FrozenToMyself
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Jul 20, 2024 4:14 PM
FrozenToMyself
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1678
46
Ryukee
They did the same in many other countries that had food forests. I believe one of those countries was new zealand. They destroyed food forests to make use of land for cattle. So wasteful.
UnapologeticTeaEnjoyer
Just purchased the book mentioned for my Native American Archeology nut dad and I to read. Can't wait
fromagewit
Thank you for this interesting post @op
aRabidGerbil
I heard an excellent talk from a forester about the redwood forests on the West Coast, and he kept coming back to the point that these forests don't have a natural, human free state, because they have been used and tended by humans for millennia. By letting them grow without human interaction, we're not allowing them to "return to a natural state", we're removing a keystone species from an ecosystem.
StephenDaniels
I just watched a video about how the Americas had a major lack of domesticatable animals which slowed farm development. Deer could be sort of tamed; but they'd jump any fence built to pen them and obviously domesticating bears was a terrible idea. There were Llamas in the south; but apparently they're pretty lazy. Horses went extinct here until Europeans re-introduced them, most of the other barnyard animals also came when Europeans brought them.
WhichEndDoITypeIntoAgain
Love this! See also the milpa farming practices of central America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa
MrFrAnK9000
Every species have a role to play in an ecosystem. Humanity used to be the janitor, now were trashing the place.
QueefMalone
varonicaED
Same for the aborigines in Australia, they knew what they were doing and kept the land sustainable for their population for tens of thousands of years. Then along we came and introduced horses and rabbits and other stuff, just look at the wild horse problem in Kosciusko National Park. Even now it's difficult to get people to see sense and realise the horses are destroying the natural environment.
MerryXMan
It’s very similar with Australian First Nations cultures as well.
Interestingly, sometime in the 1860’s, in order to justify taking over land that people clearly already occupied, some Dutch dude came up with the notion of an expanded terra nullius, which stated that as long as there was no ‘recognisable’ cultivation of land by the native population, it was free realestate. Provided a sort of retroactive justification too.
(This is the general concept only due to character limitations).
LiquidSunshine
Love this! Hawaiians used rocks to create fishponds near the shore that, during high tide, would allow for fish to come and go, but during low tide, would trap fish inside. Then they could catch and eat what they needed for that day. They also had natural ways of weeding out the sick fish….like putting a predator (say, a barracuda) in the pond and it would go after the weak or sickly fish, keeping the others healthy and safe from disease. We have to work with nature again.
nicko0
I read an article on a farmer that bought some rough terrain and he planted whatever would grow in each nook a cranny and got great yields. I wish I could find it. He was a special person with knowledge to pull it off.
lurkingperch
Read Daniel Quinn’s work. Along this line of thought. We’ve had a great forgetting in our culture.
zombiejedediah
Buying this in a few days, I think
https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817360047/feeding-cahokia/
Also, take a look at "1491" which is an introduction to this knowledge
sjbrooksy7447
Grandma knows what up
sal0qwerty
Cahokia wasn't supported by mass agriculture instead it relied heavily on trade and a hunter/gather type agriculture due to the abundance provided by the Mississippi River and bayou
HalfADozenBearCubs
#2 It was not a war, but also, people were not exactly that free to vote with their feet. There is evidence (I have read) that the climate changing in that time made it harder to sustain food growth in the area as droughts became more common, and the people TRIED for a few generations to keep it going but it wasn't worth the effort available. So the population declined slightly, making it even harder to maintain, and then the rest of them moved on to other places, likely bringing all valuables.
bassmidnitro
I do like seeing this one again from time to time. A good reminder that there’s more than one way to sustain people.
jzastrow
The fossil record also shows that prehistoric Native Americans hunted huge numbers of species to extinction. Before the notion that they lived in perfect harmony with nature they were an ecological calamity
NeutralSmith
Now try to gather food for the amount of people that are alive today on those lands.
