Ecological Amnesia: Life Without Wild Things (2019)
wilderutopia.com
wilderutopia.com
I had a personal eureka moment last year when I visited one of the last old growth flood plain forests. Humans decimated over 90% of this type of forest in just the last 200-300 year. This happened in the United States.
These flood plains are vital for the earth's homeostasis, flood plains have huge trees and hold incredible amounts of water.
In my honest opinion Permaculture management practices to rehydrate landscapes will be the first step toward reversing the climate crisis. Water in the ground acts like a battery to protect against flood and drought.
If you are also optimistic about what we collectively can do in the future, and want to hear more check out my YouTube channel here:
https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini
For more about the last of the great flood plains forests of America, checkout this video in particular:
Permaculture is a Philosophy and Systems Designed approach to working with nature to produce multiple yeilds, using little nudges and allowing nature to take the wheel to create surplus.
permaculture designers are people who think in terms of systems: inputs, process, outputs.
The goal is to stack functions, and regenerate ecosystems using site specific knowledge to guide the evolution of land and biosphere toward one of multi yield, for both people and nature.
As for figs, YES. I eat a lot of processed figs via "Cereal Bars" but I'm slowly growing my army of Hardy Chicago Figs, I have 10 or so 1 foot tall clones in their own pots, and a single treeform with two tiny figs on it. I'm looking forward to trying a fresh one but apparently collecting fig varieties is a sport for more well established growers. Worth learning how to grow a fig for anyone who isn't at their "forever" home, figs are fine to grow in pots! They are one of the few trees you can do that with because they tolerate swings of drought between watering and thrive in well draining soils having most of their roots very shallow and close to the surface.
Have a great day:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1L3BxBiUQg | Pot up a rooted fig tree cutting into a bigger pot - my best cloning method
- the effective population size of the passenger pidgeon was supposedly smaller than a million individuals. The billion animal events where likely exceptions and outside of the norm, possibly due to some form of human intervention.
- The huge bison herds were likely artifical, due to missing predators and almost all other large herbivors that are by coincidence missing since the first native american arrived.
- Same about the australian abriginees: > 'who thrived as guardians of their world for over 55,000 years. In all that time, the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, never touched them. Indigenous people accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when the primordial ancestors sang the world into existence.' which totally disregards that the entire land based australian megafauna exept emu, red kangaroo and wombat was long extinct when europeans arrived.
A world without humans would not look like it did in the 1500s.
A short anecdote, I live in the PNW. There are plenty of places that are 3rd generation logging sites. I live in a neighborhood that since the 1800's was logged, homesteaded, reforested, logged again (possibly 2x?) and in the last 30-40 years has become an attractive semi-rural place to live. I've been in the area for about 20ish years, my partner her entire life. People who have recently come to the community and complain about new development don't understand the history of the place and that the homes they live in are new development to us. What they see as old growth forests are 50 year old sick and polluted monoculture tree stands that were abandoned by the forestry industry.
There is great depth to how humanity has impacted our planet and this article touches on some of it. It's easy to forget that humans bring change to places, even 5000+ years ago. I think your comment also points out some of the longer term impact humans have had. What state of planet earth are we trying to lock in? What are we trying to save? Humans are part of nature. How do we find balance to participating in the world?
Links:
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/p9it08/we_suffer_...
[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/08/19/whales-requiem-f...
Restoration of the wild buffalo population is actually going surprisingly well, but it's just getting started.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/135ade9a64a243eaa8e4647...
https://www.nwf.org/Our-Work/Wildlife-Conservation/Bison
https://www.nwf.org/Our-Work/Wildlife-Conservation/Bison/Tri...
It is a clear case of the 'tragedy of the commons'. The only way to escape the tragedy of the commons (when there are large numbers of people who don't know each other) is regulation. However regulation has proved very hard to do at an international level.
All of Ostrom's work was to disprove this argument -- she showed that it is possible (not always, but frequently) to avoid the tragedy of the commons without regulation or privatization:
Most people claiming this have never actually lived outside of cities or suburbs. They've never directly experienced how fast nature takes back. They've never directly experienced how hard it is to fight that continuously.
It doesn't always work though. There has to be enough left that it can grow back. And there can't be, say, new grazing animals that prevent that from happening. I'm thinking of, say, Easter Island, or arguably some of the North Atlantic islands like Iceland, Greenland... maybe even Britain (the moors used to be forests in prehistoric times).
We can build better systems than clear cutting which has a huge effect on the ability of a forest to hold water. Additionally forests create rain. We need to stop injecting clouds to try to trigger rain, that shit is dumb, we need to regrow our forests and thankfully we have lots of prior art on how to do that.
Yes, the bulk of the work is done by nature, mostly we need to configure the proper inputs, trigger the process and let nature drive, observe and then make minor adjustments to optimize multi yield and surpluses (outputs).
We need wood but trashing an ecosystem because it always grows back, is irresponsible.
I do understand there on many places were pine is farmed and clear cut multiple times in a monoculture and it's a generational family owned [and more recently corporation owned enterprise]). It works I'm not saying we should block that but even those systems could use a redesign for multi yield with the least destruction when the cutting happens.