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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] back to our focus/ mounds
  • Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:53:25 -0600


Great. Thank you, anne/jim clements, for a link that brings back our focus
on Living On The Land. That link is an article in The Atlantic Monthly |
March 2002. If you can get past the long part on disease and population,
there's fascinating material about the indigenous agriculture. It appears
many huge indian nations were master ecologists long before we "invented"
permaculture. And it suggests just how far we have yet to go in living on
the land sustainably.

I'm taking the liberty of posting excerpts from that section below. All
from http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/ftts/downloadsw/1491.pdf

Thanks again!

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
-----------------

Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for
individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts
for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they
handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every
potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this
hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially
developed in the Americas.

Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with
global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize
varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could
and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became
particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and
Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced
hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the
world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled
Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest
metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets,
ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of
miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for
the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended
the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate.
(Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never
heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of
prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame,
visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and
declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and
so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ...
[that] I would rather live here than any where."

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their
environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments
for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that
the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots,
as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the
Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their
purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and
create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than
domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow
bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio
found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through
the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks
for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam
boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North
America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie,
much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of
exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian
societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois,
Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.
Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading
Europeans did? "The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next
250 years or so" after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, "and for some
regions right up to the present time."

Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of
the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely
cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist,
cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest
was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human
beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I
basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil. He
argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species
throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of
Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland
tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the
planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical," he said,
smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the
State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe
that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched
Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia."
The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not
all, Neotropical landscapes." "Landscape" in this case is meant
exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their
feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois
University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on
very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful
measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable
terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta— rich, fertile
"black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by
human beings.

Terra preta , Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an
area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain
doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to
speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with
a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The
bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because
over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial
thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated
by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently,"
Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a
presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains
the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more
like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the
University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of
Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a
huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind
this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it
rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In
a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain
dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated
bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians
there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I
ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh."
Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was
passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking,
the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon
when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta , Woods told me,
to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of
Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil
that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who
brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

... But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimize paving the
forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia
were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to
learn.


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 8/6/2006 at 4:02 PM anne/jim clements wrote:

>Take a look at this article:
>
>academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/ftts/downloadsw/1491.pdf
>
>Very interesting ideas about how much the land of the
>Americas was manipulated before the Europeans arrived.
>
>It looks a lot like the "pristine wilderness" was
>really a product of human fashioning.
>
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