“There is something to be learned from the native American people about where we are,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder. “It can’t be learned from anybody else.”
Nearly every nation in the Americas has intact native populations. Some European countries do, such as Sweden with the Sámi (formerly known as Lapps). Australia has its Aborigine people, and New Zealand the Maori. Part of Africa’s wealth is the most sustained human continuity in the world. Most Asian nations have some people who have been there the longest, such as the Ainu in Japan. The native traditions of the most experienced and attuned dwellers of the land are worth preserving and reviving everywhere.
• American Indians and the non-Indian majority—and the landscape we now share—are still getting over the trauma of the tectonic collision in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between shipborne Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A continental population estimated to have been between 50 million and 100 million in 1491 was reduced to 6.5 million by 1650. It was the greatest cataclysm in human history; a fifth of the world’s population died. We think of it as a military event, but it was almost entirely biological.
With no immunity to European diseases, native populations were shattered by successive waves of smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, whooping cough, dysentery, diphtheria, measles, mumps, cholera, typhus, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and bubonic plague. Densely populated regions like the Mississippi Valley, the Amazon, and the Yucatán Peninsula were so emptied that European explorers who arrived after the diseases swept through thought that no one lived there. The Pilgrims only survived their first New England winter, in 1620, thanks to food caches they found in abandoned native villages. The following autumn, the local chief Massasoit could afford to be generous at the first Thanksgiving: Disease had reduced the confederation he led from twenty thousand to one thousand. There was food to spare.
The book to read on all this is Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). Crammed with news of every sort, it is especially germane here as a primer on how to harness an ecosystem. Before the great dying, the American continent was a managed landscape. Afterward, it was an abandoned garden that the Europeans misinterpreted as wilderness. For a time there were parklike forests free of undergrowth, but the people who had kept the undergrowth down with fire were dead, and the woods became impenetrable. Millions of passenger pigeons darkened the skies because their human competitors for food were gone. Millions of bison overran the plains because so many of the Indians who had hunted them had died. “Far from destroying pristine wilderness,” Mann writes, “Europeans bloodily created it.”
No wonder the reforesting of the continent caused the drawdown of atmospheric CO2 noted by climatologist William Ruddiman. Before Columbus arrived, according to Charles Mann,Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.
• Geneticist Nina Federoff has described maize as “arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering.” She told Charles Mann: “To get corn out of teosinte is so—you couldn’t get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy. Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn’t get shut down by Greenpeace, I mean.” Besides converting an unpromising grass into the world’s most efficient and popular food plant, the pre-Mexican Indians developed the milpa field system to grow it in, combining, Mann writes, “maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grainlike plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).” The beans climbed up the corn stalks for sunlight, fixed nitrogen in the soil, and provided dietary niacin that corn lacks. Add the vitamins in squash and the fat in avocados, and you need very little meat for a healthy diet.
Corn and the milpa made the high civilizations of Mesoamerica possible. “In the Mayan creation story, the famous Popul Vuh,” writes Mann, “humans were literally created from maize.” (Michael Pollan makes a similar point, less approvingly, in his exposé on American agriculture, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.) Sustainability was built in—some milpa fields in Mexico have been in continuous cultivation for four thousand years. The many contemporary proponents of polyculture farming are heirs to milpa-style sophistication developed by ancient societies all over the world.
Recent studies of the Amazon have turned up another spectacular early agricultural invention. The basin’s rain-forest soil is so infertile that everyone assumed only a scattering of hunter-gatherer tribes could live there, because agriculture would be impossible. That theory held sway despite accounts from sixteenth-century Spanish explorers of the Amazon reporting “numerous and very large settlements” and “one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house.” In the 1990s, archaeologists began discovering extensive earthworks in the rain forest that indicated previous dense inhabitation, along with areas of a peculiar dark soil called in Portuguese terra preta do Índio—black earth of the Indians. Intensely and durably fertile, terra preta was generated apparently on purpose over large areas by an agricultural technique now called slash and char. The barren rain-forest soil was being amended with man-made charcoal. “Faced with an ecological problem,” Mann writes, “the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.”
These days a terra preta craze has gripped bioenergy experimenters and agricultural scientists, who call the miracle substance biochar. Once in the soil, the charcoal provides habitat for microorganisms, retains soil nutrients, and sequesters carbon, apparently for thousands of years—the oldest sites date back 4,500 years. It reduces nitrous oxide emissions and prevents runoff of phosphorus and nitrogen in the rains. Some terra preta soil goes six feet deep, and it typically retains ten times as much carbon as ordinary Amazon soil. At biochar conferences, businesses, and do-it-yourself Web sites, there is talk of a “black gold revolution” in agriculture and a “carbon-negative bioenergy industry.” An article in Discover enthuses:Burning agricultural wastes in a controlled process called pyrolysis can convert wood and other organic waste into useful volatile gases, heat, electricity, and bio-oil. The process is win-win: Burning the biomass produces substantial amounts of rich biochar from waste material like peanut shells and rice husks, and mixing this biochar into soil could more than offset the carbon that is emitted into the atmosphere not only during the burning process itself, but also when the derived fuels are used.
