of regular burning in keeping the forest open.  Such a perspective is similar to the analysis of C.R. Clar writing in a Division of Forestry publication.      

 It would be difficult to find a reason why the Indians (of California) should care one way or another if the forest burned.  It is quite something else again to contend that the Indians used fire systematically to "improve" the forest.  Improve it - for what purpose?. . .Yet this fantastic idea has   been and still is put forth time and again. . . (Lewis 1967:5).

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