How stakeholders in the Sierra Nevada are confronting the lasting legacy of the gold rush
Although Indigenous people had, since prehistoric times, modified the [Sierra Nevada] landscape and caused widespread ecological change, the arrival of Europeans and Americans for the gold rush brought a much more invasive level of alterations with the construction of dams, permanent manipulation of rivers, clear-cutting of old-growth trees and an ill-advised practice of fire suppression that makes these forests ripe for wildfires, especially when compounded by climate change, which means more heat waves, decreased snowpack and drier conditions among other impacts.