permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

Besides "Tending the Wild," an excellent text on native plant use and
ecological management in the Pacific Northwest is "Keeping it Living,"
edited by Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner. It may not touch directly on
distinctions between native and non-native plants or invasive and
non-invasive ones, but it does a great job at blurring the lines between
"wild" and "domesticated" species. The essays in the book hammered home for
me the realization that humans can live as an aloof, separate, domineering
species, or, as was the case for the native peoples of Cascadia, integral
keystone members of their ecosystems. Sure, there are species we shouldn't
plant willy-nilly, but humans can be pretty good at discerning where and
when a species makes a healthy partner to a local ecosystem. In my opinion,
autumn olives dotting the landscape here and there, helping heal the soil
and providing some awfully yummy berries for birds and humans, is vastly
preferable to the truly invasive "ecosystems" our culture has covered vast
areas with. I'm speaking, of course, of the vast monocropped stands of
maize, wheat, and other cereals.

Ben

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 9:00 AM, <lbsaltzman@aol.com> wrote:

> Somebody else was talking about leaving nature alone. Toby mentions how
> Northwest indigenous people burned forest to maintain praire.? It is worth
> pointing out that the indigenous people of North America rarely left nature
> alone. I always highly recommend M. Kat Anderson's Tending the Wild to
> understand how unwild the California landscape was, a fact that is true for
> many places on the planet. After Europeans arrived and displaced the
> California natives from the landscape, much of the landscape did go "wild",
> and many would argue it became?degraded from the managed landscape that was
> here before their arrival. What was here was well managed land optimized for
> the needs of both for humans and the animals they hunted.? I think the
> question is not whether we manage the landscape and introduce new plants and
> animals, but the intelligence with which we do it.
>
>
>