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VT Commons Magazine Interview with Ben Falk

Backcountry Users as a Beneficial Species?

Latest seriously fascinating book: 1491 by Charles Mann.
Chris Shanks puts it: "Some of the best non-permaculture, permaculture I've read." (And he reads a LOT). Mann articulates some of the most relevant traditional land-use findings put to paper, discussing the extent to which intentional ecologies had influenced this hemisphere before European arrival. His study of "native" American land practices will surprise many. His view on wilderness, for instance,is Cronon-esque but this story is more timely than Cronon's and others because it discusses the rarely acknowledged and vast influence of first peoples land management practices. The story therein has tremendous bearing on the possibilities for North America's current cultures developing a sustaining land relationship.

Some snippets:
“Sometime in the first millennium A.D. the Indians began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (nuts)…
Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result was a new ‘balance of nature’…
From today’s perspective, the success of the transition is striking. It was so sweeping and ubiquitous that early European visitors marveled at the number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source…

Millions of Europeans spent centuries behind the plough, staring at the blade as it ineffectively mired itself in the earth. How could none of them change the design to make it more useful? The complexity of a societies’ technology has little to do with its level of social complexity… Every society misses out on obvious technologies.”