My favorite discovery about Amazon civilization is that the incidence of human-edible fruit trees is much higher in any area near navigable water. They were modifying the forest to be more supportive of humans.
I have heard of an oasis in North Africa that was curated this way, and it still survived despite being abandoned by humans.
The modern version of this is called a perennial food forest.
Only about 100-150 years old, but given how well they've done over that time and how popular they are with the wildlife, I'd bet they stick around.
A couple onions I threw there did sprout!
I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today.
I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)!
EDIT: softened wording a bit
The significance of perennial food forests is that it's a practice that comes from a very different world view than our normative one that came from the industrial revolution. Yet there's a tendency to evaluate something like a perennial food forest from the world view of maximizing productivity. Maybe we're talking past each other a bit -- I have not put a lot of thought into the difference in how civilizations arose in the old world vs the new world. The patterns of design for something like the perennial food forests in the Americas have shown up in the Old World as well.
I haven't found Occam's Razor very effective in explanatory powers. Treating the minimum path as the floor is one thing; treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly. Just my personal opinion; I'm aware I don't hold a popular opinion.
Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24712701
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-8/targeted-interventions...
https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/indigenous-peoples-have...
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.
The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.
The late bronze age collapse. Humanity fucked up so bad we don't even know what happened. Everything since then has been meh. Future humans might still see us as in some form of iron age.
The European forests, in contrast were not like that. I remember reading about accounts from settlers in North America noting the park like quality of some of the forests.
As another example, here where I live in the Sonoran (Phoenix), there are a lot of chollas. Those have nasty barbed thorns, but they also produce fruits. There is another native plant that has sticky leaves and can be used to brush off the thorns so that the fruits can be harvested. I learned this from one of Brad Landcaster’s videos on this; Landcaster said he learned it from one of the native elders. They would deliberately plant the plant with sticky leaves near chollas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
The city where I live in the PNW has had a huge influx of immigrants from red and blue states who either don't respect the dignity of nonhuman life or want to gentrify communities to their liking. It seems like the first thing they do when they get here is cut down the biggest tree(s) in their yard to live out their pioneer fantasies. I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood. Then they plant ornamental pears and similar that smell like rotten garbage/death/sex.
Heaven forbid they plant a plumb, walnut or anything they have to (gasp) clean up after. Bumblebees, butterflies and small birds have all but disappeared compared to when we moved in around 2010.
With housing prices going from $100,000 to $500,000 since 2000, while wages haven't even doubled, I'm starting to not recognize this place anymore. It's heartbreaking because it didn't have to be this way. It's not a supply and demand problem, it's a cultural issue. What we value as a society, what we prioritize, how we fund institutions for checks and balances against predatory private equity firms that can't be stopped by the private sector, etc.
I think you've bent this word beyond breaking.
> I'd say we've lost around 25 trees 75 years or older in just my immediate neighborhood.
What kind of trees? Red Alder which are native to the area for example don't live much more than 70 years.
> while wages haven't even doubled,
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/205988/median-household-...
Median household income in current dollars has more than doubled in Portland since 2000[1].
> It's not a supply and demand problem
Yes it is. Housing prices increase when demand increases. Portland has an arbitrary growth boundary around the city and a lot of restrictions on height.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/205988/median-household-...
Ok I double-checked, and it looks like that graph isn't adjusted for inflation. Here's one that is:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSORA672N
From 2000-2023, yours shows $42,499-$88,740, but that shows $70,870-$88,740 in 2023 C-CPI-U Dollars.
Apparently cumulative inflation has about doubled nationally since 2000, making the consumer price index (CPI) about double, so $1 in 2000 was worth the same as about $2 today:
https://inflationdata.com/articles/2022/08/10/u-s-cumulative...
So real inflation-adjusted wages in Oregon have risen about ($88,740 - $70,870)/$70,870 = 25% from 2000-2023.
If household incomes had actually doubled and also kept up with inflation, they would be ($70,870 * 2) = $141,740 in today's dollars. Or by your graph, year 2000 wages that doubled and also kept up with inflation (so two doublings) would be ($42,499 * 2 * 2) = $169,996.
Admittedly, I don't know where the $28,256 discrepancy comes from, so expected wages would probably be somewhere between $141,740 and $169,996. Maybe someone more studied in economics can tell us.
From Jan 2000 to Jan 2023 and not adjusting for inflation, housing prices in Oregon have risen from $102,749 to $338,927:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POXRMTNSA
So a $100,000 home in 2000 would cost $200,000 by inflation and $250,000 if housing prices matched the 25% wage increase. But they cost $338,927, so are about 1.36 times more expensive than expected, even accounting for higher wages.
After writing this out, I question what a wage increase means if housing prices just match it. Is it really a raise if it's eaten up by rising housing costs?
Had people invested in things besides housing bubbles, say medical breakthroughs or renewable energy, then today's housing costs vs inflationary costs would be $338,927/$200,000 = 1.69. So homes today are 69% more expensive/overengineered than in 2000.
To me, this doesn't represent supply and demand. It shows that people have put their wage gains into more expensive homes, which reduced the supply of building materials and raised housing costs for everyone else. It also shows that a larger segment of the population today isn't working, because our economy has been moving from manufacturing to finance. Meaning that young working people are carrying a higher load to support the retirements of older people who have invested in real estate, mostly through private equity firms.
You bring up a good point about aging and sick trees though. Most in our neighborhood were cut down due to neglect and disease. The 2008 housing bubble crash left lots empty for a year or two and the banks didn't bother paying the water bill, so the trees died. We've also had unusually mild winters where I live in Idaho, allowing invasive pests and diseases to survive and harm trees. There's no talk of any of this in the local media or messaging from our city council though, so there's no consensus on saving the trees. I sympathize that trees must be cut down sometimes for safety, but it's been hard to watch.
If your theory about housing prices is building materials, you’re just flatly wrong. The underlying land values have had very large increases in value, and materials are a small portion of the court of a frame built house. Land and labor costs dominate.
My understanding is that the rainforest as we know it exists where it does in part because humans spent such effort cultivating edible plants in the area. Many of the most edible crops are not native to the regions in which they now grow, there's not much evidence of ancient-grown forest before ~5kya, and there's good evidence of burn-based plant and soil management.
Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.adi6317
Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2162-7.epdf