At one biochar conference, Australian biologist Tim Flannery declared that “biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future. The biochar approach provides a uniquely powerful solution, for it allows us to address food security, the fuel crisis, and the climate problem, and all in an immensely practical manner.” Needless to say, the fact that Indians discovered the benefits of biochar first makes the whole subject extra cool.
• If 1491 is the best introduction to indigenous ecosystem engineering, the most illuminating textbook is Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2005), by ethnoecologist Kat Anderson. The Spanish and then the Yankees who came to California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness,” she writes, “but rather a carefully tended ‘garden’ that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting.” There were grasslands and meadows, enormous trees and parklike forests, spectacular wildflowers, and an abundance of game that were the
unrecognized product of careful tending by the region’s five hundred tribes. Two centuries later, a Southern Sierra Miwok elder, James Rust, told Anderson, “The white man sure ruined this country. It’s turned back to wilderness.”
California Indians were particularly expert in the use of fire, Anderson writes:Deliberate burning increased the abundance and density of edible tubers, greens, fruits, seeds, and mushrooms; enhanced feed for wildlife; controlled the insects and diseases that could damage wild foods and basketry material; increased the quantity and quality of material used for basketry and cordage; and encouraged the sprouts used for making household items, granaries, fish weirs, clothing, games, hunting and fishing traps, and weapons. It also removed dead material and promoted growth through the recycling of nutrients, decreased plant competition, and maintained specific plant community types such as coastal prairies and montane meadows.
California Indian women crafted the finest and most beautiful baskets in the world, using seventy-eight species of plants. Cooking the region’s staple food, acorn mush, involved dropping hot rocks into baskets so tightly woven they held water. Materials that fine required serious horticulture. According to Anderson, “almost every type of sedge, wildflower, fern, bush, tree, or grass used in a basket was fussed over and meticulously groomed by weavers.” Women would have done that work, because “in aboriginal California, women were the ethnobotanists, testing, selecting, and tending much of the plant world, and men were the ethnozoologists, applying their intimate knowledge of animal behavior to skillful hunting, fishing, and fowling.”
Anderson learned that there were strict rules: Do not waste what you have harvested, and do not harvest everything. You leave some for the other animals; you leave some to grow back. This year, take your roots from one side of the tree only, then from the other side next year. (The Hopi Thomas Banyacya, who advised me never to collect herbs from the first bush, was making a similar point.) There were two levels of ownership rights—private to an individual or family, and communal to all. With the Pomo, one anthropologist found, “all the great oaks in the valley flat were privately owned; those of the hills were owned by the village as a whole.”
“Take care of nature, and it will take care of you,” a Pit River gent named Willard Rhoades told Kat Anderson.
The delectable term ecosystem engineer was introduced in 1994 by ecologist Clive Jones and then was connected to the new ideas of niche construction and ecological inheritance by Oxford bioanthropologist John Odling-Smee (and coauthors) in 2003. Beavers perform niche construction when they create ponds with their dams, as do earthworms when they remake soil to suit themselves. In the process, both make richer environments for other organisms, and that qualifies them as ecosystem engineers. Because the transformed environments persist, that “ecological inheritance” becomes an evolutionary path that supplements genetic inheritance. The beavers and worms adapt progressively to the niches that they construct.
“ ‘Evolution helps those who help themselves’ is the basic idea behind the concept of niche construction or ecosystem engineering,” wrote archeobiologist Bruce Smith in a 2007 Science paper he titled “The Ultimate Ecosystem Engineers”—by which he means us. It’s part of our very origin. Evidence for controlled burning by early humans, he notes, dates back fifty-five thousand years in southern Africa.
Smith offers an interesting angle on domestication: “In Asia, . . . the domestication of two utilitarian species—the dog (for hunting) and the bottle gourd (for containers)—by 12,000 years before the present, did not so much involve deliberate human intervention as it did allow dogs and bottle gourds to colonize the human niche.” From this perspective, we didn’t shape dogs; we allowed them to shape themselves to ride along on our landscape-tuning success story.
