![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2osM41C:
torrilin:
petermorwood:
siliquasquama:
anarcho-shindouism:
siliquasquama があなたの投稿に返信しました “since the algonqian speakers of the connecticut river valley practiced…”
If that be true, then there’s more woods around here NOW than there was in 1619.
yeah theres actually a little bit more forest now than there was like 100 years ago because people have been farming less, which leads to unmaintained land being reclaimed by forest.
but i still think that the british and americans farmed more extensively and destructively than the algonqian speakers
so in other words there was still probably a lot more forest in pre-colonial times than there is now, but it still wasn’t ~untamed pristine wilderness~ either since people were still living there and maintaining it, just in a much less destructive way
and ~untamed pristine wilderness~ is such a bad way of thinking about land anyway imo
I remember Bill Bryson talking about the idea of Untamed Pristine Wilderness in “A Walk In the Woods”. He blames Americans and the National Park movement specifically for this idea. We’ve got it into our heads that THESE areas are meant to be preserved like a fly in amber and THESE areas we can abuse the hell out of, instead of working with the supposed wilderness to provide steady economic benefits. For example, in Europe people get a small amount of woods out of their forests by selective cutting and by coppicing. In America we set aside certain areas as Pristine and chop down the rest. In Europe a path through deep woods would come across a town every ten miles or so; in America the Appalachian trail was designed to be devoid of human habitation.
And then there’s the case of the Appalachian Balds. These summit meadows are a dilemma, because they were created by Nature but maintained by human interaction. Once the national park service set up areas where people weren’t allowed to graze livestock, the forests started to overtake the Balds. Now the park service has to decide whether it’s worth letting them disappear because the land should be left to do as it will, or to maintain them in an effort to preserve the flora that only exists in these meadows.
The problem could easily be solved if the park service was willing to let people graze their livestock there again, but the park service is built on a philosophy that can’t accept this option.
We’ve created an exclusionary idea of The Wild that doesn’t actually serve the creatures living within it.
I’ve a vague memory of reading somewhere that this “Untouched Wilderness Must Be Untouched” approach contributes to the major damage caused by wildfires.
Natural wildfires caused by lightning strikes etc. burned off dead vegetation and made room for new growth etc. They were frequent, small and brief because of a limited amount of fuel accumulated since the last one. Preventing any sort of fire at all allows all the dead-leaf rotted-wood rubbish to build up until, when a wildfire does happen, it’s got far more fuel to work with and becomes far bigger than it would/should have been.
(As I say, a vague memory. I may be completely wrong about this…)
Not wrong. You’ve got the gist of it, tho it largely doesn’t work on the East Coast of the US in the same way.
I forget what kinds of ecosystems textbooks and government data tend to ascribe to the East Coast. There’s usually an assumption that there’s some “real and true” ecosystem, and that large areas will be fairly uniform. And I know from first hand experience that what the official stuff says and what reality actually does can be really far apart. And you go over the next mountain and you can be in a totally different ecosystem.
And well, the entire Appalachian mountain chain is really bad at uniform on account of being well, MOUNTAINS, and it’s one of the longest mountain ridges on the planet. So um. Yeah. Add in that there’s sections of the mountain chain that get over 1m of rainfall per year? It gets very damp and hard to burn. Also, there is perhaps more wildlife diversity than people want to acknowledge.
My mother is a historian. She was reading the letters of one of our local townsmen (upstate NY, near the Vermont border) who served in the War of 1812 and thus had been out to the western part of the state, near Buffalo.
One of the notable events he wrote home about was seeing a deer. He had never seen one before in his life. The entire state was so deforested that there was no habitat for them, by 1812. Think on that. A full-grown adult man who had lived in New York State his whole life, and who was in the process of walking back from having previously walked the entire length of the state, wrote a letter home about seeing a deer, because neither he nor anyone with him had ever seen one before.
Your basic-ass white-tail deer.
There were no forests for them to live in. There were no deer.