executivedisfunction
Missing, the word "Sustainably". Few if any real experts predict current crop volumes to continue as soil quality declines, water tables drop, natural insect and other plant fertilizers die off, etc. Paid shills for major agribusiness continue to promise infinite growth, while harvest stats are already in decline. Currently declinig actual food values of monoculture crops don't actually sustain healthy populations, 'diet suppliments' have real and immediate limits.
executivedisfunction
Some fruit and vegetables are now assaying at 1/20th the crucial nutrient values as crops from the 40s demonstrated. Goals of agribusiness genetic experimentation are to harvest mass/acre, color and appearance, ease of harvest, survivability in transportation, length of saleable appearance on retail stores, and ZERO emphasis on actual nutrition.
Kasemoch
.
OaksParcel
It's also important to recognize that the indigenous people of North America had a huge amount of cultural diversity, rivaling(if not exceeding) the amount of cultural diversity that all of Europe had. I'd like to see us talk more about what practices each individual First Nation had, rather than mentioning practices that one group did while making it sound like all groups did that. That said, environmental stewardship was nearly universal across all First Nations.
ProppaGanda
The entire narration behind the beginning of agriculture is, according to David Graeber, a misrepresentation. Humans for millennia experimented with agriculture in alluvial lands, growing herbs, vegetables and grains - but consciously avoiding what we consider domestication of wheat. Domestic wheat has seeds that don't break off, which requires more complicated harvesting and threshing process, virtually orienting the entire society around it.
ProppaGanda
He claims that it was a conscious decision to hold against that mode of social work, instead mixing agriculture with hunting and gathering. And, indeed, it seems that late neolithic had quite a fascinating mix of production in a scale that allowed building cities without tying people to one spot or to some ossified social hierarchies with warrior castes.
zombiejedediah
But.. of course once a patriarchal society decides to go the way of wheat & barley, they outbreed all other types of agricultural practices.
Do you have a source for Graeber's work, please? I'm quite curious
ProppaGanda
...but as early agriculture is presumably a domain of women, it's usually done by conquest.
He wrote about it in The Dawn of Everything.
Ryebread91
#2 can someone elaborate on the last paragraph? Are they saying the rulers started claiming the land as theirs and wouldn't let others farm it?
executivedisfunction
Basic issue of top down control of highly variable farming or production. When rulers think they are smarter, or have interests to protect, the worker closest to the issues gets ignored or suppressed. This is Everywhere, from colonial exploitation and indigenous suppression, all the failures and cruelty of Stalinism and Maoism, to current 'Deming-Toyota Model' vs most US manufacturing top down culture.
Ryebread91
Thanks. That's what I was thinking but you put it into the right words for me.
EternallyIgnorant
Does anyone have any sources for this? Im interested in learning more, and in general prefer not to get my knowledge from screenshots of social media posts.
androgenoide
Krech's "Ecological Indian" covers a bit of this.
SmoeAhsolse
Here's the mother's "life's work" link:
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-women-cuisine-culture-ancient-cahokia.html
EternallyIgnorant
ty!
Grovertrove
Another interesting read, especially on the accidental/sometimes purposeful agricultural screwups, is Ecological Imperialism. It's a tad dry a times, but goes over a fairly large span of time, and it is more heavily focused on Europe, but definitely covers colonial North and South America.
ylimey
Animal Vegetable Junk by Mark Bittman
ak56789
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
DudleyDoNothing
Sounds like Permaculture
Filanwizard
modern America used to do controlled burns too, But then wealthy people started to buy homes up in the wooded areas and the hills of fire country. Lots of NIMBY killed the controlled burns that the US Forest Service and state forestry departments used to do on a regular basis. We really need to pass a law that prohibits ALL lawsuits to prevent controlled burns, If you don't like the smoke remember you chose to buy a home in an area that needs controlled burns.
Zedrapazia
It also gets WAY worse if a natural fire occurs in such a place because its uncontrollable and spreads anywhere
unluckyandbored
It's not a coincidence that these massive wildfires started happeniing regularly not long after we stopped doing those smaller controlled burns.
