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LingcodKilla posted:Still boggles the mind they ran out of wood. I remember hearing in some pop history book that few Native Americans thought that the Europeans had come because they ran out of wood in their homeland, and the author noted that they weren't too far off
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Sep 20, 2018 08:58
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LingcodKilla posted:Still boggles the mind they ran out of wood. The northern parts of the Indian subcontinent ran out of wood during the 1950~60 when alot of development was happening. It was a huge deal, that led to some radical reforestation and community management to get local timber/wood levels to a manageable level. If you look at pictures from say national geographic from the 60s onwards of places like Nepal and compare that to now, you would see literally no tress on mountainsides. Kathmandu valley was completely bare of trees until the 80s, and it led to a whole bunch of villages vanishing overnight due to landslides and erosion. edit: by development i dont mean better things. Stuff like introduction of coal/charcoal stoves. Disruption of past trade links (wood and charcoal from the south as trade goods). Disruption of communal forestry and land management (men and leadership being diverted to WWII and wage labor in cities). ughhhh fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Sep 20, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 09:19
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If you picture how much fuckin charcoal you need to make a window or god forbid a church bell it's honestly surprising that they didn't run out earlier.
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Sep 20, 2018 10:51
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Monocled Falcon posted:I remember someone trying the dry linen scurb method in modern times, has anyone tried to see how clean you could get with a strigil? I maintain that there's be a market for a proper Roman bathing experience (light workout in a warm room, oil + scraping, big old sweat and a cold plunge. Nudism tolerated if not outright encouraged) but disappointingly the Thermae Baths in Bath don't offer such a thing.
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Sep 20, 2018 12:48
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At one point about 120 years ago Pennsylvania was completely deforested save some acres of remote virgin forest. There were no deer left if you can imagine that. All the current deer in PA are descendants of deer imported from Michigan.
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Sep 20, 2018 13:01
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That you had Europeans coming across a loving ocean to lands never seen by their people in increddibly expensive and complicated expeditions and high risk of life and limb and saying "Holy poo poo look at all of these forests we can start sending timber back across and get rich" probably tells you what you need to know about the state of European trees.
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Sep 20, 2018 13:42
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CommonShore posted:That you had Europeans coming across a loving ocean to lands never seen by their people in increddibly expensive and complicated expeditions and high risk of life and limb and saying "Holy poo poo look at all of these forests we can start sending timber back across and get rich" probably tells you what you need to know about the state of European trees. I was always amazed by the fact that New France's shipyards would build ships with the sole purpose of loading them with wood, crossing the ocean and then getting dismantled because it too, is made out of wood. Also, regarding deforestation, the Romans/Europeans may have been good at it, but Americans did it better. https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/the-deforestation-and-colonization-of-the-united-states/  I don't recall where I read this, but there were accounts of europeans coming to North America and being amazed at how much wood was being wasted. Things like people stoking fires throughout the day, never letting it die. Forests were so abundant, people thought they'd never run out.
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Sep 20, 2018 14:41
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Dalael posted:I was always amazed by the fact that New France's shipyards would build ships with the sole purpose of loading them with wood, crossing the ocean and then getting dismantled because it too, is made out of wood. Wasn't a lot of that the result of the mass population die off which had been occurring since 1492, tho?
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Sep 20, 2018 15:13
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LingcodKilla posted:Still boggles the mind they ran out of wood. It happened in Icaland.
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Sep 20, 2018 15:21
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CommonShore posted:That you had Europeans coming across a loving ocean to lands never seen by their people in increddibly expensive and complicated expeditions and high risk of life and limb and saying "Holy poo poo look at all of these forests we can start sending timber back across and get rich" probably tells you what you need to know about the state of European trees. That was what sparked the Industrial Revolution, ultimately. They turned to coal for fuel, which required mining and transportation. Mining led to a need for better pumps, which led to steam engines. Transportation led to wooden, then iron railed roads for easily rolling carts full of coal away from the mines.
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Sep 20, 2018 15:24
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It’s probably impossible to tell a 300 year old forest from a 1000+ year old forest so who knows
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Sep 20, 2018 15:30
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My Imaginary GF posted:Wasn't a lot of that the result of the mass population die off which had been occurring since 1492, tho? This doesn't represent population. It represents forested areas
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Sep 20, 2018 15:37
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Dalael posted:This doesn't represent population. It represents forested areas Yes, but dead people don't cut trees.
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Sep 20, 2018 15:43
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1491 has a good discussion of this, but the impression that the New World was perfectly untouched virgin blah blah blah has a problematic history. There's a version of it that is nominally positive for indigenous people - 'the wise native perfectly in touch with the land in harmony etc. etc.' - which is rhetorically useful as a cudgel but is nevertheless not quite right. It's partially a result of the mass die off, and partially a matter of slightly different methods and habits of agriculture. The mound builders in the Mississippi, for instance, did a number on themselves via deforesting, as did the people of Easter Island.
