North America was settled long before the Europeans got here, and they were doing quite well with forest management in their own way. Many of the lessons they learned, we were forced to relearn: like why burning the forest often and intentionally is a good thing.

I am having a great time studying this and shopping. Great thread here. I think I am feeling an itch <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif" alt="" />

Burning the woods for forest management? I’m not sure what you are talking about, unless you mean slash and burn agriculture. The Indians of eastern North America did that. It certainly wasn’t “forest management” as we understand the term. It was managing local conditions to allow them to farm new ground until they exhausted the earth’s fertility. After a few years they would move on and repeat the process in a new stretch of woodland. Far more often than not, slash and burn was harmful to the ecology of the forest or jungle in which it was practiced. More and more harmful as the population grew.

If you burn the forest often, it doesn't build up a significant base of fuel. Basically what makes forest fires destructive and vast is that all the stuff fallen and dead on the ground is burning hot and long enough for the live trees to ignite. By burning the forest over to get rid of deadfall every couple years, the fuel load on the ground never gets deep enough to threaten the trees, and the saplings are knocked back. The overall effect is that you get a very open forest with significant sunlight on the ground, promoting low vegetation and ideal game habitat. They did burn the forest for agriculture too sometimes, but that's not the only reason. We don't use burning nowadays, instead we go in and selectively cut, taking out the trees that are too crowded or too weak to allow stronger trees to thrive and to open the floor.

Yep, like Momaw said.
Fire is also needed to help some trees propogate as well.

That’s true enough, and I never denied it. But I’ve never heard that, say, the Lenape or the Seneca practiced such forest management burning. Can you point me at a source?

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond addresses a few of the facts and myths about the innate abilities of indigenous peoples to be effective stewards of the land. Lucky for us, google books allows us to view his introductory thoughts on the topic online starting at the bottom of page 8... here

I've raised it around here before, but both Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel and his Collapse are fascinating and compelling. Anyone else think so? I'd suggest that a few of the hypotheses advanced in GG&S go a long way toward explaining why many (perhaps mistakenly) believe that the original inhabitants of North America were mostly benign symbiotes.

I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel. I haven’t read Collapse.

There were only a few sample pages of Collapse in mhr’s link. In one of them Diamond points out the wave of extinctions that followed modern man as we moved into any new area of the world. Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, New Zealand, Madagascar, the Pacific Islands…we met animals unequipped by evolution to deal with this new super predator, and we wiped them out. Not that that was news to me, but it does bear on this point.

I have no patience with all the scholars who insist that the entry of paleo-Siberian-Americans into North America only accidentally coincided with the extinction of all that mega-fauna. It must have been something else. Asteroids or new diseases or the same kind of periodic ice age warm swing that had left the big beasts unmolested the last dozen times it happened. Bull. Amerindians frequently destabilized their environments in one way or another. Slash and burn agriculture not the least of them.

I’m not trying to bash them. In a lot of ways I respect the American Indians. Were they good woodsmen? Hell yes. Their ten year olds could put any of us to shame when it came to primitive survival. Could they fight? Bet your arse. Did they take care of their own? Sure, as long as you understand that their own was limited to the local tribe and current allies.

But I see no point in foisting virtues upon them that history shows they lacked. For example, New Age wisdom has it that the Indians were far more spiritual than we fallen children of cities and machines. I suppose that may be so. But I’ll get my spiritual advice from cultures that don’t practice cannibalism, or make a sport and religious ritual out of slowly torturing captives to death.