Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Major histocompatibility complex

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Major histocompatibility complex
  • Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 15:47:50 -0800

On Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 07:11 AM, Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

Anyhow, just to return the thread to the "weedy behavior" analogy,

I'm not sure that "weed" is the right term. And this takes us to an interesting place.

What we call weeds generally move into disturbed ecosystems: tilled or burned sites, clearings left by downed trees, and so on. Weeds (and almost all so-called invasive plants) have a tough time colonizing intact ecosystems. You'll see a few dandelions in old-growth forest, but far more in the clearcut next to it. Kudzu first colonized old farms, and then the carved-up forests.

But colonizing humans, unlike weeds, don't favor "disturbed" lands or cultures. They move into places already settled by stable cultures (analogous to intact ecosystems). There's no equivalent of bare ground there. Human colonizers just push out or assimilate the occupants regardless of how well established they are. So colonizing cultures are less like a weed and more like a vigorous tree that sucks up all the nutrients, shades out the other plants, and kills them with allelopathic toxins. And trees are a later successionary phase than weeds.

Weeds can only move into a limited set of conditions: disturbed ground, where there is little resource competition. But later colonizers move into many types of occupied ground, find or create niches, and leverage into dominance (there's your East Indian motel owner: not a weed, but a late-succession specialist). As a general rule in ecology, the later a system's successionary phase, the more specialized or aggressive an invader's resource exploitation must be, as all the "easy" resources are taken. Only those species able to find resources can move in, and as time goes by the niches get smaller or require innovation to create.

This takes me to a politically incorrect place: Perhaps indigenous cultures are like early successionary species (hmm, like weeds), exploiting resources via a limited array of methods (hunter-gathering, digging-stick agriculture) while industrial cultures have evolved a diverse array of specialties (smelting, drilling, military logistics, accounting, etc.) for exploiting resources unused by the earlier inhabitants. I don't much like where this takes us, as it creates a justification for the idea of calling some cultures "primitive," but then, that's only when we view them through the lens of technology or ability to exploit certain resources. If we change the criteria to, say, plant knowledge, intact families, or integration of spirit into culture, then western culture is the primitive one. But this successional viewpoint does explain why western culture is colonizing most of the planet. We're more effective at turning everything into a "resource" and using it to fuel our cultural expansion, regardless of the consequences, crowding out the early occupants.

My point then, is that thinking of the spread of certain cultures as "weediness" is not as good an analogy as succession and aggressive resource exploitation. Westerners convert the whole planet into their habitat, but weeds are limited to bare soil.

I'm happy to have this idea battered down, refined, or amended; it leaves me a little depressed.

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page