Decay, death, birth and growth are part of our everyday experience. They are organic processes that all of us are intimately familiar with. Ceremonies have evolved over time in all indigenous cultures that celebrate these organic changes in a spirit of supplication, reciprocity and thankfulness. Land stewardship practices have also evolved in indigenous cultures which work with and even direct these natural processes. Yet most of us in the larger industrial Western culture live, work and study in a human environment seemingly at odds with our everyday perceptions of nature. We live in an environment that is structured economically, technologically and intellectually like a machine.
A way of being inspired by the machine has dominated Western culture from the mid-19th century until the present. Viewed in this way, nature is imagined to be unchanging unless it is disturbed. Most resource managers, as well as the environmental movement, are still thinking about nature in terms of the machine metaphor. The modern Western belief in the constancy and stability of nature was expressed by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature as early as 1864. Marsh says, "Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline and proportion, except when shattered by geologic convulsions; and in these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets herself at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, as nearly as practicable, the former aspect of her dominion."
Roots of the Modern Environmental Movement
The principal prophets of the modern environment movement - Emerson, Thoreau, Muir and Leopold - have repeated and enlarged the same theme of nature functioning optimally when left alone. Modern environmental preservationists draw their most compelling inspiration from these earlier transcendental philosophers.
The notion of "transcendental" implies something beyond our senses which is greater than we are. In this case, nature itself is viewed as a kind of divine manifestation. Nature is conceived as being perfect because God is perfect. Transcendentalism grew out of 17th and 18th century English natural theology which saw God revealed through his principal work, nature. You could know God if you knew His creation.
When viewed from this historical perspective, we see how similar the industrial exploitation of nature and the counter-industrial effort to preserve nature really are. Both industrialism and preservationism see nature essentially in mechanical terms. Either nature is so perfectly engineered that any human interference would only result in inefficiencies or deficiencies in the system; or human interference, as in industrial resource use, can be compensated for by corrective engineering. If we destroy one part, we only have to find a replacement, like the interchangeable parts of modern machinery. Universally valid scientific laws, felt to lie behind all surface phenomena, will tell us how to re-engineer nature so that all the parts fit together.
Reciprocity - Not Wilderness!
"When people don' t use the plants, they get scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If they' re not gathered from or talked to or cared about, they' ll die."
These are the words of Mabel McKay, Makahma Pomo elder and basket weaver. Mabel represents an indigenous tradition that is in direct opposition to the dominant Western conversation ethic. In her simple exhortation to "take care of the plants," she points out an alternative to the legacy of 19th-century transcendentalism that still controls modern environmental thinking.
Plants need people as much as people need plants. This is the meaning of reciprocity. The indigenous world lies fully within nature, not wilderness. There is no Indian word for wilderness, in the sense of people separate from nature. Traditionally, indigenous people have felt at home in nature. John Muir viewed "wild" nature as a sacred place in the sense that natural theology teaches, but nature was not necessarily felt to be home. Thoreau was not comfortable in the wilderness of the Maine woods. He preferred the cultivated, almost "pre-suburban" landscape of his native Massachusetts. Transcendentalists viewed "wilderness" as a temporary spiritual recharging station, a refuge from the stresses of the industrial mode of existence, much like modern urban environmentalists who backpack into wilderness parks for a couple of weeks for the spiritual and aesthetic experience. But now listen to Mihilakawna Pomo elder and basket weaver Lucy Smith, recalling her mother' s teachings: "We had many relatives and... we all had to live together, so we' d better learn how to get along with each other." She said it wasn' t too hard to do; it was just like taking care of your younger brother or sister. "If you took good care of them you didn' t have to work as hard..." You know, I thought she was talking about us Indians and how we are supposed to get along. I found out later that mother wasn' t just talking about Indians, but the plants, animals, birds - everything on this earth. They are our relatives, and we better know how to act around them, or they' ll get after us.
Indigenous People and Dirt Bikers
Locking up traditional lands and treaty lands in wilderness preserves and parks, coupled with the forced relocation of indigenous people, has seriously disrupted or prevented traditionals from carrying on subsistence livelihood and their care-taking responsibilities. In the "multiple use" land philosophy of public agencies, Native people are just another "user group" lumped with Boy Scouts and dirt bikers. Environmental organizations with their "wilderness" philosophy have played a major role in the disruption of traditional land stewardship. Some examples of this philosophy in action are:
Ç The forced relocation of the native Aweeneechee people when Yosemite National Park was established.
Ç The 1975 purchase by the Nature Conservancy of 22,000 acres out from under Granada del Valle, a Chicano rural development project in Los Ojos, New Mexico. The good stewardship practiced by local communities was ignored in order to "preserve biodiversity" within the acquired land.
Ç The 1987 legislation to form El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico. This purchase included 13,000 acres considered to be ancestral lands of the Acoma Pueblo. The Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation lobbied for the bill, ignoring the cultural claims of the Acoma Pueblo.
Ç The refusal of the Sierra Club to support indigenous claims to ancestral lands at Sinkyone on Cape Mendocino in California.
