People and Nature: What’s the Difference?
Virtually all lands where people plant and manage vegetation have been significantly altered by human activity. In North America forests were logged, prairies were plowed, and development still occurs over ever-expanding areas. As a result of these activities, layered soil horizons have been homogenized, soil biota has been diminished, erosion and siltation has dramatically changed the character of floodplains and stream banks, hydrologic patterns have been altered, and variable topography has been leveled. Predictably, these and many other changes have reduced the diversity of the flora and fauna that existed pre-European colonization. Equally predictably, gardeners with an interest in native plants, wildlife habitat, and the general ecological health of the world in which they live, are seeking to restore that diversity. The obvious solution is to plant lots of native plants, and that of course, is a good thing. The precise associations between our native flora and fauna have been well documented, and we are learning to think of plants and wildlife as an interdependent web. But that web is larger than just terrestrial flora and fauna. And due to the activities I described above, much of it is missing.
Consequently, the idea of restoring the native landscape, in the exact locations and precise community associations that existed prior to European colonization, is not possible in the physical landscapes where we typically garden. But why not? Gardeners have successfully grown plants, exotic and native, in conditions that differ from their native habitats for years. A little compost, a little fertilizer, a little weeding, and you have a thriving garden, historic disturbance be damned. Why should increasing the use of native species for their ecological benefits make the endeavor any harder? Because of one word – scale. Plant an Aronia arbutifolia (chokeberry) at your mailbox and you fed a bird or two. Plant a thicket of Aronia around the perimeter of your property, and you may feed a whole flock of birds. Influence your whole community to do the same, and you could have a muli-flock migration stop on your hands. So, achieving a meaningful increase in habitat value requires a meaningful increase in the square footage that native plants occupy. A quarter acre lawn may be considered small, but it becomes quite big if replaced with meadow, particularly if that meadow is planted and maintained in a traditional manner, which would generally include frequent weeding sessions. So how do we make it manageable? Our first choice is to plant site-adapted native species in their historic community associations to form highly weed-suppressive compositions.
Aronia arbutifolia (Red chokeberry)
In 1491, before Europeans showed up and treated the landscape like a bull in a china shop, these native plant communities could have developed spontaneously. These days, not so much.
So today, native plants - and in many cases “nature” itself - needs our help to overcome the very obstacles that Euro-style land use has created. A daunting task at any scale, let alone on the many acres of lawn, and invasive choked woods and fields that we would like to transform.
Is this a lost cause? Is it possible for people to operate in the landscape in a manner that co-exists with, or even engenders, a thriving and balanced ecological system? Not only can it happen, it has happened…. historically at least. But to learn how, we need to look beyond the European agricultural and horticultural traditions that have dominated the North American landscape for the past few hundred years.
When the first European explorers set eyes on the American landscape they assumed, as we did until recently, that the landscape was a product of “pure nature.” Sure the “Natives” were present, but they only practiced hunting, gathering, and small plot gardening, activities that would not likely affect the landscape on a macro scale. It turns out they were very wrong.
Research by ethnobotanist M. Kat Anderson on the land management practices of Native Americans prior to European colonization reveals that they managed the entire landscape of what is now California, border to border. Remarkably, they did this with no heavy equipment, no herbicides, and no university-level ecological restoration programs. In her book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2005), Kat Anderson describes the comments of Native Americans who returned to Yosemite National Park, their former tribal lands, in the early 1900s. It was often stated that the land was “unkempt” because no one was “tending” it.
Over thousands of years Native Americans had developed an array of highly sophisticated techniques to interact with the landscape in a manner that both served their needs and allowed for resource regeneration and renewal. Strategic burning over large areas has become widely recognized, but many other highly precise and targeted techniques were also practiced. Wild vegetation was influenced through seed collection and distribution, plant division, interplanting with wild vegetation, and manipulations to the natural vegetative changes that Western science now calls “ecological succession.”
Even burning was often used in a precise manner and for a particular goal. Acorns, an important food source, were often despoiled by larvae that emerged from leaf litter in spring. Native Americans would select an Oak from which they planned to harvest the following year, burn the leaves underneath in fall, and destroy the eggs that would have hatched the spring larvae. The crop was preserved.
How are these techniques relevant outside of the Native American communities where they still may be practiced? The following is a quote from a recently published, edited collection of articles on Oak forest restoration by contemporary ecologist Jeffrey Stringer entitled, Managing Oak Forests in the Eastern United States (edited by Kaiser, Fearer, Harper, 2016, p. 67). As shown by the quote, research into traditional practice may provide modern practitioners with additional tools for their ecology-based landscape efforts*:
“Bumper crops are needed so
that some of the acorns escape
being eaten by wildlife and insects.”
Equally important is the idea that, simply because the application of Euro-based land use practices had many negative ecological side effects, all human interactions on the land need be destructive, including those that occur on the macro-scale. We can’t go back to 1491. The landscape is different now. The landscape has been too altered for that. But integrating knowledge of historic plant communities, with a better understanding of the traditional ecological practices with which those communities historically evolved, can only make us better equipped to plant and manage our way into a new, but healthy landscape ecology.
*It should be noted, however, that in traditional cultures physical interactions with the plants and other aspects of the landscape are often associated with deeper meaning than the simple use of a resource superficially implies. This is a topic that obviously could generate a wider discussion than this article, or my knowledge would allow. It should be noted that separating the “practice” from its cultural associations can have its limitations, and that “cultural appropriation” is also an issue to consider.
Originally published by North American Native Plant Society in 2021.
