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This sounds like recasting the well understood, documented, and widely practised “slash and burn[0]” as some kind of “Native American Earth Wisdom”. What am I m
by peteretep 6y ago
This sounds like recasting the well understood, documented, and widely practised “slash and burn[0]” as some kind of “Native American Earth Wisdom”. What am I missing?
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn
- smcl 6y agoFrom that wiki page: > After about three to five years, the plot's productivity decreases > due to depletion of nutrients along with weed and pest invasion, > causing the farmers to abandon the field and move over to a new area. It sounds like the Native Americans weren't farming the land to exhaustion then moving on and repeating the process elsewhere. They were just burning an area and letting it return "naturally" (yes I know that sounds weird). I imagine that it was also not performed on quite the same scale as it is in recent times in, say, the Amazon.
- toomanybeersies 6y agoSlash and burn is a method of stripping the established vegetation in an area and replacing it with monocrops or grazing animals. Indigenous cultures tended to burn forests and then allow them to regrow, with the aim of promoting the growth of endemic plant species for a variety of benefits. Modern slash and burn strips the land of nutrients and biodiversity.