[HN Gopher] Ancient Indigenous forest gardens still yield bounty...
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Ancient Indigenous forest gardens still yield bounty 150 years
later
Author : voisin
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-06-05 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nationalpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nationalpost.com)
| Glench wrote:
| I find this so inspiring! Imagine if we, as individuals, could be
| so sustainably well-adapted to our environments as the plants in
| these gardens are.
| divbzero wrote:
| See also another write-up in _Science_ [1] and the original paper
| in _Ecology and Society_ [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-
| northwest-s-...
|
| [2]: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/
| WalterBright wrote:
| These sound pretty cool. If a researcher would write up a guide
| on them, I'd expect a lot of people would like to create one on
| their property.
| mssundaram wrote:
| It's not quite the same, but there is a lot of renewed interest
| of similar farming styles under the names of permaculture and
| agroforestry
| tremon wrote:
| and horticulture
| praptak wrote:
| Akira Miyawaki did a similar thing in Japan. He studied Shinto
| shrine forests, catalogued the species and observed how they
| work together which led him to develop a method for planting
| forests. HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114425
| officialjunk wrote:
| ancient...?
| steanne wrote:
| yes. untended for 150 years, planted possibly 2000 years ago.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| > For their study, the researchers selected four archaeological
| sites that had been occupied for more than 2,000 years: two
| Ts'msyen village complexes in northwestern B.C. and two Coast
| Salish complexes in the southwest. (A village complex consists
| of two or more nearby villages, each containing five to 20
| houses.) Indigenous peoples tended forest gardens on these
| sites until they were displaced in the late 1800s.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I wonder whether enough of the knowledge was preserved for
| any of their descendants to still know how to tend the
| gardens.
| magicink81 wrote:
| Maybe. Many modern people have also learned how to
| establish forest gardens. GEOFF LAWTON is among them.
| https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/
| handrous wrote:
| Forest agriculture like this is one of the things Mann spends a
| lot of pages on in _1491_. Highly recommended, wish I 'd read it
| sooner. _1493_ is good too, if you like reading about immense
| human misery, and also, mostly, but not entirely, separately, a
| whole bunch about China.
| ciconia wrote:
| > "A lot of functional diversity studies have a 'humans are bad
| for the environment' approach," Armstrong told Science. "This
| shows humans have the ability to not just allow biodiversity to
| flourish, but to be a part of it."
|
| Absolutely! We can have a significant positive effect on our
| environment if we make the right choices. Ancient civilizations
| show us how we can have abundant food production while actually
| making our environment more diverse and more resilient.
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| Yeah all humans are indigenous and the practice of improving
| the environment and forest is not this wicked far out of touch
| mystical forgotten value. Its practiced all over the world
| today - and dare I say - even in America?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| But we do have a long history of doing it very stupidly and
| for the wrong reasons. Mostly it comes down to the fact that
| humans' priorities are entirely different than ecological
| systems' priorities.
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