roseweird posted:dank_xiaopeng posted:The guerrilla's garden: low-input, low-maintenance distributed food production in the temperate zone
thanks, friend. when the revolution comes and strong proletarian hands tear the machines down then this will be my suicide love-letter to industrial-agricultural collapse, as i take my leave and let you all dig up goobletubers or whatever. where the hell are the apples and potatoes and carrots and broccoli? where is the wheat? you're gonna tell me we need to abandon apples and eat more mulberries and "turkish rocket"? auugh. have you even tasted mulberries? i mean really
and about this acorn business i mean look maybe a handful of migratory northerners survived a bad year or two on acorn flour that they painstakingly rinsed and mashed while dying of hunger and sucking dry marrow from dog bones but the continent's actual native staple in precolumbian times was corn and it supported massive urban populations, kind of like now.
no dummy i'm not saying that that particular agricultural scheme should or could in any way replace the agriculture that feeds the majority of us. the food production system i laid out would probably be pretty awful for someone used to eating tasty industrial agricultural treats. my point was that it would be completely possible for a group to set up a very low-input and low-labor food production scheme if they were completely cut off from the broader economy and were forced to lead a transient and clandestine existence.
Abrams, M. D., & Nowacki, G. J. (2008). Native Americans as active and passive promoters of mast and fruit trees in the eastern USA. The Holocene, 18(7), 1123-1137.
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/18/7/1123.short
Mast was a critical resource for carbohydrates and fat calories and at least 30 tree species and genera were used in the diet of Native Americans, the most important being oak (Quercus), hickory (Carya) and chestnut (Castanea), which dominated much of the eastern forest, and walnut (Juglans) to a lesser extent. Fleshy tree fruits were most accessible in human-disturbed landscapes, and at least 20 fruit- and berry-producing trees were commonly utilized by Native Americans. They regularly used fire and tree girdling as management tools for a multitude of purposes, including land clearing, promotion of favoured mast and fruit trees, vegetation control and pasturage for big-game animals. This latter point also applies to the vast fire-maintained prairie region further west. Native Americans were a much more important ignition source than lightning throughout the eastern USA, except for the extreme Southeast. First-hand accounts often mention mast and fruit trees or orchards in the immediate vicinity of Native American villages and suggest that these trees existed as a direct result of Indian management, including cultivation and planting. We conclude that Native American land-use practices not only had a profound effect on promoting mast and fruit trees but also on the entire historical development of the eastern oak and pine forests, savannas and tall-grass prairies.
here's a pdf about acorns:
http://www.csus.edu/anth/museum/pdfs/Past%20and%20Present%20Acorn%20Use%20in%20Native%20California.pdf
just because idiot cracker settlers couldnt figure out how to make acorns palatable doesn't mean they weren't used. why bother clearing forests and setting up fields to grow corn when good food is literally dropping from the sky and hitting you on the head every fall?
and yeah mast crops sustained very large pre-contact populations on the east coast. corn was used there and highly esteemed (probably because it tastes better than acorns) but it wasn't the main crop. and i'm too lazy to google right now for sources, but the current archaeological consensus for precolombian societies of both north american coasts is that strong forest management supplied peoples' main caloric needs, with corn and other more intensive forms of agriculture supplementing that. this is backed up by some of the very earliest accounts of pre-epidemic coastal and riverine areas having descriptions of very closely-packed villages with thousands of people but with only very small cultivated fields surrounding them.
its unsurprising that settlers wouldn't notice forest gardens because by the time they got around to taking over the land disease had destroyed the populations that maintained them. these gardens would become totally overgrown with a generation of neglect, plus they would look totally unlike what europeans would consider a farm, so its not surprising that few people noticed that golly there sure are a lot of nuts in these woods.
the settler tales of insanely overabundant game (passenger pigeons that blotted out the sky, herds thousands of deer, flocks of 100+ turkeys) weren't exaggerations or the result of some magical eden. those animals' populations exploded once disease killed off 90% of native peoples and nobody was gathering the massive quantities of cultivated mast.
Edited by dank_xiaopeng ()
my point was that it would be completely possible for a group to set up a very low-input and low-labor food production scheme if they were completely cut off from the broader economy and were forced to lead a transient and clandestine existence.
When you're doing that sort of thing, relying on an outside source to bring all the food is really stupid and dangerous. They can fail, and then everyone starves, or worse they can snitch. A lot can go wrong.
It's not a bad idea for a guerrila group to receive portions of corn and flour and other food sources in bulk they otherwise couldn't replicate, but it's also certainly not a bad idea for them to grow sources of their own food in the woods in case their flour or maize doesn't come in.
There are tons of staple crops that can be used as guerrila crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, etc, that dank_xiaopeng didn't mention probably because the list would have gone on forever.
The flour and maize may be good sources of calories but the gardens are otherwise a very good and very free source of nutrition, which is badly needed.
roseweird posted:dank_xiaopeng posted:
and i'm too lazy to google right now for sources, but the current archaeological consensus for precolombian societies of both north american coasts is that strong forest management supplied peoples' main caloric needs
come on, you really don't have some in mind?
i have to go to the dentist right now but this weekend i'll write up an extremely spergy post about archaeology and what kind of picture we have of precolombian agriculture in the american east
also if you read 1491 you must have missed the part about nuts 
Diaper Sniper...
roseweird posted:come on, you really don't have some in mind? what that grows in a forest, other than meat, could possibly meet human caloric needs as efficiently as grain farming? i mean, there are other explanations here than "the (northern) native americans had a special kind of ecological sagacity shared by no other people in history"... people turn to forage when agriculture fails, undercutting animal harvests for short term prevention of starvation. so if natives in any given area were in fact meeting most of their caloric needs through forest gathering, i doubt it was by choice, because i think that with more successful harvests in intensive agriculture they would prefer to leave the treenuts and twigs alone, let the animals eat them, then wait and fill tortillas with meat.
you should go learn to not write endlessly about stuff you dont know anythig about
roseweird posted:swampman posted:you should go learn to not write endlessly about stuff you dont know anythig about
you never post except to lash out briefly at some poster so idk seems like you need me and others to continue doing this, in an ecological niche sense
a quick search of my post history disprove it; but this is deflection anyway
its widely known that forager lifestyle is the easiest life, the best life, and the only way that agriculture becomes a "more efficient" is when the entire lands are cleared of ecosystems for agricultural use.
the idea that foraging is what people do when catastrophes reduce them to the knife edge of survival, is complete hockey, of the lowest, ugliest caliper
this is another myth to shore up western ideologicals, the supremacy of monoculture, which toots for the "high efficiency" of mass agriculture, "efficiency" that requires incredibly high resource extraction and human labor input to maintain.
an actual, functioning forest in most parts of land provides fruit and berries, root and leaf vegetables, and extreme nut amounts, and insects, animals, beefs, tigers, donut, sugar loaf, raisin bran, waffles, pancakes, pancake syrup, and so forth, in quantities to support biologocal human life at the 100 million population of the original, largely forager / hunter / gatherer, norteamericanas
Here's a video showing natives working on restoring indigenous aquaculture systems in Hawaii. These systems are a source of food, and fresh water.
It's widely believed that Indigenous Hawaiians invented marine aquaculture. It's super cool IMO.
