Considering the way the West just steals from these people I would quarry as to just who are the Hunter/Gatherers here. These people are the remnants of the great civilizations who died by the millions when the Spaniards came through.
REH April 3, 1990 Research in 'Virgin' Amazon Uncovers Complex Farming By WILLIAM K. STEVENS LEAD: OVER thousands of years, scientists have discovered, ancient inhabitants of the Amazon and their present-day descendants have evolved a sophisticated blend of agricultural and forestry techniques to shape and reshape the region's vast forests, savannas and river valleys to their needs. OVER thousands of years, scientists have discovered, ancient inhabitants of the Amazon and their present-day descendants have evolved a sophisticated blend of agricultural and forestry techniques to shape and reshape the region's vast forests, savannas and river valleys to their needs. In an earlier form, the scientists say, the system enabled the ancient Amazonians to build a civilization whose size, power and achievements far outshone the conventional picture of the ancients as small, primitive tribes living on the edge of existence. And they say in its present form, the system has enabled the descendants to prosper in a way that eludes many settlers who follow more modern practices - without disrupting the ecology of the tropical forests. Even while the scientists strive to learn more about this remarkable system of resource management, they and others are starting to search for ways in which it might be applied to help head off the destruction of the Amazonian forests. And at a time when expanding populations and growing poverty are overwhelming third world economies, they believe, the system could enable millions of poor peasants to make a good, secure living based on self-renewing resources. Beyond that, the scientists say, the techniques can be used to tap the tropical forests - while leaving them basically intact - for a broad range of export products that under ideal circumstances could bring billions of dollars into the debt-ridden economies of the Amazonian countries. The potential export products include foods, medicines, natural fertilizers, pesticides, body-care products and fragrances. A study last year by American experts on the Amazonian forests calculated that these products would be more profitable than the widespread logging and cattle ranching that today are largely blamed for progressive destruction of the forest. There is ''a whole range of possibilities that could be carried out based on what ancient people did for thousands of years,'' said Anna C. Roosevelt, an anthropologist and archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History who has investigated the ways of the Amazonian ancients in depth. Dr. Roosevelt, a great-grandaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and winner of a MacArthur Foundation award, was the co-organizer of a symposium on the past, present and future of the Amazon at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in late February in New Orleans. The practices of present-day Amazonian natives offer ''thousands of ways of making the living forest more valuable than the destroyed forest,'' said Darrell A. Posey, an American anthropologist who works for the Goeldi Museum in Belem, Brazil, and who has lived with the natives in the forest and observed their agricultural and forestry techniques closely. In one such technique, for instance, Amazonian Indians have learned to manage agricultural plots so that over a period of decades years they evolve in pre-planned phases from cleared farmland back into thick forest. The plots move through stages in which conventional crops predominate at first, but then wild species of useful plants and trees are encouraged to encroach gradually. These are tapped for a variety of uses, including medicine, insecticides and pesticides. Eventually the forest reclaims a given plot. Meanwhile, other plots are in varying phases. The result is that the forest continually renews itself even while sustaining its exploiters. Some agencies concerned with development in the Third World have begun exploring the feasibility of applying the techniques of traditional cultures more widely. ''I think it's time we started looking for some new ways of doing business,'' said Thurman Grove, a Cornell University ecologist who has been detached for two years to help the United States Agency for International Development find ways to adapt the traditional techniques to modern use. ''Mother Nature has a lot of tricks,'' he said, and ''old cultures have already run a lot of the experiments.'' The challenge, Dr. Grove said, is to learn how to augment the natural systems so that they can be made productive enough to sustain a large population without, as was true in ancient times, relying so much on labor-intensive methods. ''That's a field where I think we are in a very nascent state,'' he said. Scientists who have studied the present-day application of these techniques and skills are finding that they provide a more reliable and sustainable living over the long term than can be achieved by neighbors who rely on modern cash-cropping. Ancient SocietyA Civilization Of Chiefdoms The system evolved through millennia of practical experimentation in response to changing conditions. In archeological investigations that over the last 10 to 15 years have challenged a number of conventional beliefs about both the Amazonian forest and its inhabitants, Dr. Roosevelt and others have traced the origins of the natives' manipulation of the Amazonian environment back thousands of years. The conventional beliefs have held that the ancient native populations were small, scattered, primitive and sickly, and that the forest itself was mostly virgin and undisturbed and was poorly suited to sustainable agriculture. But at their peak in the centuries around the birth of Christ, according to archeological evidence that is still unfolding, the ancient Amazonians forged a civilization of agricultural chiefdoms that lasted 2,000 years - a vast, powerful rural economy that some scientists believe sustained millions of people. Many of them lived in settlements of up to 4,000 people, built atop huge earthen mounds to keep them away from floods. The mounds were linked by causeways, and other causeways led to fields where corn, the staple crop, was grown. The natives of this era carried out their agriculture in the forest, in reclaimed swamps and on alluvial plains along the rivers. It sustained them well enough, said Dr. Roosevelt, to produce a populace that, on the basis of the archeological study of skeletons, was on the average tall and healthy. There have been people in the Amazon forest about as long as the forest itself has existed, or since the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 years ago, and they have exploited it intensively, said Dr. Roosevelt. But their manner of exploitation has allowed the forests to regenerate so completely, she said, that they have fooled some into thinking they are virgin. This is so even though at their peak, the ancient Amazonians greatly outnumbered their modern descendants. ''What people did in ancient times may be ecologically sensible,'' said