|
|
|
Book Review
| Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape. Edited by Thomas Vale. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002). xv + 315 pp.; figures, boxes, tables, maps, bibliographies, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.
|
| In April 1933, the pre-eminent American ecologist Victor Shelford, who at the time chaired the Ecological Society of America's Committee for the Study of Plant and Animal Communities, wrote in a short essay in Ecology that "Primitive man ... is probably properly called a part of nature." So far, so good; properly, so are we all. But then—and here Shelford would articulate a view that two succeeding generations of ecologists and environmental thinkers took to heart—he went on that America was "probably not much affected by these primitive men. That is the argument for leaving them out of the picture." It's also the argument that eventually would get those ecologists and conservation biologists down the time-line in a heap of trouble when environmental historians and ecological anthropologists came along with new techniques for estimating pre-Contact human populations, and considerable documentary evidence of Indian manipulation of the world around them. As we know, this has fueled a most interesting debate that's functional in modern ecological restoration: Were the Americas' wilderness settings shaped purely by "natural" forces? Or (the newer view out of the historical record), had 12,000 years of human inhabitation/manipulation made the continents "managed" places much as Europe or Africa were? |
1
|
|
This is the contest that geographer Thomas Vale's edited anthology, Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape, enters, and with a decided opinion. Vale and most of his contributors are of a mind that the historians and anthropologists (including this reviewer, and even some of Vale's fellow geographers like Carl Sauer and William Denevan) have gone too far in pressing arguments that America was not a wilderness but an ancient home place, that large pre-European populations of Indians lived in and altered it for centuries before Europeans arrived. Europe, Africa, and even Australia have not had great difficulty accepting similar concepts, but in North America the challenge that Eden Had People Who Acted On The World obviously strikes at some deeply held values. |
2
|
|
The book focuses specifically on a crucial technology by which Indians might have altered landscape ecology—fire—and on the American West, with specific chapters on the Northern Rockies, Intermountain West, Lowland Southwest, Upland Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Sierra Nevada, and California chaparral. These are sandwiched by a pair of Vale's essays introducing and summarizing the arguments. All the authors with the exception of Craig Allen (who works for the United States Geological Service) are academic geographers. |
3
|
|
This is a spirited and careful anthology, full of highly useful insights from fire ecology (ignition sources are often the limiting factors in the northern West, while fuel accumulation sets the limits in the Southwest) and good cautions about the cultural and demographic variability in the use of fire by Indians (Apaches do not seem to have burned to manage landscapes; the Kalapuya and Salish did). Its authors will annoy and astound historians, however, by their Malinowski-like straining to discount historical documents as useful evidence. Because few of the firsthand historical chroniclers mention lightning strikes as a fire source, and only a handful of those who describe Indian burning actually witnessed an Indian torching long grass, the authors try out on readers the conclusion that the accumulating pile of documents just does not pass the test for rigor. In short, they ignore or argue against the documents and read the West's fire history as one controlled by "natural" processes as opposed to the unnatural human role. Maybe a little Indian burning here and there, but minor and subsumed by that "natural" background of lightning and climate. Vale's concluding essay, in fact, puts the book's case this way: "the intensely-humanized landscape seems localized amid a dominating natural landscape" (p. 299). That is supposed to assure us that wilderness was alive and well five hundred years ago, except that the same description could apply just as easily to the oasis-like twenty-first century West, which nobody thinks of as a wilderness Eden. |
4
|
|
Even if I found its conclusions unconvincing and some of its quibbles with historical accounts frankly silly (and where was a chapter on the Great Plains, a kind of litmus-test region for this debate?), this is a stimulating and well-done book with some excellent regional applications. |
5
|
|
Reviewed by Dan Flores, the University of Montana. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|