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July 01, 2007
Real Americans Love Fireworks
From 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, By Charles C. Mann This book came highly recommended. I second the motion. Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland. He became a kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, which owned and operated the colony as a private fiefdom. And it was all blessedly carbon-neutral. Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of "succession," the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land...If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Early succession species would have vanished. I'm told that the Australian Aborigines also employed fire extensively. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used "to set fire of the country in all places where they come." Barbecue and Fireworks. How American can you get? Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both. I wonder, would that be considered the scientific concensus of the time? "It is at least a fair assumption," a widely used college forestry textbook remarked in 1973, "that no habitual or systematic burning was carried out by Indians." I guess so. Luckily, science is always marching (slowly) on. In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the "modest" Indian population "modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs." Kinda makes you wanna dress up in buckskins and blow off a few Roman candles, doesn't it? Well, feel free. It's still your country. Something we should all be grateful for. posted by Justin on 07.01.07 at 02:35 PM |
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