|
Pristine Nature:
The
Founding
Falsehood
Banishing
livestock is
a death
sentence for
the lands of
the
Southwest. By Steven H.
Rich
 |
Still
resilient
after
years
of
severe
drought,
this
ranchland
(left)
in
Houserock
Valley,
Ariz.,
beneath
the
Paria
Plateau
cliffs,
still
provides
an
abundance
of
grasses
and
forbs. |
| The
Founding
Falsehood |
|
Why
leaving
ãnatureä
alone
means
destruction
of the
wilderness.
By
Steven
H.
Rich
. |
|
Brave
Daniel
Boone,
the
famous
bear
hunter,
warrior
and
frontiersman,
described
some
wilderness
areas
of the
Southern
Appalachians
as
"so
wild
and
horrid
that
it is
impossible
to
behold
them
without
terror."
Why?
Because
the
frontier
of
Daniel
Boone's
experience
was
not a
wilderness.
Though
made
up of
native
organisms,
it was
a
human-created
landscape
full
of
food
and
useful
plants.
Native
Americans
had
managed
the
woodlands
and
grasslands
to
produce
native
game
animals,
native
birds
and
fish,
native
seeds,
berries,
nuts,
greens,
fruits,
bulbs,
corms,
mushrooms,
roots,
basketry
and
cordage
materials,
firewood,
weapon-making
and
building
materials,
medicines
and
ceremonially
important
plants
by
processes
collectively
called
"proto-agriculture."
They
burned
the
brush
to
prevent
catastrophic
wildfire
and to
increase
wildlife
and
visibility
for
military
reasons.
The
very
soils
were
changed
by
their
activities.
Many
"wild"
native
plants
that
exist
today
are in
fact
the
products
of
ancient
Native
American
genetic
selection
and
propagation
projects |
that
favored
better-tasting
or
more
useful
versions.
The
sight
of a
wild,
trackless,
impenetrable,
dense
forest
or
barren,
brushy
tangle
(both
subject
to
huge
devastating
wildfires)
with
little
animal
life
and
nothing
to eat
repulsed
Boone,
as it
did
the
Native
Americans
of his
time.
He was
used
to
productive,
gentled
native
landscapes
--humanized
landscapes
full
of
bears,
deer,
rabbits
and
squirrels.
Advocates
for a
return
to ãpristineänature
demand
an end
to
ranching,
claiming
that
ranchers
ãalterä
what
activists
imagine
to be
ãnaturalä
ecosystems.
Water
holes,
water
troughs,
erosion
controls,
irrigation,
seeding,
grazing,
clearing
brush,
making
a
living
on the
land,
hunting
and
fishing
are
all
castigated
as
wrong
and
bad.
These
angry
activists
want
to ãrestoreäwhat
they
suppose
was
the
ãpre-Columbianä
or ãpre-contactä
condition
where,
they
say,
humans
ãhad
little
influenceä
on
ecosystems.
Health
and
biodiversity
with
human
assistance,
in
their
minds,
seems
to be
a
distortion
of the
natural
order. |
Anything
that
happens
in
nature
without
humans
is
sold
by
them
as
desirable
and
good,
no
matter
how
destructive
of
ecosystem
values,
no
matter
how
many
species
of
native
plants
and
animals
are
lost.
This
odd,
irresponsible
position
has
been
adopted
because
after
years
of ãridding
the
land
of
human
influencesä
the
health
and
biodiversity
they
promised
from
ãreturning
things
to
natureä
never
happened.
They
fundamentally
misunderstood
the
causes
of
ecosystem
health.
