Cafeoutdoors.com: Hellbender

Forest Stewardship Has Roots
September 18th, 2007

We have emphasized the fact that human beings have been impacting Western landscapes for millennia. We have 64 posts in the Anthropogenic Fire Theory category. In those posts we have presented references to articles, reports, and books by anthropologists, archeologists, historians, ethno-ecologists, other -ologists, and just plain folks with deep knowledge of the past. They all convey the same message: human stewardship not only altered but engendered many of the forests, prairies, and savannas that existed in the West, and indeed across the America?s, when Columbus landed.

Anthropogenic fire maintained and sustained landscapes beneficial to cultures that depended on the fruits of those landscapes for survival. The indigenous peoples learned, likely through trial and error, how to sustain game and edible plants. If they had not, they would not have survived.

If catastrophic fires denuded watersheds and incinerated wildlife over vast tracts (as they do today), the human beings that lived there would have starved or had to move. We from know anthropological research that Native American cultures were not wandering tribes, but rather nations with long established, permanent territories. The members of the Nations sustained the productivity of their territories through traditional environmental management techniques. In the West, the most advantageous and successful techniques involved frequent, regular, seasonal burning.

The public needs to grasp that human beings have always been integral, that our forests are heritage relics of human care. The understanding that our landscapes are CULTURAL and not wild is a key component of the restoration of sustainable forests. To abandon our forests to ?natural? disasters is to throw away the real past.

Human beings have been tending our forests for millennia. That justifies, indeed demands, our tending of our forests today. If we took better care of our forests, we wouldn?t have so many of the other ancillary problems.

It is important for the lay public to understand that stewardship has roots, that stewardship is our inherited responsibility, and that abandonment to wildfire is shirking our responsibilities as human beings.

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