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The most significant type of environmental change brought about by Precolumbian human activity was the modification of vegetation. … Vegetation was primarily altered by the clearing of forest and by intentional burning. Natural fires certainly occurred but varied in frequency and strength in different habitats. Anthropogenic fires, for which there is ample documentation, tended to be more frequent but weaker, with a different seasonality than natural fires, and thus had a different type of influence on vegetation. The result of clearing and burning was, in many regions, the conversion of forest to grassland, savanna, scrub, open woodland, and forest with grassy openings.”

—William M. Denevan

Keeping large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth and small trees was just one of many reasons for using fire in ecosystems.

This problem arises because there was no systematic record keeping of these fire events. Thus the interaction of people and ecosystems is down played or ignored,

But Native Americans had three powerful technologies: fire, the ability to work wood into useful objects, and the bow and arrow.

the choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.”

The modification of ecosystems to live with and enhance the natural abundance.

Develop or change the natural order to increase land production, such as farming and grazing.

William cronon

Hunting ‑ The burning of large areas was useful to divert big game (deer, elk, bison) into small unburned areas for easier hunting and provide open prairies/meadows (rather than brush and tall trees) where animals (including ducks and geese) like to dine on fresh, new grass sprouts. Fire was also used to drive game into impoundments, narrow chutes, into rivers or lakes, or over cliffs where the animals could be killed easily.

Crop management ‑ Burning was used to harvest crops, especially tarweed, yucca, greens, and grass seed collection. In addition, fire was used to prevent abandoned fields from growing over and to clear areas for planting corn and tobacco.

Pest management ‑ Burning was sometimes used to reduce insects

Improve growth and yields ‑ Fire was often used to improve grass for big game grazing (deer, elk, antelope, bison), horse pasturage, camas reproduction, seed plants, berry plants (especially raspberries, strawberries, and huckleberries), and tobacco.

Warfare and signaling ‑ Use of fire to deprive the enemy of hiding places in tall grasses and underbrush in the woods for defense, as well as using fire for offensive reasons or to escape from their enemies. Smoke signals, actually large fires rather than the movie version of using blankets and smoke, were used to alert tribes about possible enemies or in gathering forces to combat enemies. Or a fire was used to merely announce leaving camp.[

Europeans in the eastern part of the continent observed that Natives cleared large areas for cropland. Their fields in New England sometimes covered hundreds of acres. Colonists in Virginia noted thousands of acres under cultivation by Native Americans.[92]

The hunting of Pleistocene mammals was not sustainable

Indians participated in the commercialization of deer hunting, which led to drastic depletion of deer populations in some regions.

When con- fronted by rapacious Euro-American competitors on the Great Plains they played their own role in the near extinction of bison. Overkill

Their nineteenth century solution to the decline of the bison herds was the Ghost Dance, not conservation.

Hohokam

Soil Salinization

Drought flood climate change

an impressive hydraulic civilization in what is now southern Arizona as early as 100 A.D., but apparently disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century. While some scholars have argued that the Hohokam were ecologically "naïve" because they did not grasp the consequences for the land of their irrigation methods, particularly the problem of salinization (the build-up of salts in the soil),

"most compelling explanations" are related to their desert environment and water, especially drought, a high water table, salinization of the soil, and floods. (p. 58).

how precolumbian America could "be simultaneously paradise seemingly untouched by human hands and—as archaeologists and other scholars have often prop

He gives little credence to the idea that Indians managed either their own populations or those of wildlife.

the park-like savannahs and meadow openings in the forests, resulted from Indian modifications of the environment, particularly through the use of fire.

The montones maoic and sweet potato mounds on hispanola

The buffalo population increased as the Indians were depopulated, subsequently declining under white pressure

Maize beans squash pumpkin tomatoes avocadoes chocolate tobacco

Hidatsas Missouri river bottom

One’s title to a field once set up, no one ever though of disputing it

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He argues it is the moral, the economic, and the political choices we make, not the machines we use that has produced a capitalist industrialized machine oriented society

In describing the neotechnic age (from about 1900 to Mumford's present, 1930), he focuses on the invention of electricity, freeing the factory production line from the restrictions of coal through the addition of small electric engines to individual machines, and freeing the laborer to create small but competitive factories. Mumford presciently notes that a small producer can deliver what is needed when it is needed more efficiently than paleotechnic assembly lines. The neotechnic phase he saw was dominated by men of science, rather than mechanically apt machinists. Rather than pursuing accomplishments on the scale of the trains, it is concerned with the invisible, the rare, the atomic level of change and innovation. Compact and lightweight aluminum is the metal of the neotechnic, and communication and information --even inflated amounts -- he claimed was the coin.

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Warren tarr

People animals energy resources

Water food desiese

Tarr

Sink air water land

1832 asiatic cholera

unsanitary water very deadly

without delivery of fresh water, cleaning dispose of sewage, there could not have been large American cities

cholera promoted large aqueducts

cholera epidemics are endemic to areas where population and industry growth outgrows public health institutions

in 1832, the response to cholera was piety and a return to morality, in 1866, it illuminated specific infrastructure faults.

In 1832 cities were seen as unnatural

In 1866 cities were the natural domain of man

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Human desieses

the horse, changed the lives of many Native American tribes on the Great Plains, allowing them to shift to a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting bison on horseback.

Pox

Flu

Tb

Plague

Malaria

Measles

Scarlet fever

Typhoid

Wheat

Soy

Rye

Coffee

apples

Cotton

Carrots

Oats

Rice

Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no tomatoes in Italy, no coffee in Colombia, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no donkeys in Mexico, no chili peppers in Thailand and India, no cigarettes in France and no chocolate in Switzerland. Even the dandelion was brought to America by Europeans for use as an herb.

2.5 million colonists in the thirteen colonies

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The size of individual plantations increased, from relatively small plots to huge farms with as many as several hundred slaves each.

The cotton industry in turn spurred enterprising northerners to build factories: southern farmers supplied the cotton, northern factories spun it into cloth, and the finished cloth was then either used at home or shipped abroad.

Erie canal transportation

Over time, regional specialization emerged: the West farmed to feed the Northeast, the South grew cotton to ship to the Northeast, and the Northeast produced manufactured goods to sell in the West and South. The roads, canals, and other internal improvements made under Henry Clay's American System made this nationwide trade possible.

Native ecological elements that were not condusive to this new market economy were destroyed at this time, old-growth forests were clearcut for lumber, wolves, bears and cougars were hunted to extirpation in populated areas and farmlands, deer were slaughtered for meat, and the once most populous bird in north America, the passanger pigeon, was commercially hunted as cheap slave food

a blog for me.

Hello.
thanks for checking this out, I admire your taste.

I'll be using this portal as a place to publish my work, not so much as a diary, but I havent a real notion where this little experiment will go. Post twice a day? We'll see how it goes.

A link for the bored.