North America was settled long before the Europeans got here, and they were doing quite well with forest management in their own way. Many of the lessons they learned, we were forced to relearn: like why burning the forest often and intentionally is a good thing.
Burning the woods for forest management? I’m not sure what you are talking about, unless you mean slash and burn agriculture. The Indians of eastern North America did that. It certainly wasn’t “forest management” as we understand the term. It was managing local conditions to allow them to farm new ground until they exhausted the earth’s fertility. After a few years they would move on and repeat the process in a new stretch of woodland. Far more often than not, slash and burn was harmful to the ecology of the forest or jungle in which it was practiced. More and more harmful as the population grew.