• One of the finest examples of beautifully nuanced ecosystem engineering is the thousand-year-old terraced rice irrigation complex in Bali. “Perfect order” is how anthropologist Stephen Lansing describes it in his talks and books analyzing the Balinese water temple system. The elaborate array of ninth-century tunnels and rice paddy terraces in steep volcanic mountains is managed from the bottom up through a system of what are called subaks. Each subak is a group of men with adjoining rice fields that share a water source. Their meetings are democratic, dispensing with the otherwise powerful caste distinctions of Bali, and subaks are connected to one another through the hierarchic water-temple network. “The Balinese call their religion Agama Tirtha—the religion of water,” says Lansing. “Each village temple controls the water that flows into nearby rice terraces. Regional water temples control the flow into larger areas.”
The universal problem in irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no incentive to be generous to downstream users. They can just keep all the water and put downstream competitors out of business. What accounts for their apparent generosity in Bali? Lansing discovered that the downstream users also have power, because pests can be controlled only if everybody in the system plants rice at the same time (which overloads the pests with opportunity in one brief season and starves them the rest of the time).
If the upstreamers didn’t let enough water through, the downstreamers could refuse to synchronize their planting, and the pests would devour the upstreamers’ rice crops. That balance of power is enough to enforce perpetually renewed agreement among the subaks. The system is kept legitimate by the democratic transparency of the governance, and, Lansing says, “the water temple rituals are intended to tame the passions and keep order.” In Balinese language and understanding, he says, “rice paddies equals ‘jewel’ equals ‘mind.’ ”
The green revolution (indeed playing the villain this time) arrived in Bali in 1971, funded by the Asian Development Bank. For the new program, the government provided “technology packets” of fertilizer, pesticides, and pest-resistant seed and urged the farmers to “plant as often as possible” instead of on the old pulsed schedule of the water-temple system. The result: Millions of tons of rice were lost, year after year, mostly to voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever-decreasing effect. Thanks to Lansing’s research, the bureaucrats at the Asian Development Bank became converts to the water-temple system, and in the 1980s, the Balinese government was persuaded to throw out the green revolution pesticides and the “plant often” directive. Balance returned.
With the system functioning again, the subaks have gotten good value from the new higher-yield rice varieties. Unfortunately, the farmers continue to load their fields with fertilizer—needlessly so because Balinese water is naturally rich in nutrients. All that superfluous fertilizer passes through the watershed out to the sea, where it is destroying the coral reefs with suffocating algal blooms—a process known as eutrophication. The fishermen who are harmed by that are Bougainese rather than Balinese, and so their complaints don’t connect back upstream. The rice farming may stay healthy for another thousand years, but the coral reef fishes are in trouble.
Bali’s water-temple system presents an exquisite case of managing the commons, of refining and maintaining natural infrastructure. But what about the coral reefs? One hope may be the dive industry for ecotourists: It is run by Balinese, and they could put pressure on the government to discourage farmers from overloading the waters with fertilizer. For really perfect order, the dive operators should join the water-temple religion and organize their own subak.
• Ecosystem engineering can be beneficial or pathological. It can enhance biodiversity or decrease it. It can self-stabilize or go chaotic. The classic pathological case is what humans have done to most of the world’s large animals—the megafauna. As soon as we arrive in virgin land, we kill and eat or burn out everything that is big or slow: in Australia, the enormous lizards, wombats, giant kangaroos, and flightless birds; in Madagascar, the giant hippos, mongooses, lemurs, and tortoises; in North America, just thirteen thousand years ago, the mastodons, mammoths, sloths, tigers, and yaks. Three fourths of our continent’
s large animal species disappeared in what are called the Pleistocene extinctions. As conservation biologist Daniel Janzen put it at a talk in California, “There were animals walking around here that weighed twice what an African elephant weighs. They’re still down there in the La Brea tar pits. Our people took them out. It’s like going to East Africa and machine-gunning the elephants.”
Most consequentially for later history, the first people in the Americas extirpated the native horses, camels, oxen, and pigs—animals they might have domesticated. And so when Europeans arrived after 1492, they brought not only a cavalry advantage in warfare but also lethal diseases—evolved from long cohabitation with domesticated cattle, pigs, and chickens in Eurasia—to which they were relatively immune. The American continent that had originally been tamed with spears, fire, and plant-tending women was overrun by a new set of ecosystem engineers armed with guns, germs, and steel.
Human prehistory confronts us with two harsh truths. Edward O. Wilson, who coined the term biodiversity, states one: “Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival. We have cut much of the heart out of biodiversity.”
Steven LeBlanc states the other truth in Constant Battles: If any group can get itself into ecological balance and stabilize its population even in the face of environmental change, it will be tremendously disadvantaged against societies that do not behave that way. The long-term successful society, in a world with many societies, will be the one that grows when it can and fights when it runs out of resources. It is useless to live an ecologically sustainable existence in the Garden of Eden unless the neighbors do so as well.
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