Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas

["mike shupp" mikeshupp@xxxxxxxx]

I've a stock response when someone suggests that the Los Angeles area
would benefit from using past Indian "wisdom" to manage the local
environment: "Oh goody! We're going to set fire to Orange County
every other year!"

(For the curious-- Range fires tend to burn off smaller twigs and
branches on shrubs, but leave them alive, so the following spring
you get a lot of new buds and young green branches. These tend to
be high in sugar-rich sap, which attracts deer and other browsing
animals, which simplifies hunting deer... So every so often local
Indians did set fire to the flat lands in the LA area. And then of
course, thermal inversions trapped the smoke in the LA basin,
creating smog centuries before cars were invented.)



----Original Message Follows----
From: George Scithers 
Reply-To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 21:49:21 -0400

It would be satisfying to refute the goody-goody image of the
environmentally sensitive Amerindians . . .

George Scithers of owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx
----- Original Message -----
From: 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas


> Not there, yet, but some in other places. The big issue is whether the
> decline of these big creatures was affected by human hunting. It's a hot
one,
> no where near settled.
> Phil
>
>
>
>
>
>




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