Very
positive
ecological
effects
of
well-managed
livestock
--so
valuable
that
experts
recommend
paying
skilled,
responsible
ranchers
for
the
ecosystem
services
they
provide
--are
contemptuously
rejected
by
doctrinaire
ãenvironmentalistsä
as
more
ãalteration.ä
Stranger
still,
ranchers'
so-called
ãchangesä
generally
cause
the
landscape
to
look
much
more
like
the
West
their
ancestors
encountered
in the
early
1800s,with
a mix
of
successional
communities
in a
mosaic
pattern. |
| With
their
lawsuits
against
ranchers,
these
activists
destroy
rural
communities,
then
claim
"environmental
success"
as
defined
by
themselves
as
judges,
juries,
executioners
and
arbiters
of all
things
environmental.
Biodiversity
and
health,
they
claim,
will
show
up in
a few
centuries
or so.
Popular
beliefs
which
imagine
pre-Columbian
America
as a
"pristine
wilderness"
(including
the
West)
are
false,
and
are
based
on
racist
stereotypes.
The
highly
successful
and
extremely
intelligent
adaptations
and
achievements
of
Native
American
societies
are
reduced
to the
instinctual
behavior
of
wildlife
("noble
savages
in a
state
of
nature").
The
related
notion
that
"protecting"
land
in the
West
from
all
human
influences
preserves
biodiversity
long-term
is
also
false.
It
actually
endangers
and
destroys
the
biodiversity,
health,
and
stability
of
these
lands.
The
romantic
notion
of the
Americas
as
pristine
wilderness
was
created
in a
prior
century
by
people
who
could
not
fathom
the
idea
of
Native
Americans
creating
natural
paradises
through
deep
knowledge
of
nature
and
hard
work. Most
people
today
have
little
experience
with
nature
and
have
inherited
what
amounts
to
15th
through
19thcentury
Eurocentric
propaganda
--the
"pristine"
myth.
A
scholarly
paper,
"The
Pristine
Myth:
The
Landscape
of the
Americas
in
1492,"
by
William
N.
Denevan
of the
University
of
Wisconsin
(one
of
many
works
on the
subject),
begins
with
an
abstract
which
sums
up the
facts:
"The
myth
persists
that
in
1492
the
Americas
were
as
parsely
populated
wilderness
--a
world
of
hardly
perceptible
human
disturbance.
There
is
substantial
evidence,
however,
that
the
Native
American
landscape
of the
sixteenth
century
was a
humanized
landscape
almost
everywhere.
Populations
were
large.
Forest
composition
had
been
modified,
grasslands
had
been
created,
wildlife
[populations
modified],
erosion
was
severe
in
places.
Earthworks,
roads,
fields,
and
settlements
were
ubiquitous.
With
[Native
American]
depopulation
in the
wake
of Old
World
disease,
the
environment
had
[fewer
fields
and
villages
and
had
become
more
proto-agricultural
than
agricultural]
in
many
areas.
A good
argument
can be
made
that
the
human
presence
was
less
visible
in
1750
than
it was
in1492."
The
Native
American
depopulation
was a
tragedy
believed
to
have
killed
up to
90
percent
of
Native
Americans
within
200
years
of
original
exposure
to
European
diseases,
to
which
they
had no
immunity.
Millions
still
survived
in
North
and
South
America.
It
pleased
European
consciences
to
imagine
the
land
as
free
for
the
taking.
According
to
Denevan:
"The
pristine
view
is to
a
large
extent
an
invention
of
nineteenth
century
romanticist
and
primitivist
writers
such
as
Hudson,
Cooper,
Thoreau
[who
was
terrified
the
one
time
he
experienced
actual
wilderness],
Longfellow
and
Parkman,
and
painters
such
as
Catlin
and
Church." |
 |
Grazed
land
behind
the
fence
is a
historic
source
of
seeds,
greens,
basket
materials
and
hunting
opportunities
for
the
Native
Americans
who
left
ruins
nearby.
The
land
in
front
of the
fence
is
clearly
dying
from
years
of
"rest." |
| The
notion
that
we can
give
up
awareness,
learning,
work
and
discipline,
and
live
by
impulse
and
instinct,
was
fashionable
with
these
writers
and
their
friends.
