Note: this post got out of sequence when i split these and should be at the top here.
I think that one thing that gets missed in that idea is that what we often call ‘hunter gatherers’ were often already intensively managing the landscape. There’s a broad span between true hunter gatherers (say, in the Arctic where you can’t really grow anything, though they did/do manage wildlife of course) to monoculture ag/row crops, but i don’t think the latter is the only possible system, as some groups such as many Native American groups for instance in California, were developing different ‘agricultural’ systems… the best English word to describe them would be ‘permaculture’ i think but it is actually different and deeper than that. Colonization brought a stop to this land management type in most cases. While this is mostly ‘topic drift’ it isn’t entirely as many of California’s ‘wildlands’ are in a sense 500 year old abandoned farm fields (albeit not farming recognized by European colonists) and as such, they are more prone to invasive species, don’t necessarily have a stable ecological endstate (not that anything does) and this is one factor making the fires worse. I suspect in Australia the situation is similar because aboriginal groups (apologies if I am using the wrong word!) were managing the landscape there even longer than was the case in California (probably).
Hard conversation but one we really need to have, somewhere, somehow, if we are going to re-sentientize ourselves