On 14 Oct 02, Philip Owen wrote: > Begging your pardon, I would insist that grasslands are the climax > vegetation for the region, having evolved over at least 200 million > years. ---8<---
On Lawrence London's Permaculture list, Mark Ludwig is a strong advocate of US prairielands. Inspection of the archives at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture may add a string or two to your bow? > Note that I hesitate to use the word 'forest' in association with > these timber plantations. There is no undergrowth, few birds, > minimal soil life and no sounds of insect's buzzing around. ---8<--- Oliver Rackham, now a retired Cambridge don, is scathing in his criticism of UK forestry (= plantation) development. His strong advocacy of 'woodmanship' clinched my resolution of the wilderness/productivity dichotomy as it applies to the progress of our property. Closed canopy 'forestry' (long practiced in parts of Europe) with its close attention to the 'underwood' is gaining recognition in New Zealand. Rackham has written several readable books, there isn't a great deal of his iconoclastic stuff on the Internet. Try: http://medievalarchaeology.unisi.it/NewPages/COLLANE/TESTIQDS/paesaggio/07.rtf http://www.hamar.fsnet.co.uk/teg/7/EcologistsAgainstTriumph.html http://www.hamar.fsnet.co.uk/teg/7/Falacy.html http://www.logrus.demon.co.uk/Rackham.htm eg: "We live in an age in which accuracy is called pedantry; presenting both sides of an argument is called complacency; and who says something is considered more important than whether it is true. The line between education and entertainment is dangerously thin." Cheerio... Rex
