By M. Kat Anderson
John Muir was once an early proponent of a view we nonetheless carry today—that a lot of California used to be pristine, untouched desolate tract earlier than the coming of Europeans. yet as this groundbreaking booklet demonstrates, what Muir used to be rather seeing while he renowned the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and pink flora carpeting the principal Valley have been the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, changed and made effective by way of centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously certain and fantastically written, Tending the Wild is an unprecedented exam of local American wisdom and makes use of of California's traditional assets that reshapes our knowing of local cultures and exhibits how we would start to use their wisdom in our personal conservation efforts.
M. Kat Anderson provides a wealth of data on fatherland administration practices gleaned partly from interviews and correspondence with local americans who remember what their grandparents advised them approximately how and while components have been burned, which vegetation have been eaten and that have been used for basketry, and the way vegetation have been tended. The complicated photograph that emerges from this and different old resource fabric dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype lengthy perpetuated in anthropological and old literature. We come to work out California's indigenous humans as lively brokers of environmental swap and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this conventional ecological wisdom is vital if we're to effectively meet the problem of dwelling sustainably.
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John Muir was once an early proponent of a view we nonetheless carry today—that a lot of California was once pristine, untouched desolate tract ahead of the arriving of Europeans. yet as this groundbreaking e-book demonstrates, what Muir was once quite seeing while he favourite the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and red plant life carpeting the valuable Valley have been the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, transformed and made effective by means of centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.
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Extra resources for Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources
Example text
David Egan, editor of Ecological Restoration, defines this kind of ecological restoration as “[t]he practice of re-establishing the historic plant and animal communities of a given area or region and renewing the ecosystem and cultural functions necessary to maintain these communities now and into the future” (pers. comm. 1996). 16 Wildland areas can also be co-managed with California Indian tribes, with the goal of restoring, maintaining, and enhancing the natural resources important to their cultures.
By the thousands and thousands, northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) and Guadalupe fur seals (Arctocephalus townsendi) returned to the same rookeries on the Channel Islands year after year—usually the very islands where they were born. Alpha male northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) molted and defended their harems with shrieking cries. Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) born in the shallow lagoons and bays of Baja California migrated by the thousands to the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic and back again, a ten-thousand-mile annual journey.
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was named after a Spanish word for “pelican,” and with good reason. ” Hundreds of pairs of cormorants occupied rookeries in Tule Lake, Eagle Lake, and Clear Lake and along the flooded banks of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. Condors, whose wingspans approach ten feet, were not an uncommon sight WILDLIFE, PLANTS, AND PEOPLE . 21 in south-central California in the earliest years of Euro-American settlement. Hunters would spot these birds in the vicinity of recently killed game.