KirbyUOR
I can't stand when people move somewhere then bitch about things that were ALREADY THERE. When I was a kid, my dad raced at a dirt track in Texas. Some genius build a neighborhood nearby, and rich people moved in and got the track shut down cuz of all the noise. The track that had been there for decades and was a local tradition.
Filanwizard
sprawl builders have killed tons of small tracks all over the country, and outdoor concert venues, small airports. Sadly these people have piles of lawyers and the venues do not. And such things should be illegal, They knowingly built homes next to a place that deliberately placed itself far way because it made noise. They never asked to be built up against.
spool32
Reminder that Trump’s solution to this is that we should rake the forest……..
MardukRules
This is America. You can’t just pass laws prohibiting lawsuits. Not unless you make guns, anyway.
abion47
Not true. You could also own an insurance company or a police union.
androgenoide
A rancher out in the foothills told me that some of the newcomers, retirees from the city, had threatened to sue them for doing controlled burns saying that the blackened hills looked ugly and decreased their property values.
Harbltron
The commodification of housing strikes again.
Shaodyn
The very concept of property value is part of the problem. A house isn't somewhere to live, it's an investment whose value must constantly be maximized. No one must ever do anything that might affect that investment.
Filanwizard
their property will have tons of value when that 35000sqft mansion is ash due to a preventable by controlled burning wildfire.
Harbltron
It's probably their third home and covered by fire insurance, they're more concerned with it being pretty while it exists than they are with it continuing to exist.
T0go
While this is interesting I've seen a lot of 70s-90s feminist anthropology that wildly over-interprets limited information and takes fashionable feminist attitudes of the late 20th century and projects them back hundreds of years onto societies we know little about. I've read similarly pat and utopian feminist anthropology about pre-literate societies in Eastern Europe that turned out to be so much bunk.
grandopening
If you haven't read 'The Power," you may thoroughly enjoy the ending.
ArcaneM37
While I can't speak for the rest of the issues, but I know the concept that women do the farming is alive and well in Zambia. The women would go into the field with babies on their backs. And they were proud of it.
Dailywitchery
Neolithic Europe is rife with examples of similar pre-Western cultural trajectories found in the Americas. The current research, far from bunk, has been established through multidisciplinary methodologies across archeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, art history, and importantly, genetics, and other fields by multiple scholars from any universities and institutions. You may want to revisit your 2 decades old understanding of this exciting field of study.
damogen
Yeah, I think it sound much more plausible that the Europeans were like. Heh, that's neat what they did there... now let's plant some wheat instead so we can feed 100x as many people on the same land.
TheUntiss
Im Indigenous and can attest to our Matriarchal society. So chill.
xenjamin
Thank you. Let's get this to the top for the misogynistic naysayers.
T0go
Calling someone a bigot if they don't accept an interpretation of archeological evidence is not convincing anyone, it's just setting off more alarm bells in people's heads. People who cave in and agree with you after you call them a misogynist haven't been convinced, they just want you to go away.
meskarune
Yeah I gotta agree. Native americans enslaved each other, raped women and took multiple wives at once , etc. Women were not equal.
Eli93
That is just as overly generalised as the romanticising view though. Native Americans weren't and aren't a monolith.
T0go
It's hard to say what pre contact cultures were like in North America outside of Mexico and the Caribbean because so little of the continent was recorded by Spanish explorers before the plagues began. People like Cabeza de Vaca and Cortez report a diverse place where many different cultures existed. The idea that there's a continent-spanning and centuries-spanning native American nationality at all seems suspect to me whenever it comes up.
Richek
O....k? But this isn't "feminist anthropology," this is firmly grounded not only in western bodies of academic research, but also (more importantly) in modern oral histories, traditions, and lifeways of existing indigenous peoples.
T0go
Giving a confident and specific account of the decline of Cahokia is ringing my over interpretation alarm
Richek
They (the academic not the person on fucking tumblr) gave a confident and specific account of their theory of a major factor of decline based on anthropological, historical, and ethnographic data. Thats not "over interpretation," thats just... how these sciences work. Take issue with the tumblr post all you want but you're being reductive to a disingenuous fault here.
