Impresive Practices

The culture we call our own is much like many that have come before ours, living on this planet, using its resources, exploring its lands and settling its "wilderness". It is considered normal practice to move into a new area, exploit its natural riches, dispose of waste; human and other, and even pollute its waters. Now, not every culture does this, although we are certainly guilty, the native Americans that inhabited California in the late eighteenth century coincided very well with mother nature.
In part two of Natures Operating Instructions there is a nice passage explaining some of the aspects to the native American culture and what steps they took to preserving their homeland. The settlers that were exploring California in the 1780's were surprised and unaware of the Indians involvement with the homeland and assumed they had lived in California for thousands of years without altering the land.
But in fact the the natives practiced very specific laws regarding the resources of their land and using them. Managing the land began with a deeply detailed knowledge of place, or climate, season, soil, etc. For example, When the elderberry appears it means the shell fish are now poisonous and can no longer be collected and eaten. But when the berry ripens in the fall, its the signal to start collecting the fish again.
When the wren starts to sing, the salmon will be around in a few more days. All sorts of little natural occurrences are indicators of other occurrences. The indians learned these and followed the way of the earth. The natives also would have large rabit hunts, for food and fur of course but also because the rabit was in direct compotition with people for other crops and had to be controlled.
One of the most interesting practices of the natives was to burn the land. Settlers came and did not understand this, thinking the Indians were crazy and even creating laws against it. But the fires cleared out the undergrowth allowing the larger trees to prevail. The settlers remarked on how a walk in the woods was like a park, this was due to the burning of the undesired plants.
I found all this very interesting because how far we live from nature. We all love a good walk in the woods here and there but as a society we bend nature to live around us. We do what we want whether its good for mother nature or not. And because of all this bending, nature is starting the break.
We are pushing our resources to the extreme and do not moderate our consumption. The native Americans for example had a quarry which was their source of chert. This hard rock was used for tools and weapons and it was also pretty rare. Each man was aloud to go in their once a year, take one swing with a hammer and keep what fell off. This was such an unbelievably good idea, preserving the valuable stone for generations to come. I think if the modern world we lived in was able to base life of the preservation of nature we would all be way better off. But unfortunately we are using up oil like water and polluting our oceans faster than we can clean them. I'm not sure if we will ever be able to live life the way the California Natives did and surely seem to face a certain terrible fate.