Manmade
Grasslands
It didn’t take long for our hominin ancestors, creatures of
the grass, to learn that large game was most often found in grassland
habitats. Forests were more challenging
to hunt in, and they were mostly home to small game. This fact of life motivated hunters to
eagerly follow their stomachs to wonderlands of grass-fed, organic,
all-you-can-eat flesh. Therefore, the
human diaspora out of Africa tended to pursue routes that majored in
grasslands.
As they migrated out, their journey took them to grasslands
in the Middle East, and then Europe. Barry
Cunliffe noted that a vast steppe grassland began in Hungary and ended in
Manchuria, providing an easy to travel grass highway that was 5,600 miles
(9,000 km) long. As an added bonus, the
steppe was largely carpeted with excellent vegetation that was drought-resistant
and frost-tolerant.
Later, around A.D. 1300, Marco Polo described the Silk Roads
that spanned across the steppe, connecting the civilizations of Europe and the
Far East. This link enabled much
cultural knowledge to move back and forth (a mixed blessing). The steppe also enabled the emergence of
tribes of pastoralists, with their large roaming herds of livestock. These tribes were sometimes absorbed into
powerful empires, like those of the Mongols and Huns.
Once established in Asia, the front line pioneers of the
human diaspora were eventually able to wander from Siberia, over the Beringia
land bridge, and then explore the incredible grassland Serengetis of the
Americas.
Anyway, our early hominin ancestors could not help but notice
that when occasional wildfires burned off the dry grassland vegetation, tender
shoots would soon emerge from the ashes.
Fresh greenery looked heavenly to the hungry grazing critters, and
hunters deeply loved grazing critters.
Fire was a good tonic for the health of grass. It burned up accumulated dead foliage,
allowing more solar energy to feed the grass people. Also, when the snows melted away, the ground
warmed up faster when the litter was gone, enabling the growing season to begin
earlier.
Several million years ago, a clever hominin learned how to
kindle a manmade flame by generating friction.
One day, by accident or intention, flames from a campfire somehow
ignited nearby grass, and winds pushed the roaring blaze across hill and dale,
incinerating brush, trees, dry grass, and unlucky wildlife.
This exciting experience gave birth to a devious idea. They could deliberately start grass fires
wherever and whenever they wanted.
Burning fried the shoots of woody vegetation, eliminated dead plant
debris, and encouraged grass to produce at optimal rates. They could encourage bigger herds of game by
expanding and maintaining high quality grassland. They could entice game to graze in locations
optimal for hunting them, like places close to a water source, and not far from
camp. By cleverly controlling nature,
they could eat better, feed more bambinos, and enjoy a higher standard of
living. So they did.
We folks in the era of glowing screens have a hard time
imagining that the practice of deliberately burning grass was a remarkable
history bending innovation. But back in
the good old days, it was a very hot idea.
The routine eventually spread around the world, and substantially
reconfigured many ecosystems. It was a
highly influential transition in the human saga, far more significant than
smart phones or automobiles, which are ridiculous unsustainable amusements that
have no long term future.
Initially, fires were used to expand or improve open
grassland. Once woody vegetation was
eliminated, additional fires were routinely set every few years to prevent its
recovery. Eventually, there were no more
seeds of woody plants hiding in the sod, so the burn cycles could then be less
frequent.
The practice of attracting large game by maintaining top
quality grassland is often called firestick farming. It was an easy low tech way to increase food
resources. Alfred Crosby noted that
firestick farming had transformed much of six continents a long time before the
first field was planted. Let’s look at a
few examples.
Australia
In Australia, the firestick farming practiced by Aborigines
was a time-proven fine art that evolved after many centuries of trial and
error, learning and tweaking. Humans
arrived between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, and they must have brought with
them the magical art of fire starting.
Within several thousand years of their arrival, 85 percent of the
megafauna species were extinct, including 1,000 pound (453 kg) kangaroos, 400
pound (181 kg) birds, lizards 25 feet (7.6 m) long, and tortoises the size of
Volkswagens. Over time, many dry forests
that were not fire-tolerant went up in smoke, and were displaced by
fire-promoting eucalypt forests.
Bill Gammage described the Australia that British colonists
observed in 1788, when they first washed up on shore. The landscape looked radically different from
today. Much of what is now dense forest
or scrub used to be manmade grasslands.
Early white eyewitnesses frequently commented that large regions looked
like parks. In those days, all English
parks were the private estates of the super-rich. Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the beautiful
park-like Australian countryside were penniless bare-naked Stone Age anarchist
heathens. Their wealth was their
time-proven knowledge, and their respect for the land.
In 1788, large areas of Australia had been actively
maintained by firestick farming, which greatly expanded habitat for the
delicious critters that the natives loved to dine on. The Aborigines used both hot fires and cool
fires to manage vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire
dependent, or fire promoting. Different
fires were used to promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses. When starting a fire, the time and location
was carefully calculated to encourage the desired result. According to Gammage, most of Australia was
burnt about every one to five years. On
any day of the year, a fire was likely burning somewhere.