InTheBeginningWasTheNerd
This is interesting, but can we please stop with the whole "enlightened natives" bullshit? Native Americans weren't some mystical beings living in perfect harmony with nature. They just did what worked in order to survive, just like everyone else. The only difference between them and ancient Summerians, Chinese, Swahili, or Europeans is that they encountered a literate culture curious about the world it inhabited and prone to writing everything down.
beastthatshines
This is a wildly disingenuous interpretation, at best, and outright inflammatory at worst. We clearly did not read the same post.
NonstopRampage
"oh muh gawd, this makes the white devils who came here, look like a bunch of unenlightened rubes! I can't allow that! How dare they act like they weren't just forest savages swinging clubs and throwing their own feces! We came here and civilized them!!"
...was the impression I got from their post. SUPER quick to downplay my people, out of literally nowhere. The fuck.
Athanar
I don't think this is calling them enlightened. More that they were using a different form of agriculture that was healthier to the land itself. That's just humans finding and using good practices.
Aurentis
This is very much not that. It's pointing out that the natives knew their land and had built a world in it that European invaders fundamentally did not understand or even recognize for what it was. It's not talking about how they were mystical, it's talking about how fucking dumb and simplistically, unthinkingly evil invaders are, erasing rich local cultures and replacing them wholesale with how things "ought to be done."
Natives are just people. And everything they'd built was destroyed.
CarlBassett
Yep, centuries earlier Europeans were probably doing much the same thing. The industrialisation of agriculture moved away from that and so to the early settlers eyes the "natural" looking land looked just that, natural.
taegins
It's way more insidious than that unfortunately. European Christians saw themselves as encountering and completing the finding of the promised land, as descendants of the Israelites. A popal edict went into effect saying that Christian nations had the right and moral responsibility to subdue the land, and that natives who would not convert needed to be treated as infidels. Part of the planned destruction of this people group was the systematic destruction of their land and way of life...
Aurentis
Papal*
taegins
This wasn't accidental, it was heavily intentional. And we can see it playing out in millions of small ways across America's land. Federal law still recognizes the pope's decree as justifying legal doctrine for America's ownership of the land. Tragedies such as the mass killing of buffalo herds, deforestation, and river architecture were partially informed because they would weaken native populations, not just because it was a happy accident to get rich.
Aurentis
This is since much-needed context, all of this was taking place against the backdrop of intentional, methodical genocide.
namelessone
I'm not an expert, but I've read or watched someone say that even in medieval Europe, the forests were not wild, they were managed by the local populace in clever and practical ways. People have been managing nature for a really long time.
Givemeyourworst
The amazon is also a largely oriented forest by the ommunities that lived there for thousands of years before the westerners came up to them in the late 19th century.
notchoosingone
There's a quote from a former Australian Prime Minister along the lines of "if we had deliberately set out to destroy the ecology of this country, we could not have done a better job than we did by accident"
pleaseconsiderthatImightbejoking
Kind of. In medieval Europe you had "Forests" which were basically areas set aside for hunting, amd not necessarily forested, and you had "Woods" which are basically farms for forestry products, firewood, timber and staves, but also things like berries and honey that don't need open plowed fields.
HandoB4Javert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest
xeno426
Yep. Coppicing and pollarding were common in the woods surrounding villages. Underbrush would be kept clear to allow wanes to move through.
SinStar87
i imagine lightly maintained wilds isn't a productive means to support major population centers that'd allow for world wide conquest like europe managed. So to return to such a living would require like 19/20 people to just die off and all modern convenience to be wiped away with the meagerly populated gatherer villages to devote themselves to nothing but manicuring forests.
namelessone
I mean, I wasn't trying to suggest we go back to that. Just talking about the historical aspect. People of the time responded to the needs of their circumstances.
