[onlypassingthru]

Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.

[AlotOfReading]

The national park service does controlled burns in Yosemite and has for a couple decades at this point. You can argue they don't do enough but they're limited by bureaucracy, safe conditions, and manpower rather than willingness.

[ryao]

National parks are a small percentage of California’s land area. Does the state do controlled burns outside of the national parks? If not, national parks doing controlled burns do not do very much.

[AlotOfReading]

Yes they do. It's a completely different set of government agencies with different policies though.

[ryao]

Newsweek suggests that they do not do enough of it:

https://www.newsweek.com/controlled-burns-california-forest-...

That article focuses on the federal side, but this article by Ars Technica appears to include the state side:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-...