The natives generally enjoyed an affluent lifestyle. They had learned how to live through
hundred-year droughts and giant floods.
No region was too harsh for people to inhabit. Their culture had taboos that set limits on
reproduction and hunting. During the
breeding seasons of important animals, hunting was prohibited near their
gathering places. Lots of food resources
were left untouched most of the time, a vital safety net. The Dreaming had two rules: obey the Law, and
leave the world as you found it.
The colonists were clueless space aliens. Their glorious vision was to transfer a
British way of life to a continent that was highly unsuited for it. Australia’s soils were ancient and minimally
fertile, and the climate was bipolar — extreme multi-year droughts could be
washed away by sudden deluges. But, they
brought their livestock and plows and gave it a whirl. They believed that hard work was a virtue. The Aborigines were astonished to observe how
much time and effort the silly newcomers invested in producing the weird stuff
they ate.
The new settlers wanted to live like proper rural Brits —
permanent homes, built on fenced private property. They freaked out when the natives set fires
to maintain the grassland. Before long,
districts began banning these burns.
This led to the return of saplings and brush. So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy
dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.
Without burning, insect numbers exploded. Without burning, fuels built up, leading to
new catastrophes, called bushfires. The
Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851.
It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep,
thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.
Mark Brazil shared a story that was full of crap. In Britain, cow manure was promptly and
properly composted by patriotic dung beetles, which returned essential
nutrients to the soil. In Australia,
none of the native dung beetles could get the least bit interested in cow
shit. It was too wet, and too out in the
open. Cow pies could patiently sit on
the grass unmolested for four years, because nobody loved them. This deeply hurt their feelings.
Australian flies, on the other hand, discovered that cow pies
made fabulous nurseries for their children.
Each pat could feed 3,000 maggots, which turned into flies — dense
clouds of billions and billions of flies — which the hard working Christians
did not in any way fancy. Being outdoors
was hellish. In the 1960s, folks
imported British dung beetles, which loved the taste and aroma of cow
pies. Oddly, this is one example where
an introduced exotic species apparently didn’t create unintended
consequences. When they ran out of pies
to eat, the beetles simply died.
Anyway, a continent inhabited by Stone Age people was substantially
altered by firestick farming and hunting.
The Australia of 1788 was radically different from when the first human
arrived. We’ll never know if continued
firestick farming would have eventually led to severely degraded
ecosystems. Some serious injuries can
take a long time to fully develop. Many
attempts to deliberately control ecosystems have spawned huge unintended
consequences over time. For example,
agriculture.
United
States
In the central U.S., the prairie ecosystem emerged in the
last 8,000 to 10,000 years, displacing the tundra that had emerged as the ice
sheets melted and withdrew. Prairies
support complex biodiversity, with different mixes of species adapting to
different mixes of soil types, moisture, and climate. Two hundred years ago, the prairies were home
to 30 to 60 million bison, and numerous other herbivores.
Stephen Pyne wrote that when white colonists landed in
America, the western portion of the Great Plains was shortgrass prairie, too
dry to support forest. But the eastern
portion was tallgrass prairie. Most of
it had rainfall and soils suitable for forest, but Native Americans had
gradually pushed back the forest cover.
They maintained this highly productive prairie by burning it every three
years or so. It provided excellent
habitat for buffalo and other delicacies.
Burning was a common practice almost everywhere in North
America. By A.D. 1000, the expansion of
manmade grasslands enabled buffalo to cross the Mississippi River for the first
time. By the 1600s, they had reached
Massachusetts on the Atlantic coast. In
some regions, forests were periodically burned to prevent the accumulation of
brush. This was often done in late
autumn, after the leaves had fallen.
Pioneers commented that these fire-maintained forests resembled European
parks. The open floor made it easier to
travel, which sped the process of colonization.
Shepard Krech wrote that California Indians burned chaparral
(dense brush) to entice deer. Along the
east coast, there were oak openings (meadows with scattered trees) as large as
1,000 acres (404 ha). Manmade grasslands
in the Shenandoah Valley covered a thousand square miles (2,590 km2). Indians in Oregon’s Willamette Valley engaged
in extensive routine burning. When
colonists ended this traditional burning, there was a tremendous recovery of
forest in many regions. Krech noted that
Indian fires sometimes exploded into raging infernos that burned for days,
sometimes killing entire buffalo herds, up to a thousand animals.
Between about A.D. 800 and 1300, Indian agriculture greatly
expanded, majoring in corn (maize), beans, and squash. Much of their cropland was former forest, and
it was kept cleared by regular burning.
Their fields were often 100 acres (40 ha), and sometimes 1,000. Because they had no livestock to produce
manure for fertilizer, soils were often depleted in a few years. So, they cleared more forest, and the
depleted fields once again grew trees.
This cycle could be repeated until the soil was junk.
In the Midwest, where large areas of forest had been replaced
by manmade tallgrass prairie, the topsoil was deep and highly fertile. Settlers, arriving with plows and draft
animals, were able to turn the thick sod, plant grasses like corn and wheat, and
reap impressive harvests. Today, maybe
one percent of tallgrass prairie still survives. A number of states that were once primarily
forest or tallgrass prairie are now sprawling farmland.