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Sep 20, 2018 15:50
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euphronius posted:It’s probably impossible to tell a 300 year old forest from a 1000+ year old forest so who knows It depends on the environment. If you’re in a place with giant sequoia it’s easy. Succession is complicated, and there are secondary forests in Latin America that regrew following the Columbian exchange that remain recognizably different than true old growth. However our understanding of succession in complex multi-species environments is evolving, and it’s no longer clear that these old “secondary” forests will necessarily converge on the same end state as existing old growth forests. As for the map I think much of the old growth area would actually be a matrix of secondary and primary forest, as the Native American swidden agriculture required a lot of land. Still I wouldn’t be surprised if the area was nearly all old growth, as swidden cultivators tend to use the same plots over and over so as to save the effort of clearing new land.
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Sep 20, 2018 15:59
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Dalael posted:This doesn't represent population. It represents forested areas older societies managed their local forests. they would cut down trees for lumber, set fires to clear brush to better aid hunting, remove dead trees for fuel, coppice trees for stakes and poles, plant fruit trees, etc. native americans were not just wandering around deep old growth forests all of the time. They had intensive agriculture, towns, and managed lands that would have extended a significant way past settlements. One reason northern america was SO densely wooded was the population was still recovering from a literal apocalypse and large areas had gone unmanaged for decades, close to centuries in some areas.
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Sep 20, 2018 16:29
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WoodrowSkillson posted:older societies managed their local forests. they would cut down trees for lumber, set fires to clear brush to better aid hunting, remove dead trees for fuel, coppice trees for stakes and poles, plant fruit trees, etc. native americans were not just wandering around deep old growth forests all of the time. They had intensive agriculture, towns, and managed lands that would have extended a significant way past settlements. There's been some really good work done on this with regard to the South American rain forest.. Turns out, it's very likely that one reason the South American rain forests were so rich is that they were actively managed for like a thousand years prior to European arrival. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/
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Sep 20, 2018 16:32
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1491 talks about how europeans arrived in North America thinking it was a paradise- forests full of apple trees and blackberry bushes and nuts and beans and game animals- not realizing that it was like this because up until recently, it had all been cultivated land. The talk about native american agriculture in that book is really interesting, to the point it makes me wish I had studied plant science instead of just taking one class. They developed a system of growing a diverse mix of symbiotic crops that worked well together, up to fifteen different crops in one group. This resulted in a nutrionally-complete diet and a field that was fertile year after year, rather than the european (and modern) system of ecologically-unsound monocrop fields that inevitably go fallow and produce a poor diet of breads and cereals. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 20, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 16:55
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WoodrowSkillson posted:older societies managed their local forests. they would cut down trees for lumber, set fires to clear brush to better aid hunting, remove dead trees for fuel, coppice trees for stakes and poles, plant fruit trees, etc. native americans were not just wandering around deep old growth forests all of the time. They had intensive agriculture, towns, and managed lands that would have extended a significant way past settlements. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it can't explain the vast amount of forest that was found by the earliest of settlers. the kind of forest that was found in north America in the Early 1500 by French and British explorers take way more than decades to grow. I'm no expert, but I did take pulp & paper industry course in my early 20's and I've learned just enough about "forest management" to know mass dying off of humans are not the main reason. If that was the case, Europe would have been re-forested after the bunch of plagues that affected Antiquity. We're talking about trees on the east coast that almost rivaled the sequoia's of the west coast. Forest that were almost comsidered "virgins" now don't get me wrong, I am absolutely not denying the effect that mass die-off had, nor am I denying Native American's ability to manage land and forest. But they had a completely different view & relationship with nature than europeans had and it showed. They did not need the same amount of charcoal europeans needed and that alone meant forest were not destroyed at the same rate. Also if you look at fossil records. It's also important to note that the forests of today are not at all the forests of yesterday. According to the fossil records, entirely different types of trees used to be found on eastern coast before Europeans showed up.
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Sep 20, 2018 16:56
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WoodrowSkillson posted:One reason northern america was SO densely wooded was the population was still recovering from a literal apocalypse and large areas had gone unmanaged for decades, close to centuries in some areas. Yup. The native peoples managed all the forests, and they were huge into slash and burn agriculture. There's even a hypothesis that the Little Ice Age was triggered/exacerbated by the sudden drop in atmospheric CO2 first from the Black Death, then pushed further when the Americas stopped burning yearly.
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Sep 20, 2018 16:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:1491 talks about how europeans arrived in North America thinking it was a paradise- forests full of apple trees and blackberry bushes and nuts and beans and game animals- not realizing that it was like this because up until recently, it had all been cultivated land. No. Just no. Jacques Cartier arrived in 1534, less than 50 years after Christopher Columbus did. There is absolutely no way these old growth forest grew to what they were in less than 50 years.
