Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 16

The forests of New England, the Midwest, and the Southeast had been disturbed to varying degrees by Indian activity prior to European occupation. Agricultural clearing and burning had converted much of the forest into successional (fallow) growth and into semi-permanent grassy openings (meadows, barrens, plains, glades, savannas, prairies), often of considerable size. Much of the mature forest was characterized by an open, herbaceous understory, reflecting frequent ground fires. “The de Soto expedition, consisting of many people, a large horse herd, and many swine, passed through ten states without difficulty of movement” (Sauer 1971, 283). The situation has been described in detail by Michael Williams in his recent history of American forests: “Much of the ‘natural’ forest remained, but the forest was not the vast, silent, unbroken, impenetrable, and dense tangle of trees beloved by many writers in their romantic accounts of the forest wilderness” (1989b, 33). “The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage …. Selective Indian burning thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession” (Cronon 1983, 49–51).

The extent, frequency, and impact of Indian burning is not without controversy. Raup (1937) argued that climatic change rather than Indian burning could account for certain vegetation changes. Emily Russell (1983), assessing pre-1700 information for the Northeast, concluded that: “There is no strong evidence that Indians purposely burned large areas,” but Indians did “increase the frequency of fires above the low numbers caused by lightning,” creating an open forest. But then Russell adds: “In most areas climate and soil probably played the major role in determining the precolonial forests.” She regards Indian fires as mainly accidental and “merely” augmental to natural fires, and she discounts the reliability of many early accounts of burning.

Forman and Russell (1983, 5) expand the argument to North America in general: “regular and widespread Indian burning (Day 1953) [is] an unlikely hypothesis that regretfully has been accepted in the popular literature and consciousness.” This conclusion, I believe, is unwarranted given reports of the extent of prehistoric human burning in North America and Australia (Lewis 1982), and Europe (Patterson and Sassaman 1988, 130), and by my own and other observations on current Indian and peasant burning in Central America and South America; when unrestrained, people burn frequently and for many reasons. For the Northeast, Patterson and Sassaman (1988, 129) found that sedimentary charcoal accumulations were greatest where Indian populations were greatest.

Elsewhere in North America, the Southeast is much more fire prone than is the Northeast, with human ignitions being especially important in winter (Taylor 1981). The Berkeley geographer and Indianist Erhard Rostlund (1957, 1960) argued that Indian clearing and burning created many grasslands within mostly open forest in the so-called “prairie belt” of Alabama. As improbable as it may seem, Lewis (1982) found Indian burning in the subarctic, and Dobyns (1981) in the Sonoran desert. The characteristics and impacts of fires set by Indians varied regionally and locally with demography, resource management techniques, and environment, but such fires clearly had different vegetation impacts than did natural fires owing to differences in frequency, regularity, and seasonality.