[nitrogen]

You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."

"Wilderness" is probably also more wild than would be intuitive, iff our sense of "wild" is based on a landscape that was actually actively managed to be an ideal habitat for hunting and gathering.

[acituan]

> You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."

Not really. The most common image of a garden is a controlled nature space tended for human enjoyment.

“As it would be with zero humans around” is the definition of a wilderness.

Even if you pushed the definitions to extremes they don’t overlap (a wildlife garden is still a garden).

Either way natives didn’t have that degree of control. Even today, in places where forests are assigned to villages for such caretaking, they don’t have that degree of control, even with all the modern aerial firefighting power it is a struggle, as evidenced by current wildfires in the Mediterranean.

[NoSorryCannot]

The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden. Just that the landscape was already heavily transformed by the time Europeans arrived, but the Europeans didn't know that and assumed what they saw was its wild state.

It's not limited to California, either, as it's now suspected that North America's vast inland prairies were largely created by people setting fires and that we'd see something closer to forests if it were truly untouched.

It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.

[acituan]

> The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden

> It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.

It doesn't matter what kind it was, garden metaphor implies human control over a certain boundary.

And in this context (both from OP and the linked article) the control is specifically about preventing mega-fires through controlled fires. Prairies and uncontrolled fires are irrelevant.

There is little reason to question this technique was being applied locally with some success, but there is no evidence that this could be to an extent that made California their garden, in any meaning of the word you want to imagine.

If anything, I don't think the historical population vs landmass numbers can match up, hence my original objection. Disappointingly, only counter-arguments so far has been finessing over the definition of "garden" instead of working on the manpower and efficacy questions.