A Fire-Stick Farm of One's Own, Part 1
Dire Wolves, Big Cats, & New Kids in the Neighborhood!
“Wasn’t it I who had once written that there was a trickster in every culture who humbles what are supposed to be our greatest moments? The trickster who reduces pride, Old Father Coyote who makes and unmakes the world in a long cycle of stories and, incidentally, gets his penis caught in a cleft pine for his pains.” — Loren Eiseley, in The Rat That Danced (Chapter 1 of All the Strange Hours [Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1975])
Imagine along with me if you will, a lush wetlands that exudes aromas of tar and methane gas, and a moment when predators and prey alike are drawn to the edge of a shallow pond, each individual playing out the timeless cycle of concentrating nutrients into energetic life, until all helplessly sink together into the chemical-laden, toxic soup…
…meanwhile, wildfires blacken the mountains that form the horizons of this perilous oasis, at times sweeping down from the slopes through the valley’s grasslands and forests. Another multi-decade-long drought stalks the land, the climate is getting hotter, and a new type of creature has spread across the continent, carrying implements and cultural practices more deadly than tooth and claw. These new creatures kill from a distance and ignite fires for heating, cooking, or to clear patches of forest for foraging, hunting, and growing food crops — thereby engineering a habitat and diet more suited to customs developed in far-off lands.
I’ve set the above scene to illustrate some recently published findings from a group of southern California-based paleontologists, who radiocarbon-dated fossilized bones from the La Brea Tar Pits, then matched the fossils’ ages to ash layers found in silt from a lake in the hills southeast of the once lush wetlands that humans now call Los Angeles.
Approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, large mammal populations dropped sharply as the lake’s silt layers record a massive increase in soot and ash, coinciding with an increasing human population using their tools and skills to adapt to—and modify—climate and habitat. Over the next several hundred years, pollen grains in the silt show that forests and grasslands transitioned to more drought-resistant, fire-adapted shrublands and pine forests. According to the research data, by 12,900 years ago, gone from this landscape are the Ancient bison, camels, horses, mammoths, sloths. Also gone are the carnivores that preyed on large herbivores—American lions, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats. From then on, the only member of the 8 most common species of the megafauna era still found in the Los Angeles basin is the trickster, coyote.
As it should be in scientific circles, along with its refinement of existing timelines and theories, this study is galvanizing critiques and further analysis. A key conclusion, one drawing the most debate, is that a major cause of the habitat transition and extirpation of local megafauna was human fire use (intentional and accidental) in a drying, hotter climate.
Though my main takeaway from the study is a comparison the researchers made to our current era, when temperatures are rising much faster than during their study period that encompassed a shift from Pleistocene (Ice Age) to Holocene epochs, several critics worry that emphasizing humans’ effects on habitat and fauna may lead to an oversimplified view blaming North America’s earliest human pioneers for megafauna extinctions. This caution seemingly taps into a current world-wide cultural practice of scapegoating designated groups for complex interactions. Others note that little direct evidence exists to document human fire use levels in North America during the study’s focal period, though few question that the human population was burgeoning across the continent 13,000 years ago, or the concept that humans commonly shape habitat— often at the expense of species deemed less important—to suit themselves.
Each continent carries its own litany of enculturated successes and disasters, though with time the details become hazy with nostalgia and myths. To explore the phenomenon of humans and fire use further, I’ll turn now to archeologist Rhys Jones, who was instrumental in using radio-carbon techniques to date the arrival of humans in Australia (now estimated be approximately 65,000 years ago), describing the cultural burning practices of Aboriginal Australians, in his 1969 paper, “Fire-Stick Farming.” Here’s the first paragraph:
“In recent years there has been increasing interest in the effect of man on the Australian environment. Forests have been bulldozed, swamps drained, heaths sown with trace elements, beaches chewed up, and the litter of the mid-twentieth century spread everywhere. That this is deeply affecting the countryside is obvious to all and causes concern to some. G.P. Marsh saw the same thing happening to the face of America during the last century, and doubtless the Roman intelligentsia of the rich provinces of North Africa gave the matter some thought as the wheatfields around their villas turned slowly into desert.