Dr. Roosevelt. ''At least we know the forest survived.'' With the arrival of Europeans in the 1500's, a new chapter opened. The Spanish established new economies on the flood plains, and cattle ranching emerged as a major economic activity that survives to this day. This was the forerunner of today's industrial-age exploitation of the forest. Driven by economic pressures, millions of acres of Amazon forest have been exploited for timber or burned and converted to cropland that, under presently employed methods of cultivation, plays out after two or three years and then sustains no one. The Spanish conquest also brought disease that wiped out most of Amazonia's native population, with 85 percent of the people in some localities dying out within the first year of contact. Many of the survivors fled to the interior, where, in response to new conditions, their peculiar blend of present-day agricultural and forest management evolved from the ancient ways. Farms in the JungleForest to Field And Back Again In one application of this approach to what scientists call agro-forestry, the Kayapo tribe of Brazil, studied by Dr. Posey, operates as follows: A circular field is prepared by felling several large trees at key junctures so that their crowns fall on the periphery of the circle. This also brings down smaller trees that have been weakened by notching. They, along with the leafy crowns of the big trees, also fall on the perimeter, providing nutrients for the highest-consuming plants, which are to be concentrated around the edges. Yams, potatoes, manioc and other tubers are planted between the fallen tree trunks. On a windless day just before the year's first rain, the dead, felled trees are burned under carefully controlled conditions. The rains wash the fresh ashes into the soil, where the tubers' root systems are already established. In this new field, crops are planted in concentric rings radiating out from the center: Sweet potatoes and yams in the middle, mixed corn and rice next, then manioc, then more yams. The outer zone contains papaya, banana, pineapple, mango, cotton and beans. In an older field in its later stages, the corn and rice have disappeared, the potato-yam zone has been expanded and manioc continues. The forest begins to encroach on the field. Gradually, fruit trees, palms and medicinal herbs move into the field. Eventually, the forest re-covers the field entirely. Each phase of reforestation has its own inventory of useful plants and animals. Other fields in both Peru and Brazil follow much the same pattern, with varying mixtures of crops, according to scientists from the New York Botanical Garden's Institute of Economic Botany, who have studied the practice extensively. The institute is in the forefront of study about such matters. For a given plot to go from first cultivation back to forest takes 10 to 15 years, said Wil De Jong, an international fellow at the institute, who has taken part in field studies in the Amazon. ''Then it's continued for a longer time as forest,'' he said, ''maybe 50 or 60 years.'' During some stages of cultivation, he said, the plots propagate a number of forest species. ''People are preserving their resources by actually multiplying them,'' he said. Supermarkets of a Sort Among the Kayapo, said Dr. Posey, an ''enormously wide range'' of plants are brought from vast areas of forest and re-planted on small plots of three acres or less. Most have multiple uses as, for example, natural fertilizers and pesticides, insect repellants, building materials, medicines and food. ''These islands are sort of supermarkets concentrated in specific places,'' Dr. Posey said. In creating the islands, he said, the Indians actively reshape the environment, transplanting forest species to the savanna in a sort of ''mix-and-match'' kind of ecological management. The Forest Economy Cash Crops Vs. Self-Sufficiency One demonstration of the effectiveness of the native way of farming as compared with modern ways has been documented by Jane L. Collins, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Working in the Peruvian Amazon, she compared the performance of natives who pursued the old ways with the modern, cash-crop pursuits of migrants who had moved into the local region from elsewhere in the country. In the modern application, she found, cash-cropping tends to force farmers who pursue it ''to be hooked up to the markets differently'' from the practitioners of native agro-forestry. That is, the cash-croppers, relying on one crop and on debt financing to produce it - as is commonly the case in many parts of the world - tend to ''be more dependent on cash, so they need to get more out of the land over the short term.'' The natives, on the other hand, tend to produce for their own use to a greater extent and to be less reliant on the market. Although they do sell some of their crop, they have a more stable, long-term source of sustenance. ''The migrants don't have the agro-forestry management skills,'' said Dr. Collins, ''and often there are lots of incentives to go other ways.'' For instance, she said, the government provides loans for cattle ranching, which encourages farmers to clear-cut land for pastures. ''If push comes to shove,'' she said, ''they can sell the cleared land and move on.'' Their one-crop practices are also more destructive to the soil, she said: ''That's why it gets worn out.'' Question of Compensation Pharmaceutical companies have long exploited the medicinal properties of plants discovered from native cultures, said Dr. Posey, and the potential for broadening that exploitation into other areas is considerable. In a study reported last year in the British journal Nature, Charles M. Peters of the Institute of Economic Botany, Alwyn H. Gentry of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Robert O. Mendelsohn of Yale University calculated that the long-term economic value of products taken from the living forest, excluding field crops that might be grown there, is about double that of the timber that might be harvested from it and the cattle that might be raised on cleared land. Already, as awareness grows, Dr. Posey and many others are worrying about what might happen to the native peoples if the outside world begins tapping their intimate, detailed knowledge of the Amazonian environment in earnest. Will they expropriate the expertise, denying compensation to those who have developed it? That would be ''nothing more than another form of neo-colonialism,'' said Dr. Posey, who last week, in a sign of the times, attended an international conference on ''intellectual property rights'' in York, England. The traditional systems of resource management and the knowledge that undergirds them, he says, ''are rare and priceless resources.'' -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 7:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Forest garden stewardship My brother sent me this link, about traditional forest agriculture in vietnam, which resonates nicely with Ray's account of forest-farming: -Pete > What you can do with 2 acres > http://www.nextworldtv.com/videos/permaculture/300-year-old-food-forest-in-v ietnam.html > William E Vincent _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
