Rest: Part 1

~ This article first appeared in The Leader Vindicator newspaper. ~

Stephen Pyne’s tome Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire teaches a powerful lesson regarding man’s relationship with the land.  Pyne reveals the importance of fire in the Native American nation by studying their use of firewood.  Natives burned as a matter of survival: cooking, warmth, ceremonies, and light are the obvious employments for fire.  What we fail to grasp from our school book education is the quantity of fuel wood consumed by Indian tribes.  They gathered and incinerated every scrap surrounding a campsite, to such an extent that early explorers from England described the so-called ‘virgin wilds’ in the New Land as being very similar to the ‘parks and champion fields they had known in Old England’ (pg.46).  So important was firewood availability to Northeastern tribes that many assumed English explorers had departed their homeland in search of more wood.

The Indian fire story does not end at the edge of the campsite.  Natives completely reshaped their environment using fire.  Carrying with them, from early days in the African Savannah, it’s speculated, a preference for grasslands interspersed with open forests, American Indians cleared and burned nearly unfathomable tracts of land in order to suppress forest succession.  Grassy, open savannas stretching east from the Mississippi enabled buffalo to expand their range into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts by the seventeenth century; the grassland corridors were the product of anthropogenic fire (pg 76).  So widespread was Native deforestation that “they inadvertently assisted the rapid deployment of early settlers…nearly every colony occupied sites already cleared by Indians” (pg.46).  History stories of valiant Englishmen chopping inch by inch through dense, virgin forests in America are a myth promulgated by those same valiant men who felt a little less heroic when they discovered the going to be easier than expected.  Vegetation was thinned and organized into a landscape long before the first sea-legged European stepped ashore.

Native Americans did not exist in day-to-day harmonious balance with nature, as is the common assumption.  Conversely, Indians were the source of massive environmental disruption, fully reshaping the landscape around them to suit the needs of the tribe.  Furthermore, a campsite, some occupying 100-150 acres (pg 46), exhausted every firewood resource in the surrounding area because inhabitants cleared the forests of fallen branches, underbrush, and trees; such consumption certainly affected environmental equilibrium in the vicinity of a village.  Factors including “soil exhaustion, weed infestation, gradual reduction of game, [and] steady increase in vermin” resulted from tribal presence (pg 47).

Yet, it is inaccurate to conclude that Indian inhabitation damaged the environment.  The terrain that would one day become America was not depleted, abused, and eroding.  On the contrary, “…when Europeans arrived, the landscape was in finely tuned balance” (pg 82).   Explorers staggered off their boats and into a utopia overflowing with abundance.

Such widespread, inexhaustible productivity was possible because tribes moved.  The action of packing, the drudgery of travel, and the hope of new space are focal points when discussing nomadic existence.  We must be careful to avoid assigning success to the wrong action: It was not the settling of new land that enabled Native American tribes to flourish in fecundity; rather, it was the ample rest provided to land abandoned. 

Natives were not reluctant to utilize every resource available to them.  Nor were they hesitant to reshape the wilds to better suit their needs and preferences.  Such tendencies, by today’s orthodox environmental standards, are barbaric, yet Natives’ track record was significantly better than that of any modern earth-saving charity.  The Indians’ rhythmic pulse of heavy use (now forbidden in parks, neighborhoods, and wildlife preserves) followed by long respite (now forgotten on agricultural land) worked in perfect sync with natural ebbs and flows.

As Europeans settled and moved west, they established and enforced boundaries, thus choking off the healing touch of Native migration and disrupting it “by the corrupting habits of civilization” (pg 82).  When people stopped moving, chronic overuse of land concentrated into specific locals and underuse reverted grassland back to dense forests.  Europeans didn’t conquer the choked, tangled forests; they created them.

There are two powerful lessons to be extracted from this study.

First:  It should not be discouraged, nor can it be considered an abhorrent crime against the environment, to fully utilize all of the resources in nature for the betterment of humanity. 

Second:  After resources have been utilized, nature will replenish all of them for free if given time to do so.

These two takeaways are so profound that they have the power to completely alter our home life, our agriculture, our recreation, and, by way of adjusting all of those, our greater relationship with the environment around us.  Yet, they’re marginalized and conspicuously overlooked by anyone with clout.  I fear they will continue to be so, largely due to the fact that if a use-rest rhythm can achieve the results we’re all seeking, the simplicity of such a solution would negate decades of hard-won scientific orthodoxy that claims a resolution is far more complicated.

I cannot change the minds of the masses.  I can, however, change my own mind and my own actions.  Check in next week for Rest: Part II, and I’ll discuss how the ideas above are influencing my life and, by extension, our farm and the food we produce.

References:

Pyne, Steven J.Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire.Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1982.