permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

on 8/29/00 6:31 PM, mangodance at bmn@iglou.com wrote:

> I'm not sure why you think we should keep
> in mind human manipulation when thinking about "restoration".
> Why would this be appropriate?

In North America the prairies, all major river valleys, coastal plains, and
many mountain valleys--pretty much the whole continent--were regularly
burned by humans and otherwise altered for millennia before whites arrived
(I can give plenty of references). Thus the baseline for restoration work is
a landscape that was already highly manipulated by humans. So we're
arbitrarily deciding that the earlier human-modified landscape is worth
preserving, while *our* human-modified landscape is somehow bad. In many
cases this is reasonable, as with the impoverished flora found in farmland,
strip mines, etc. But in restoration we're deciding that one species mix is
superior to many others possible on that site. I just ask that we
acknowledge the slipperiness of defining the "best" vegetation for a site;
that when we say "native" we're excluding many eligible species because they
don't fit a tiny subset of possible timeframes and conditions.

We're stuck in the position, like it or not, of playing God. Thus it would
be useful to recognize how wide our opportunities really are.

Like many permies, I like species mixes that have plenty of exotics as well
as natives because in many cases I can design them to promote greater
insect, bird, and mammal density and diversity, richer soil, plus more food
for me, than natives alone seem to promote (now there's some God-playing
hubris for you!). But obviously I'm not talking about planting the Greater
Yellowstone Ecosystem with the same mix.

And I'd love to see the woolly mammoth back!

Toby