Coyote and the Monkey Wrench Gang
"When people don' t use the plants they get scarce" is more than a metaphor; it is a biological fact rooted in a basic truth of nature - change. Decay, death, birth and growth are the stuff of ordinary existence and the stuff of which the universe is made. There is always an element of uncertainty in change. There is a reason many tribes consider Coyote to be the Creator of the world. Coyote is capricious and unpredictable. Some tribes in western Washington call the Creator simply "Changer."
Only recently have a few forest research scientists discovered that forest ecosystems need periodic disturbance to maintain forest health. Coyote has snuck into the BLM and Forest Service computers, disrupting the steady-state notion that nature is unchanging unless disturbed. This is real "monkeywrenching" at the conceptual level. Phrases like "mimicking natural processes," "ignorance of complex ecosystem interactions," and "the whole is more than the sum of the parts" are being thrown around.
It is not just change that is important but rather the ecologically appropriate kind and rate of change. Over-harvesting and under-harvesting, overgrazing and under-grazing, catastrophic wildfires or slash fires, and total fire exclusion, are all inappropriate. Certain practices or concepts may lead to a kind of "ecological stability" at the landscape or watershed level, but it is a stability poised as precariously as a snowball in a bonfire . Concepts like biodiversity, diverse wildlife habitats and uneven-aged/multi-layered forest structure are some of the current working concepts in the field of "new forestry" which are meant to give forest ecosystems a measure of resiliency in the face of repeated disturbances. A few public land agencies are now beginning a process of determining how much and what kind of disturbance is required to maintain stability.
Indigenous People and Fire
It is easy to blame historic over-harvesting for the current state of imbalance and to conclude, as preservationists do, that if the forest had never been disturbed in the first place, nature would have taken care of herself. What would the forests of southwestern Oregon and northwestern California have looked like if no timber harvesting had ever taken place? We need only look at places where old-growth has been undisturbed. We could assume that these few remaining old-growth stands are "natural," except that two significant historical factors are missing: indigenous people and periodic low-intensity fires. Both have been legally excluded from the forest.
The pre-European forests of interior southwestern Oregon at low to middle elevations were probably varied and healthy, maintained by frequent, light ground fires which served as periodic disturbances. Those frequent, light ground fires were set mostly by local Indian people (Shasta, Takelma, Karuk) in order to enhance food and fiber production and gathering and hunting.
The native grasses and pine-needle litter carried the light ground fires without burning the whole forest down. Native grasses created a permeable forest surface, enabling entire watersheds to soak up water like a sponge. They checked surface erosion and enhanced soil fertility by continually decomposing feeder roots. They also prevented woody plant invasion through severe root competition for water and nutrients.
Unmanaged (preserved) forests are no more healthy than forests that have been clearcut. Insect and disease epidemics are sweeping through southwestern Oregon, seemingly unable to distinguish between crowded second-growth from crowded old growth. Historically controlled burning and constant intervention by people produced a kind of precarious balance or ecological stability that acknowledged change as a fundamental feature of nature, and worked with and directed natural processes, especially fire.
The Fire Mosaic
The best model that we have of competent land management is the tens-of-thousands-year-old Native American management style. Traditionally, Indians (usually the older women) cleared small openings in the forest and maintained them by prescription fire. The late summer to late fall fires stimulated fresh deer and elk forage, and native foods like bunch-grasses, clovers, forbs and bulbs. When stored food supplies were running low in midwinter, before the salmon and steel head runs began, deer came to these meadows to feed. Some were killed for food.
Different places were burned at different times, with varying intervals between fires. In this way a mosaic of vegetation types and plant communities was created. Only the arroyos and riparian borders and flats were heavily wooded and uniformly shady. On the slopes and ridges and in the valleys, the land was open and park-like. Since southwest Oregon was heavily populated with Indians and since Indians utilized hundreds of plants and animals from virtually every biotic type, most forest lands were burned at one time or another. The average burning interval was about eight years.
Most Indian burning has ceased in North America. Periodic, low-intensity fires that regularly disturbed the forest and helped create the incredible biodiversity and productive soils enthusiastically described by nearly every traveler who left a written account are almost gone.
The Spirit of Changer
The North America that European peoples invaded and settled was not a "virgin" land undisturbed by people. There was no "pristine wilderness" here. Prairie and forest were to a large extent the creation of indigenous peoples. The main justification by Europeans for genocide - that land was not used to its productive potential by its Native inhabitants - was false.
Decay, death, birth and growth - a constantly changing life - was a reality well understood by Native peoples. Fire, along with wind and water, were the material or "seen" manifestations of the Creator - the spirit of Changer. Indian people worked in harmony with Changer as well as all other relatives when they used fire as a management tool. But you have to be careful with fire. Fire is like Coyote. Fire destroys as well as creates. But then isn' t death really the same as life?
Aho!
Author' s note: I have personally seen only one example of a pre-contact ecosystem not changed for the worse. That is the Walpole Island Reserve in Lake St. Clarion, the Michigan-Ontario boundary. Ojibway, Potawatomi and Ottawa peoples (Three Fires) have never stopped burning. They continue to burn over 4,400 acres of tallgrass prairie/oak savannah on a regular basis. If there is any doubt left about the relationship between burning and biodiversity, then consider this fact: Every one of Ontario' s 60-plus endangered plants can be found at Walpole Island in considerable quantity!