I don’t know how much of the area was already cleared by the activities of the Native Americans before English settlers arrived, but that was the ecosystem by 1812: few to no trees, and no deer. No “wilderness”.
torrilin:
petermorwood:
siliquasquama:
anarcho-shindouism:
siliquasquama があなたの投稿に返信しました “since the algonqian speakers of the connecticut river valley practiced…”
If that be true, then there’s more woods around here NOW than there was in 1619.
yeah theres actually a little bit more forest now than there was like 100 years ago because people have been farming less, which leads to unmaintained land being reclaimed by forest.
but i still think that the british and americans farmed more extensively and destructively than the algonqian speakers
so in other words there was still probably a lot more forest in pre-colonial times than there is now, but it still wasn’t ~untamed pristine wilderness~ either since people were still living there and maintaining it, just in a much less destructive way
and ~untamed pristine wilderness~ is such a bad way of thinking about land anyway imo
I remember Bill Bryson talking about the idea of Untamed Pristine Wilderness in “A Walk In the Woods”. He blames Americans and the National Park movement specifically for this idea. We’ve got it into our heads that THESE areas are meant to be preserved like a fly in amber and THESE areas we can abuse the hell out of, instead of working with the supposed wilderness to provide steady economic benefits. For example, in Europe people get a small amount of woods out of their forests by selective cutting and by coppicing. In America we set aside certain areas as Pristine and chop down the rest. In Europe a path through deep woods would come across a town every ten miles or so; in America the Appalachian trail was designed to be devoid of human habitation.
And then there’s the case of the Appalachian Balds. These summit meadows are a dilemma, because they were created by Nature but maintained by human interaction. Once the national park service set up areas where people weren’t allowed to graze livestock, the forests started to overtake the Balds. Now the park service has to decide whether it’s worth letting them disappear because the land should be left to do as it will, or to maintain them in an effort to preserve the flora that only exists in these meadows.
The problem could easily be solved if the park service was willing to let people graze their livestock there again, but the park service is built on a philosophy that can’t accept this option.
We’ve created an exclusionary idea of The Wild that doesn’t actually serve the creatures living within it.
I’ve a vague memory of reading somewhere that this “Untouched Wilderness Must Be Untouched” approach contributes to the major damage caused by wildfires.
Natural wildfires caused by lightning strikes etc. burned off dead vegetation and made room for new growth etc. They were frequent, small and brief because of a limited amount of fuel accumulated since the last one. Preventing any sort of fire at all allows all the dead-leaf rotted-wood rubbish to build up until, when a wildfire does happen, it’s got far more fuel to work with and becomes far bigger than it would/should have been.
(As I say, a vague memory. I may be completely wrong about this…)
Not wrong. You’ve got the gist of it, tho it largely doesn’t work on the East Coast of the US in the same way.
I forget what kinds of ecosystems textbooks and government data tend to ascribe to the East Coast. There’s usually an assumption that there’s some “real and true” ecosystem, and that large areas will be fairly uniform. And I know from first hand experience that what the official stuff says and what reality actually does can be really far apart. And you go over the next mountain and you can be in a totally different ecosystem.
And well, the entire Appalachian mountain chain is really bad at uniform on account of being well, MOUNTAINS, and it’s one of the longest mountain ridges on the planet. So um. Yeah. Add in that there’s sections of the mountain chain that get over 1m of rainfall per year? It gets very damp and hard to burn. Also, there is perhaps more wildlife diversity than people want to acknowledge.
My mother is a historian. She was reading the letters of one of our local townsmen (upstate NY, near the Vermont border) who served in the War of 1812 and thus had been out to the western part of the state, near Buffalo.
One of the notable events he wrote home about was seeing a deer. He had never seen one before in his life. The entire state was so deforested that there was no habitat for them, by 1812. Think on that. A full-grown adult man who had lived in New York State his whole life, and who was in the process of walking back from having previously walked the entire length of the state, wrote a letter home about seeing a deer, because neither he nor anyone with him had ever seen one before.
Your basic-ass white-tail deer.
There were no forests for them to live in. There were no deer.
I don’t know how much of the area was already cleared by the activities of the Native Americans before English settlers arrived, but that was the ecosystem by 1812: few to no trees, and no deer. No “wilderness”.
