Tree Keepers: Where Sustaining the Forest Is a Tribal Tradition
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
> “We come in every 15 years, take out the weak trees, the sick trees, and the ones that are dying, but leave the healthy stock to grow some more and reproduce”
> In almost 170 years, the tribe has harvested nearly twice the forest’s former volume of timber, yet it still has 40 percent more standing wood than when they started. “And by leaving the best trees, the old and sick lumber they harvest is now better than the best from most everyone else”
Such an elegant solution!
The big cutters are paper companies. Corporate forests are planted in nice rows like corn, so it is easy to plant, easy to harvest. Reduced time, reduced labor.
And, these small private groups have larger labor overhead. Maybe tribes like this, or small family owned plots can do this.
But I wonder if they are really self-sustaining, or these groups have cash coming in from other endeavors, other jobs that help support them.
The claimed result was that in even relatively small periods of time (less than a decade), the number of "high quality" deer on their property skyrocketed due to the fittest bucks actually being able to compete and pass on their genes rather than being hunted immediately.
But for the people that live there, it is their problem, they exist with people that were there 30-50 years ago, they know the local history going back hundreds of years.
Most of us live in a temporary and individualistic society. In my country, generally speaking, people get married, buy a house, have kids, live there for 30-40 years, then sell the house because it's too big and inaccessible for their aging bones, live in a rental or buy an apartment for the next 10-15 years, then sell that and spend the rest of their money on the retirement / care home. Some might pass on to their children. Usually the children don't inherit the house, because they can't afford to buy it or buy the other children out, or because they don't want to live in their parental house or town. Nothing remains from the previous generations except maybe some keepsakes.
The only example of generational stuff are some farms or companies, but even they don't last; farms from 100 years ago are not up to modern standards and cannot compete with industrial farms. I was staying at an airbnb on a farm like that, the only reason they still survived was because they lived in a protected nature area and they could benefit off of tourism, making and selling their own products in their own restaurant and local stores. Cottage industry, but they're the exception because it's a lot of work to make and sell products like that; you need an audience that's interested in locally produced goods like that, and it has to be priced competitively.
Or at least the was the case in rural Wa ca 15 years ago.
Our (modern, not nec. "western" whatever that term means) definition boils down to:
usus, fructus, abusus (use, benefit/derive profit, destroy)
In other words, complete ownership means: this is mine, I can control when you have access to it, I can do whatever I want with it.
A contrasting definition would involve domination, in a sense that:
I have control over a certain resource and thus I need to take care of it.
A practical, classic historical example would be slavery. Owning a slave means exclusion from the society and thus turning them into property whose owner could deal with as they pleased. Native Americans (NWE, or Southern) practiced what we call capturing and treated their slaves more like pets, to the point where taking care of a "pet", "training" them could be a way of introducing them back into society.
This was not always the case, but it shows a huge, deeply embedded difference in how we perceive the world and the idea of property now.
> The Menominee fire team spends as much time starting fires as stopping them, says Curtis Wayka, who runs the burning program.
I thought this was another interesting data point about the wildfire situation in North America. I’ve heard people say that the wildfires are less about global warming than they are about mismanaged forests where the policy is always to stop fires. Probably loss of property values and resource values plays a part in this thinking?
I wonder if implementing something like this could be helpful and if it’s actually politically and logistically feasible elsewhere.
We found a very interesting conclusion: there appears to be a combination of strategies that improves biological outcomes AND increases timber harvest volumes over the long term. The debate seems to always center on wilderness (no management) vs industrial timber farming (monoculture). But our models clearly showed a third path - it required a spatially-explicit, long-term plan with lots of labor-intensive interventions but it was absolutely possible to manage a forest for multiple purposes - timber, wildlife and human recreation - and do so without compromising any of the objectives. That these practices closely mirror the forest management of native people is not at all surprising.
in general I think as a culture we could do with more tradition. And traditions based on modern problems. Rituals for programmers, doctors and office workers. They don't have to be inscutable, or given mystic power. Just a thing, done repeatedly, over a period of time, by many people. Which you are expected to keep doing, and which it is considered a shame to stop.
maybe its just that I struggle to motivate myself for my own reasons, I need responsibility to be given to me from external sources. But it seems to be a common affliction these days
Sustainable forestry is good and this is a nice story, but an advertorial nonetheless.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-wall-wes...
Aristotle (Pol. 6.5.4 = 1321b31, 7.11.4 = 1331bl5) records ύλωροί "forest-keepers," but does not specify the area or their duties.
Sometimes I think about this.