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While Amazon mega-billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has certainly meddled with the paper’s opinion section, prohibiting views that oppose select libertarian priorities, reporters over on the news side of the paper are still producing some quality journalism.

As evidence, check out today’s stunning multimedia presentation of a story on the use of fire in indigenous forest management. Reporters Daniel Wolfe and Alice Li traveled to Orleans, here in Humboldt County, to watch cultural fire practitioners with the Karuk Tribe as they burned a patch of farmland, and to interview a variety of researchers and ecologists about the practice.

“This cultural burning is part traditional food and craft production, part environmental protection and part ceremony with the land,” the story notes.

The piece goes on to outline how Native communities employed fire for centuries of landscape management, but these practices have been suppressed following colonization by European settlers. In 1850, for example, California passed a law making it legal to fine or punish anyone burning land, and the 1911 federal Weeks Act ushered in a paradigm of “total fire suppression.”

“This made cultural fire illegal at a federal level,” the story says. “Native people were shot and imprisoned for starting fires.”

Of course, the total-fire-prevention approach hasn’t worked as well as expected. Decades of fire suppression have led to overgrowth and a loss of biodiversity, creating conditions rife for larger, hotter and more catastrophic wildfires.

Recently, California has allowed federally recognized tribes to conduct cultural burns with less federal oversight. However, the Trump administration has released a draft executive order that could reverse recent policies aimed at reintroducing fires to the landscape, the Post reports.

The whole presentation — best viewed on a laptop or, better yet, projected onto a big TV — includes stunning photos, video and graphic elements

You’ll apparently have to create an account to access the story via this gift article link, but it’ll be free to experience should you choose to take that step.