“In most discussions a contrast is made between a “natural” environment as opposed to an “artificial” one. We imply that the former represents the climax without the effects of man, and as examples of it we think of bushland around our cities, the national parks, and remote areas. We imagine that the country seen by the first colonists before they ring-barked their first tree was “natural.” But was it?”
Dr. Jones went on to describe a range of indigenous fire practices he and colleagues noted during the middle of the last century, as well as noting accounts by early European colonists, “Peron, in 1802, sailing up Derwent in southeast Tasmania, said that ‘wherever we turned our eyes, we beheld the forests on fire.’ When men explored inland, the entire horizon was often filled with smoke from Aboriginal fires, and anthropologists have reported regular seasonal firings over hundreds of thousands of square miles in central and tropical Australia.”
Although the early paragraphs of this paper read like an indictment of human actions past and present, Jones coins the term ‘fire-stick farming’ as he explores how long-term indigenous cultural practices re-shaped Australia’s habitat, until European colonization disrupted the culture and its effects. Dr. Jones brings the discussion to a consideration of the science of using prescribed burns to reduce the potential of severe wildfires that leads him to ask, “What do we want to conserve? We have a choice. Do we want to conserve the environment as it was in 1788, or do we yearn for an environment without man, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago?”
Here, 54 years on from the original publication of Rhys Jones’s article, human cultures world-wide seem to have given up on both of his proposed conservation aspirations, trading them for bottom-line focused drives to derive ever-more ‘ecosystem services,’ ‘economic development,’ ‘workforce expansion,’ etc. from human-engineered habitats, regardless of climate and ecosystem conditions. As I write this essay, smoke from a prescribed burn—designed to protect a nearby wildland-urban interface (i. e. - a housing development) from next year’s inevitable lightning and/or human-caused wildfires in the fire-dependent Ponderosa Pine forests that form the north and east horizons—blankets my small town on the edge of the Colorado Plateau. To the south and west, stylized agrarian fantasies play out on small ranches and in rural housing tracts, where a culture of ditch, field, and slash burning will likely keep the local volunteer fire department running with lights ablaze come the next dry spring. A little further south, east, and west, several indigenous cultures also navigate the treacherous ground of all human societies, balancing long-practiced traditions with entrenched investments in extractive industries and industrial agriculture. This weekend, a sheep drive will pass through town, and many newly-arrived residents will celebrate their nostalgia for times past with a parade and festival, before returning to their daily commute to the more vibrant economy of a nearby town, while others resume their tele-commute jobs in the digital economy. This uneasy alliance of disparate histories, goals, and desires is leaving a collective footprint that is becoming known as the Anthropocene Era.
I’m left considering how, in our own ways, we each carry a fire-stick of our own making, casually and/or intentionally reshaping our habitats—regardless of inherited culture and traditions, all without the tools necessary to envision the long-term results of our passing. As Rhys Jones noted in his paper 54 years ago, “…it is in some ways as irrelevant to me whether or not the ancient Aborigines knew what they were doing as it is to paleontologists whether or not the giraffe knew why his neck was growing.”
Up next, a look at how cultural traditions, scientifically-tested techniques and current social practices are being compared and combined, in: A Fire-Stick Farm of One's Own, Part 2—Jaguars, Wolves & Livin’ the Anthropocene Dream. Until then, let’s help each other enjoy our beautiful home planet. - B.
For a look at how ancestral humans may have begun using fire to modify food, tools and habitat, here’s an intriguing news article from Science Magazine, on research published in 2022.
A few months back, I posted an article about human migration onto North America that relates to the issues discussed above.
Here’s a graphics-heavy look at the reality of living in the wildland-urban interface zone, and some techniques for creating and sustaining a fire-adapted human community, both from the U. S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.