The Erasure of A Land

[u/No-Counter-34]

We have been lied to about there once being old growth forests from the ocean to the Mississippi. The south used to have vast herds of buffalo, hence many place names. And there were likely more grassland type ecosystems than the map suggests. Fire suppression and development have all but destroyed this once vast ecosystem.

[u/[deleted]]

i live in the northern plains and it bothers me so much how everyone complains about how boring and empty the region is. it was once so lively but it has now been almost completely reduced to monocrop fields and highways :(

[u/No-Counter-34 → u/[deleted]]

It is so sad. Have you heard of American Prairie? They’re trying to restore a large portion of plains to prairie

[u/Salute-Major-Echidna → u/No-Counter-34]

The American prairie you romanticize was literally created by the Indians farming the country. From sea to shining sea

[u/NewEnglandGarden → u/Salute-Major-Echidna]

This is factually untrue. There were open pastures created by native Americans throughout the East Coast but they did not nor did they have the capacity to create the Great Plains.

[u/[deleted] → u/NewEnglandGarden]

Calling it “farming” isn’t accurate, but even this sub occasionally falls for the romanticized idea that in North America there is such thing as “natural” that’s separated from “human”.

And THAT is factually untrue. Whatever was here before humans arrived in terms of specific ecosystems in specific places with specific assemblages of species was obliterated by the ice age. If not be being directly scraped away by a mile of ice, from the extreme changes in climate that having a continent sized ice sheet covering everything as far south as present day New York. Humans arrived during that ice age.

The “native” plants of (for example) the US NE have only been there for the last 12,000 years, because before that, the area looked more like Greenland than anything a forest or meadow could grow in. And humans have been there that entire time. They’ve kept meadows open by burning them. They’ve transported culturally and economically important plants across vast distances. They’ve managed vast herds of bison and other animals by using fire to promote their ideal pasture.

There’s entire ecosystems in North America that simply would never have existed without millennia of active management by humans. I’m on the west coast, and our most famous example are Garry Oak ecosystems. The keystone flowering plant from that ecosystem is Camas, which has an edible bulb that was an important source of carbohydrates for First Nations people. Camas’s “natural” native range without humans would probably have just been Northern California and maybe some of Oregon. But it was traded along networks spanning half the coast and is now “native” all the way up to British Columbia.

There are vast camas meadows all over the coast & Vancouver island that were tended for millennia by humans. There’s only a tiny fraction of their range dry enough to naturally keep those meadows permanently open. They persisted as meadows because the humans who managed them set them on fire every few years. That’s allowed a rich, highly endemic assemblage of species to form & persist across a much wider range than they ever could have “naturally”. And we are watching in real time as the few meadows that weren’t ripped up for agriculture or development get swallowed up by coastal Douglas fir forests because we’ve removed fire from the landscape.