Michael Williams noted that as the diseases of civilization
spread westward, Indians died in great numbers.
They had zero immunity to highly contagious Old World pathogens. Diseases spread westward far faster than the
expansion of settlers. The half-lucky
Indians who survived the epidemics were herded into reservations. Consequently, the cycle of periodic burning
stopped, and the forests quickly returned.
The high mortality of disease resulted in extensive reforestation. Forests in 1750 may have been bigger and
denser than they had been in the previous thousand years. When whites eventually arrived to create
permanent agricultural communities, the regrown forests had to be cleared.
Britain
When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea
levels were very low, and England was connected by dry land to Ireland,
Scandinavia, and continental Europe.
Barry Cunliffe wrote that as the ice retreated, and the climate warmed, the
newly exposed lands went through a sequence of transitions — from tundra, to
steppe, and then forest. Essentially
most of Western Europe became a vast forest.
Large game thrived on the tundra and steppe, but the expansion of
forests reduced grazing land area, and the abundance of large game.
By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers apparently made some small
clearings in the forest to attract game.
By 6000 B.C., England became disconnected from the continent by rising
sea levels. By 4500 B.C., when farmers
and herders began to trickle in, England was largely a forest, except for the
highlands. Hunters dined on red deer,
wild boar, and aurochs. By 3000 B.C.,
there were substantial clearances for cropland and pasture. By A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was
forest. By 1919, it was five percent,
Britannia was essentially stripped naked.
Jed Kaplan’s team of researchers wrote a paper on the
prehistoric deforestation of Europe. It
included stunning maps that illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000
B.C. and A.D. 1850. [MAP] Forests can be pushed back by killing them
via burning, chopping, or girdling.
Tropical primates are the only critters that have the spooky ability to
create such massive change, affecting entire continents.
In the 1970s, Hugh Brody was working on a British documentary
about the Inuit people of Canada. He had
worked closely with an elder named Anaviapik, who had never travelled outside
of his homeland. When the film editing
was done, both got on a plane, and flew to London to bless the finished
version. One day, Brody took Anaviapik for
a drive in the countryside, and he was totally freaked out by what he saw. “It’s all built!” The natural face of the land had entirely
been torn off, and replaced with manmade scars.
J. B. MacKinnon mentioned the story of a British scientist
visiting the U.S. From an overlook in
the White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres of
woodland — an overwhelming experience.
The man burst into tears and had a long, hard cry. At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for
the first time, and he dropped to his knees.
Ireland
The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but
Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508
cm) of precipitation. The wet climate
encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests. Frederick Aalen noted that early
hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with
a dense unbroken forest. Folks lived
along coastlines, lakes, and streams. In
the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were
apparently small in scale.
Farmers and herders began arriving around 3500 B.C., and the
long war on trees commenced. By the end
of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly complete. When Aalen wrote in 1978, just three percent
of the land was covered by natural forest or fake forest (tree farms). Deforestation had many unintended
consequences. William MacLeish noted
that in the good old days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the
land, and allowed the breezes to disperse it into the atmosphere. When the trees were gone, this dispersal
ended, but the Gulf Stream continued delivering warm rainy weather from the
Caribbean. Consequently, water tables
rose, bogs spread, and ground turned acid.
If we disregard the serious damage caused by deforestation,
Ireland seemed to be a perfect place for raising livestock. Winters were mild, the grass was green all
year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed. Barns were not needed to protect livestock
from the cold. Milk and meat were
available all year round. Herding worked
well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite
the rich soils.
In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus Cambrensis (Jerry
of Wales) to Ireland and report on the conditions. His report mentioned many beautiful lakes,
where some of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before. Common freshwater fish included salmon,
trout, eels, and oily shad. Along the
coast, saltwater fish were abundant. The
woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.” There were vast herds of boars and wild
pigs. Small hares were numerous. Wolves had not yet been fully
exterminated. He said it was common to
see the remains of Irish elk, a species that vanished on the island before the
arrival of humans. Their remains were commonly
found in bogs, often in groups.
The Irish people lived like beasts, he wrote. They held agriculture in contempt, and had no
interest in the glittering wealth of the outer world. There were large tracts of land suitable for
crops, but folks had no interest in a shift to backbreaking drudgery. The herding life worked just fine. Cambrensis felt great pity for the
uncivilized natives. “Their greatest
delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the
enjoyment of liberty.”
Ireland was a great place to be a hunter-gatherer, as long as
the clans avoided classic booboos like overhunting, overbreeding, or allowing
the introduction of domesticated livestock and bloodthirsty colonizers. Unfortunately, booboos happen. The wild stags, wolves, and boars were
perfectly adapted to the ecosystem, and caused no permanent injuries. Humans often have a difficult time smoothly
blending into ecosystems. Will shamans
ever discover a safe and effective cure for cleverness fever?