At the same time, I don't think that our current use of the wilds is sustainable either, so even if we can't go back to what we did in medieval times, I'd say it's safe to assume we should scale back exploitation of natural resources to some extent.
JacktheKind
Sounds awesome. And I bet we can mediate some of the downsides with the things we learned. We're so productice now, but don't reap our reward because we're not working for ourselves; barely anyone is
flyingmonkeystick
You can’t make up for that kind of productivity. You’d have to go all in and give up all modern conveniences if you want to go that route. And that’s never going to happen by choice.
HalfADozenBearCubs
Not really, but it would require a lot more cooperation and moving most of the population centers off of productive floodplains and coastlines and into rocky badlands, floating platforms, and going to higher density housing in suburban woodland and prairie areas to make room for more food forests, productive liminal spaces, and wetlands. SINCE global climate change is shifting out of the ice ages (FUCKING FINALLY!) we gotta get hot on that and stop bickering about how much is caused by humans.
astrangehop
Sidebar: in the age of ships forestry was essential to maintain tools for colonisation and the slave trade. Yes, there was always something way inland, but it's hard to get something that's gonna be a 100 foot mast from 200 miles inland down the river hence "the king's pines" etc
VodkaReindeer
I figure the natives would have been happy to make use of animal husbandry and wheat to avoid their kids starving.
astrangehop
(again talking outta my ass) wheat is way up on the tech tree; you can harvest + dry maize with stone tools and hands
TorrentialUpPour
Native Americans lived in harmony with nature by necessity, not because it was practical, or 'healthy', or 'by choice'. They didn't have the beasts of burden that Europe, Africa, and Asia had that were necessary not only for more formalized agriculture, but also mining and metal tools. Everything had to be done by human labor and much of it wasn't sustainable that way.
Noahbalboa82
You may be right. However, there are lessons to be gleaned from older forest management that could help reduce our impact. We won't ever return to what it was, but maybe we can better preserve what we have thru more efficient use of resources and get off this self destructive trajectory we are all on
ZOMGNO
Well population control is interesting, yes. If people didn't work 40+ hour weeks and more people had time to grow SOME of their own food..... we would still need population control to do a way with the giant agriculture we have now to support this level of people. Infant mortality in the 1st world has dropped. Lifespans are longer and there is increased medical care... We've changed so radically that we couldn't go back now in the same way.
Leaps
Plus it would take a while for the animal populations to come back to what they were.
Causeitsmadeofmeat
Areas with clear-cut logging have orders of magnitude more animals than a mature forest.
Noahbalboa82
I think it would take decades, even centuries. You know how some would say it would take centuries to terraform Mars, but many are willing to try it? Maybe a similar mindset is needed here. It won't ever be what it was, but if it can get closer, that's the right direction. And it needs to be a moonshot for generations
Leithoa
Managed by the feudal lord for his exploitation. Not every day folk.
TorrentialUpPour
Those agricultural methods predate feudalism. Try again.
Leithoa
They're talking about medieval europe. When feudalism was how things functioned.
MithgarSilvervein
Europe wasn't feudal for the entire medieval period... where are you getting this from?
Blonderian
Yeah. Who do you think managed the forest in the name of this feudal lord?
Leithoa
Lower level nobility. Again, the forest wasn't managed for the entire population, everything went to the lord. Serfs who were found foraging in the forest were arrested for poaching.
Blonderian
You're mistaking "managed by" with "managed for", it was the common people that managed the forests in the name of their feudal overlords and got much of their food from said forests.
TorrentialUpPour
You're literally just making shit up. Most serf diets included food from foraging, hunting, and personal gardens. You sound like everything you know came from The History Channel after they fully embraced reality TV.
MithgarSilvervein
I had the exact same thought; fucking Americans and their obsession with pre-modern Europe being some weird monoculture.
