A cool note on fire

Fire was probably the most important technology used by the native Americans before the coming of the Europeans. Fire cleared land for cultivation, fertilizing it with ash. Fire thinned out forests into game park-like woodlands for the all important deer, and prevented succession from taking over rich meadows with brush and trees again. Fire created the vital “edge habitat” that fosters productive insect and bird life. Berries came back thick after a fire: William Wood in the 17th century noted the strawberries, and “gooseberries, bilberries, raspberries, treackleberries, hurtleberries, currants” growing in yummy abundance. (Treackleberries, hurtleberries?)

There’s some argument for the notion that the broadleaf forests of the east (like Amazonia) were in fact orchards long before Europeans splashed ashore, husbanded to produce tall straight trees for construction, and a plethora of nut and fruit trees. The numbers of pecans, walnuts, chestnuts, and various edible (with processing) acorns from oaks were much commented upon.

I hear there are some sprouting American chestnut stumps in Staten Island, although I’ve never seen one of these trees, which once numbered in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, until the blight came through New York harbor, burning in a whole other way.

(Thought conjured by Steve Nicholls’ Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery, a heartbreaking record of slaughter upon slaughter, echoing Peter Matthiessen’s earlier Wildlife in America (1959). To be continued…)