Hacker News Books

I’m mostly alluding to Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard, and drawing on Tending the Wild, M Kat Anderson.

What you are saying is not really correct. A good book on this topic is "Tending the Wild" by M. Kat Anderson

https://baynature.org/article/book-review-tending-the-wild/

Thanks for bringing up this book. Everyone who lives in California and thinks about nature needs to check out Tending the Wild.

> Read “Tending the Wilds”, for a start.

Searching for that exact phrase isn't leading me to the resource. Is it "Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources"?

If not, do you have a link?

You might find this book interesting - Native American management of land via fire is a central theme:

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson

M. Kat Anderson's Tending The Wild details how the Yosemite indians warned Congress more than a century ago that it was a mistake to suppress fires in the national park and allow brush to build up on the forest floor. I can't find the exact passage, but the entire book is worth reading.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280434/tending-the-wild

What a poorly educated reply. No one mentioned any notion of peace before colonizers. How is that relevant?

Nearly everything you said is just plain wrong.

> no single tribe that has carefully tended the land for thousands of years

Yes you are right, there were MULTIPLE soveriegn tribes that did that. And yes they did tend the land for thousands of years. Look up Tending the wild by Kat Anderson.

> since they lacked a meaningful method of keeping knowledge beyond word of mouth, any non-common technique would have to be rediscovered every 100 years

Huh? So I guess there was not a chance that one of those millions of native Americans still living on reservation lands in the 1900s passed down any knowledge of how they lived. Interesting assumption there chap.

>crap agricultural skills

"Crap agricultural skills"? Good lord. Americans are the ones with "crap agricultural skills." It's not normal for soil to be unusable for half a decade after farming FYI. Ever heard of soil erosion? Look up Three Sisters, https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass, Karletta Chief's field work, Indigenous Environmental Perspectives:NAP.

I've heard similar complaints about John Muir. People get very, very touchy when you say bad things about John Muir.

Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of locations?)