epiphiny43
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Fire as ecological tool is far more complex and nuanced than any above post seems to grasp. Abo use wasn't unique to the area Anywhere. Natural fires everywhere tend to be more random and spaced than deliberate ones. This has both plusses and minuses, mainly Minuses. As fuel builds on the land, fires become more intense and large area. Often far more destructive of both wildlife and both plants and the soil community they live in and above. Seasonal fires (Few humans are dumb enough to light fires when they may grow to intensities that risk their own community and selves, other than modern pyromaniacs.) are the rule by hunters and gathering cultures. Much of the US Eastern Forest was regularly burned of shrub and ground cover in the cool of the Fall, when the forest canopy would survive well. Otherwise travel other than by boat on waterways would have been difficult to impossible in many areas, and hunting anything but small ground animals 'unproductive'.
The body count of regular fires in open ground typical of many areas in Oz are quite low. The mobile animals move ahead (to waiting hunters, by design) or to the side of the fire path. Most animals who aren't fast enough who've survived humans take advantage of burrows and other underground safety. Regular fires rarely reach the intensities and duration to cook soil and suffocate burrowing animals. 10 to 20 year natural fires (Absolutely inevitable until someone eliminates all Lightning) or even less common, on the other hand, are land and ecology altering in an order of magnitude greater. Species abundance below topsoil, in it, and above, of all phylum, reflect the fire history, short and long term. The same as it reflects the water and temp history of the location. There are no 'good' patterns, just different ones. The repressed fire practices in the Mountain West of the US is now showing the error of nearly 100 years of letting fuel build on the land. Combined with the gentrification of many wilderness areas, solutions are now desperately being explored.
In the true absence of fire, many 'normally seen' animals simply can't survive, and others flourish. The faster prey animals depend on open space to escape. The concealment prey animals have to have cover, the denser the better, for many. Flourishing predators are adapted to the ecology and prey at present. All available ecological niches Are filled, sparse human populations alter ecologies the same as any species. Only dense human populations impoverish whole ecologies. Till the various natural controls (The 'evil' parasites and diseases 'cursing' Abos, for instance) and undeveloped technologies kept many human populations relevant to their surroundings. Towns and cities that depend on mass agriculture enable and depend on environmental pressures that destroy ecologies, impoverish soils, exhaust water resources and often degrade to surviving on waring on less profligate neighbors for sustenance.
I'm not aware the Cherokee deviated from the garden/farming pattern elsewhere in North America, where each planting was accompanied by 'fertilization' (often a fish in each hole that seeds were dropped in.) and most plant growth was left on the land as cover for the Winter, maintaining fertility, preventing erosion and remaining useful cover for hunted small animals that helped feed the village, Not used as feed for livestock. How the Europeans exhausted soil quickly everywhere. (Biofuels suffer the same objection, soil fertility plummets when all growth is harvested.) The problem with developed communities and slash and burn, is the village has to have land resources that don't belong to other villages or tribes to move to. Hardly the case in the fairly well populated SouthEast. And a good location is never abandoned unless necessary. As trade was crucial, trails and navigable waterways defined excellent locations as much as soil and water.
Besides, assessments of the SouthEast peoples is a study of a catastrophic remnant of the previous emerging civilization. The De Soto expedition found emerging city states everywhere, and spread devastating European diseases to all that they didn't murder outright, on their path. Town on raised earth mounds with stockade exterior walls were almost the rule, with emerging ruling and priest classes, not all that far behind the stone building cultures of Mexico and the rest of all Central America. We know less of the Mound People of the Mississippi Valley but their constructions strongly imply mobilizing large numbers of people regularly. The landscape of the SouthEast was a hundred years all but neglected by humans as the native peoples returned to small group hunting and gathering as they struggled to survive in a new world where highly contagious diseases (Flu, etc.) no one had any immunity to caused mass deaths whenever more than a small group gathered. (The cultures in the NorthEast seem to have survived better, cold winters breaking contagion cycles?)
We are just starting to dig into the details of the pre-Columbian cultures and their millennium or longer Stable reign on the land and the details of their cultures and land practices. We know even less of the mass of peoples living in the South American forests and lowlands as most had vanished to the new diseases before any European penetrated to their areas. The Spanish recorded the peoples of some of Central America, and the Andes, before they slaved most out of existence, then ruined much of the arable land with cattle and sheep. Live stock that have ruined ecologies most everywhere they are herded. We now know land productivity overall harvesting the natural game preserves ecologies far better, provides more and better meat, but doesn't profit Individuals and specific communities near as well as domestic animal husbandry. Australia is just now coming to confront just how inappropriate transplanting the English ag and animal husbandry models to a drought plagued continent has proven.
Modern deep well technology is fast destroying most aquifers world wide, particularly in the Western US. Those that aren't over tapped are often being poisoned by Fracking! The pre metal cultures simply didn't have the technology to do even a fraction of the damage Technological Man does casually.
There was nothing 'Noble' or all that sustainable to any human culture, nor were diseases and parasites absent anywhere before Western Medicine. But the low technologies most everywhere meant damage was Slow and limited. Hawaiians were slowly lowering the productivity of much of the Islands, as in many areas were a few manage to profit from the labor of many. As human powers over their environments grew, damage escalated. We now believe we live ON the planet, on In it. This illusion is now being rudely shattered by a number of dynamics, Planetary Heating from the Greenhouse Effect is only getting more press. Soil and water use is now completely unsustainable most places, while population growth sadly lags any relevant technology to feed, clothe, water and house the masses. To say nothing of provide the energy and raw materials a consumer culture that is sweeping the Earth demands. We haven't defeated any of the forces controlling natural populations, we have only temporarily countered a few, so the population bloom and inevitable crash will be that much more devastating.
< Message edited by epiphiny43 -- 12/15/2015 6:21:02 PM >
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