Jason E. Andersen

Bonus Fun Fact: Blueberries, like the ones you are familiar with from the store, were traditionally pruned with fire, which stimulates berry production.

I typically watch YouTube over lunch and caught a short by @NativeHabitatProject on prescribed fire. He talked about blueberries being rejuvenated after a burn and having increased berry production. I like things like that where you can point to them and say ‘hey, look, fire is good.‘

Blueberries led me down a rabbit hole of learning about indigenous fire use and cultural burning. Native American peoples used fire widely across what we now call North America. I lack the expertise to talk further to you on the subject, but I will say learning about indigenous fire is something I am getting really interested in.

If you want to follow into my rabbit hole, here is a really good article about how the Hoopa, Karuk, and Yurok tribes of northern California have worked to restore cultural burning on their ancestral lands.

Side thought: I feel like I need to tell you that I don’t usually watch short format videos, unless they are about conservation or science of some kind. Otherwise, I feel like they rot my brain and I actively avoid them. In some cases though, I feel the brain rot is counterbalanced by the content. To that point, I will watch @NativeHabitatProject when I scroll by. He does a good job of presenting cool nature and conservation snippets in ecosystems that I am not familiar with (the US southeast). The real question, now that I have typed all this, is why do I actively avoid short ‘brain-rotting’ videos, but feel absolutely fine watching a full 40 minute video of someone playing a video game (shoutout to @uThermal). I don’t know. My mind is an enigma.