Frenchgeek
Which is why some of us laugh softly at the hardcore "ecologists" here who want to leave forests alone... And then are surprised when the lack of maintenance make said forests fire-prone deathtraps. Nature hasn't been 'natural' for a very long time now.
someLittleFrog
frankly this arguments tend to be usually "cut the whole forest down, let it grow for 50 years, repeat." from the "controlled/maintained" side. Not at all what is talked on post or referenced on the comment above. Letting it be and controlling the natural cycles, which is the sensitive ecologists side is much closer. But it is then usually painted by media and such like you wrote.
zombiejedediah
Wait up. Humans have killed off most of the larger animals who used to provide a lot of balance to the original forest biomes.
We are still discovering what animals are necessary, but adding mammoths & aurochs is going to be tricky.
ZOMGNO
There is a project to recreate Mammoths in order to bring back some natural steppes... its still years off, but the genome mapping is interesting
Rhythmaster
Well, I think the forest ecosystems would be a lot healthier if we hadn't cut down 98% of all the old growth trees in north america and planted monoculture pine plantations that are super flammable because that type of lumber is the most profitable? The fire prone death trap is BECAUSE of human interference, not because of lack of human interference. Yes controlled burns can be healthy for forests, but the forests we have now are so unhealthy anyway. There are natural fire-resistant trees like
Rhythmaster
Aspen, and forests in north America are routinely sprayed with glyphosate to kill Aspen and save the space for profitable and flammable lumber products, sorry I mean trees, but seriously, this is how we are treating the forests, as a factory for lumber production. That's why its fire prone and beetle infestation prone, because there is not enough biodiversity and all the trees are super young and clones of each other. Comparing this travesty to healthy, old growth forests doesnt really work.
Rhythmaster
I dont disagree that the forests can do better with maintenance, but colonizers destroyed the original forests, there is such a thing as TOO MUCH interference, and that's what we have wrought. it's kind of too late to learn any lessons about how indigenous populations maintained their healthy forest ecosystems because we destroyed those forests and put this modern profit driven bullshit there in their place.
Noahbalboa82
The knowledge, expertise, and examples lost is devastating. But perhaps there's enough passed-down oral traditions that can help restore this type of forest farms. In fact, there are some versions of this around the world. But in America, probably none. If there's a will, and some knowledge, we can plant the correct species and start working on experimenting with how to maintain these types of forests
Maverickaura
Incorrect, nature has been natural for a long time. It's just humans only relatively recently started considering themselves apart from what is natural. Humans in their ecosystems ARE nature. Is a bee doing somthing unnatural by pollinating flowers?
xeno426
Better analogy would be beavers and their dams.
Maverickaura
if the metaphor you're trying to make is about controlling the environment rather than nurturing for mutual benefit then yeah
xeno426
Beaver dams have lots of natural benefit for the surrounding area as well. Bees are a more direct symbiosis, where many plant species wouldn't be able to reproduce without them.
strawberrycocoa
I remember reading an article about the Cambrian era and the true primeval woodlands; forest fires were a natural part of their life cycle, the planets way of cleaning out scruff and dead growth. They WANTED to be burned down periodically. Some plants even grew so dependent on regular fire seasons that they required it to distribute their seeds. Its crazy to think about.
CarlBassett
I read that a few decades ago researchers realised that forests in the north western US were dying off and couldn't work out why, before realising that they had become too good in preventing forest fires, and that naturally occurring fires were a vital part of the ecosystem, clearing away areas where new young trees could grow.
LivMooreordiehard
I suspect you are thinking of a later era such as the Devonian or Carboniferous. There were no land plants in the Cambrian .
strawberrycocoa
Carboniferous maybe, it began with a C
SirenBrick
Love one story. Researchers found a small river island on Native managed lands, and were SUPER excited to see a real wild forest and asked permission to go study it. The chief said yes, but was super embarrassed because it was HIS responsibility to keep it clean and he had been ignoring it for a decade, so he had his sons go do a burn on it before the researchers arrived to cover up his lack of responsibility.
arp271
Me cleaning my house right before guests come over
NecroNikolai13
You throw everything in the closet and set it on fire? Me too!
SecondSince
It's the only way to be sure!