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Sep 20, 2018 16:58
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying that Native (North) Americans had agriculture, nor am I denying their ability to manage forest. But compared to Europe, there were huge swatch of forest and it was because it had NEVER been clear cut.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:00
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Dalael posted:No. Just no. He's not talking about old growth forest. Europeans would write about how they found fields of fruit trees weaving among big cleared out prairies perfectly ready for farming, and how god had clearly given this Eden for them to use, unaware that the reason there was all this perfectly ready to use farmland was... because it had been farmland not that long ago. Other instances, they knew full well what had happened because the native villages were still there, abandoned. They reused them, robbed graves for anything valuable, etc.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:04
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Grand Fromage posted:He's not talking about old growth forest. Europeans would write about how they found fields of fruit trees weaving among big cleared out prairies perfectly ready for farming, and how god had clearly given this Eden for them to use, unaware that the reason there was all this perfectly ready to use farmland was... because it had been farmland not that long ago. Oh yeah.. Sorry I misunderstood that part.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:05
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:forests full of apple trees and blackberry bushes (Also apple trees are not native to north america so I assume they meant other native fruit trees like pawpaws or whatever).
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Sep 20, 2018 17:14
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I may be talking out of my rear end, but I THINK europeans of that era used "apple" and equivalents as kind of a generic catch-all term for edible fruits? Which is where english gets pineapple and french gets pomme de terre. Not that potatoes are a fruit but I can see where they were coming from.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:23
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Apple can mean any fruit.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:25
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Actually, aside from the pawpaw what fruit trees are even native to the southeast? There is definitely some management involved, but our pawpaws sucker aggressively and they definitely tend to form natural thickets. We are constantly digging out saplings.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:32
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Scarodactyl posted:Actually, aside from the pawpaw what fruit trees are even native to the southeast? There is definitely some management involved, but our pawpaws sucker aggressively and they definitely tend to form natural thickets. We are constantly digging out saplings. Maypop, Jelly / Pindo Palm, chickasaw plum, wild black cherry, serviceberry, red mulberry, Persimmon, that's everything I can think of anyway
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Sep 20, 2018 17:44
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Maypop is a passion fruit, which grows on vines, and the jelly palm is from south america. But those others would make a lot of sense. It is hard to mentally fit pawpaws into that role.
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Sep 20, 2018 17:57
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Dalael posted:No. Just no. They never clear cut as much as Europeans did, correct, since their populations did not mandate a similar demand for lumber, and why cut down a giant tree that is a pain in the rear end to further process when the trees you are farming can be cut down at an acceptable size closer to the woods intended use. Europeans wanted things like ship masts which necessitate very large old trees. However forest density changes fast if no one is clearing brush or cutting anything down. It would not take long for managed "old growth" forests of large old trees with managed land around them to return to densely packed old growth forests. Decades of brush and younger trees coming in would change things a lot, and then for large amounts of North America, it was much longer still before anyone was actually operating in those lands.
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Sep 20, 2018 18:06
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Scarodactyl posted:Maypop is a passion fruit, which grows on vines, and the jelly palm is from south america. But those others would make a lot of sense. It is hard to mentally fit pawpaws into that role. I'm not sure how far west southeast US fits, but Mexican plum and mayhaw get out to George at least.
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Sep 20, 2018 19:17
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Swedefacts: During the 17th century, foreigners in Sweden noted that the Swedes were absolutely obsessed with cutting down forest, even when there was no real reason to do so.
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Sep 20, 2018 19:32
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I bet there was a reason which they just didn't know/understand That or swedish women just love lumberjacks
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Sep 20, 2018 19:33
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cheetah7071 posted:I bet there was a reason which they just didn't know/understand I would postulate that the forest was considered a spooky, bad place where wolves and bears and thieves hung out. Cutting down the forest made them feel safer and represented advancing civilization.
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Sep 20, 2018 20:09
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Probably. The Romans didn't like forests for similar reasons and would cut them down whenever possible, except for some considered particularly spoopy and best to avoid.
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Sep 20, 2018 21:28
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Grand Fromage posted:Probably. The Romans didn't like forests for similar reasons and would cut them down whenever possible, except for some considered particularly spoopy and best to avoid. I thought they didnt like forests because that's where their legion gets massacred.
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Sep 20, 2018 21:50
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Paradoxically, one good thing about guns is that it allows us to maintain peace with man eating animals so we don't feel compelled to totally destroy them and their habitat
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Sep 20, 2018 21:52
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We still do it to make room for farmland, palm oil plantations and so on.
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Sep 20, 2018 22:00
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Kassad posted:We still do it to make room for farmland, palm oil plantations and so on. To be fir they were coming right towards us.
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Sep 21, 2018 00:50
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