Ancient Indigenous forest gardens still yield bounty 150 years later | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Indigenous forest gardens still yield bounty 150 years later

nationalpost.com

99 pointsvoisin17 comments

> “A lot of functional diversity studies have a ‘humans are bad for the environment’ approach,” Armstrong told Science. “This shows humans have the ability to not just allow biodiversity to flourish, but to be a part of it.”

Absolutely! We can have a significant positive effect on our environment if we make the right choices. Ancient civilizations show us how we can have abundant food production while actually making our environment more diverse and more resilient.

Yeah all humans are indigenous and the practice of improving the environment and forest is not this wicked far out of touch mystical forgotten value. Its practiced all over the world today - and dare I say - even in America?

But we do have a long history of doing it very stupidly and for the wrong reasons. Mostly it comes down to the fact that humans' priorities are entirely different than ecological systems' priorities.

I would like to interject that Earth changes very very rapidly and humans never remember what it was like just 20 years ago. Most of the natural forests in the United States have been a ravished and destroyed. Yet people are still worried about the environment but not concerned about tearing down a quarter acre of the forest for their house. The snowflake never feels responsible for the avalanche. My grandpa told me stories of squirrels that could go from Cincinnati to Apalachicola on the tops of chestnut trees and never touch the ground, now you'll never find one chestnut tree the whole way.

Forest agriculture like this is one of the things Mann spends a lot of pages on in 1491. Highly recommended, wish I'd read it sooner. 1493 is good too, if you like reading about immense human misery, and also, mostly, but not entirely, separately, a whole bunch about China.

Mann also wrote an article called 1491 for the Atlantic that’s an abbreviated version of the book for anyone who hasn’t read it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...

See also another write-up in Science [1] and the original paper in Ecology and Society [2].

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...

[2]: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/

These sound pretty cool. If a researcher would write up a guide on them, I'd expect a lot of people would like to create one on their property.

It's not quite the same, but there is a lot of renewed interest of similar farming styles under the names of permaculture and agroforestry

and horticulture

Akira Miyawaki did a similar thing in Japan. He studied Shinto shrine forests, catalogued the species and observed how they work together which led him to develop a method for planting forests. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114425

I find this so inspiring! Imagine if we, as individuals, could be so sustainably well-adapted to our environments as the plants in these gardens are.

ancient...?

yes. untended for 150 years, planted possibly 2000 years ago.

> For their study, the researchers selected four archaeological sites that had been occupied for more than 2,000 years: two Ts’msyen village complexes in northwestern B.C. and two Coast Salish complexes in the southwest. (A village complex consists of two or more nearby villages, each containing five to 20 houses.) Indigenous peoples tended forest gardens on these sites until they were displaced in the late 1800s.

I wonder whether enough of the knowledge was preserved for any of their descendants to still know how to tend the gardens.

Maybe. Many modern people have also learned how to establish forest gardens. GEOFF LAWTON is among them. https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/

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