The
allegedly
"spontaneous"
and
"natural"
abundance
of
allegedly
"pristine"
and
"pagan"
America
was
the
ultimate
proof
of
their
philosophy
and
the
ultimate
reproof
of
strait-laced
work
and
sacrifice-oriented
Judeo/Christian
civilization,
which
they
saw as
the
enemy
of
pristineness
and
spontaneity.
"Environmentalist"
ideas
of
spontaneous
land
health
exist
in
direct
lineal
descent
from
these
romantic
fallacies.
Denevan
quotes
John
Bakeless
as an
example
of
confused
writers
who
passed
on the
irrational
myth
in the
1950s:
"There
were
not
really
very
many
of
these
redmen·the
land
seemed
empty
to
invaders
who
came
from
settled
Europe·that
ancient,
primeval,
undisturbed
wilderness·."
Bakeless
recounted
their
observations
of
what
we now
know
were
the
benefits
of
Native
American
proto-agricultural
management
practices.
But
the
Europeans
blindly
and
unknowingly
gave
random
nature
the
credit:
"The
streams
simply
boiled
with
fish...so
much
game
that
one
hunter
counted
a
thousand
animals
near a
single
salt
lick...the
forested
glory
of
primitive
America....
Indian
prairie
fires
caused
the
often
mentioned
oak
openings...great
fields
of
[Native
American
planted]
corn
spread
in all
directions...the
Barrens
[mountaintop
grasslands]
without
forest,
and
early
Ohio
settlers
found
that
they
could
drive
about
through
the
forests
with
sleds
and
horses."
Native
Americans
had
cleared
them
of
brush.
The
glaring
contradiction
between
his
data
and
his
beliefs
was
lost
on
Bakeless
and
nearly
everyone
else,
so
cocksure
and
religiously
enamored
were
they
of the
false
but
seductive
idea
that
nature
would
reach
a
healthy,
productive
balance
spontaneously
if
humans
left
it
alone.
Early
settlers
and
their
Native
American
contemporaries
were
not
fond
of
living
in
places
that
were
not
altered
by
humans.
On the
topic
of
intellectual
inconsistency,
Denevan
continues:
"Scholarship
has
shown
that
Indian
populations
in the
Americas
were
substantial,
that...landscape
change
was
commonplace. |
 |
| Tufts
of
green
grass
(above)
are
as
clear
a
sign
as
the
deer
droppings
that
this
dry
country
welcomes
animal
life.
Below:
Managed
ranchland
like
this
was
a
rich
larder
for
early
Native
Americans
who
planted
part
of
their
harvest
to
ensure
a
variety
and
abundance.
It
took
an
average
of
10
to
20
times
more
unmanaged
plants
to
serve
a
cultural
need
than
those
from
productive,
managed
lands. |
 |
|
|
This
message,
however,
seems
not
to
have
reached
the
public
through
texts,
essays
or
talks
by
both
academics
and
popularizers
who
have
a
responsibility
to
know
better.ä
Well-established
facts
have
been
purposefully
left
out
of
the
textbooks,
journals
and
discussions.
Academics
and
the
media
are
participating
in
this
deception
either
through
active
suppression
of
the
truth
or
by
an
inexcusable
ignorance.
Land
health
and
native
diversity
suffer
seriously
from
this
widespread
misunderstanding.
Respected
Native
American
elders
remember
better
times.
ãThe
white
man
sure
ruined
this
country,ä
said
Southern
Sierra
Miwok
(from
California)
elder
Jim
Rust.
ãIt's
turned
back
to
wilderness.
In
the
old
days
there
used
to
be
lots
more
game:
deer,
quail,
gray
squirrels
and
rabbits.ä |
Natives
of
Payson,
Ariz.,
an
area
under
Apache
tribal
stewardship
for
many
hundreds
of
years,
have
documented
that
over
1,000
miles
of
former
trout
streams
have
dried
up
in
the
last
70
years,
along
with
| | |
