I question whether the hunter-gatherer culture really ever existed. I'm noYou're absolutely right that the term "hunter-gatherer" doesn't do these people justice. They were and are certainly actively involved in the manipulation of their environments. See the excellent "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Mann (reviewed in Permaculture Activist #59) for a plethora of examples from the Western Hemisphere. And some of these "hunter-gatherer" cultures arguably degraded their environments, although the majority were/are an overwhelmingly positive influence, in terms of overall biodiversity and biomass. Native hunter-gatherer groups in the Pacific Northwest and California reached population levels comparable to some highish-density agrarian cultures, but didn't degrade their ecosystems, though they changed them dramatically, primarily through the use of controlled burning.
anthropologist, but I figure that when we were able to make tools to hunt and
gather then we were probably already engaged in creating a polycultural
environment that appears to us today as "nature" but in fact has been very
carefully influenced by conscious human action for their benefit. And on my
more cynical days, I figure that the early cultures just lacked enough people
and technology to degrade the ecosystems.
The concepts we are developing now of food forests and permacultureCertainly. I would suggest that the main difference in modern permaculture is that it is a design system that ideally works across different ecosystems and biomes, while traditional hunter-gatherer knowledge/wisdom is generally tied specifically to a single bioregion.
farms/gardens, we often think of this as modeling natural systems, yet maybe
this is more going back to earlier design strategies that we forgot or
abandoned when we moved to systems that we recognize today as agriculture.
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