bounty strung bulls archly …

The knowledge of how to work iron accrued over centuries of random experimentation, first poking at the slag left behind from bronze production and hammering meteorites, then experimenting with how long to work and fold iron over a charcoal fire to get just the right balance of carbon and iron to form workable tools. …

The worst case scenario, then, is a culture setting up near an iron mine with high quality ore, near the surface, with good logistics that 6.5 billion industrialists scouring the world for just such a thing never happened to stumble upon, that also has maintained a pragmatic metallurgical tradition and has blacksmiths who know what to do with iron ore. For that society, the limit is the same that nearly collapsed Western civilization at the Bronze Age, and did collapse most civilizations that encountered it, like Cahokia–the problem of peak wood.

If you find an appropriate place to start a land use discussion, let us know. I would like to participate in that.

There’s a section at Rewild.Info for such discussions now.

http://www.rewild.info/conversations/index.php?board=38.0

Not to mention the 2008 Ashland, Oregon gathering of Ten Thousand Ways, which is tentatively scheduled for August 12th through 14th this coming year.

- Chuck

If you find an appropriate place to start a land use discussion, let us know. I would like to participate in that.

this also seems to be a large part of the challenge to overcome when discussing land use (which, imo, is both a national & regional discussion that’s vastly overdue). and i think that’s part of the reason that we (as a culture) tend to beat around the bush a lot when it comes to examining how we use/abuse our landbase.

I agree with your philosophy of restoring our impacted, semi-developed lands, like you have in Ohio, and like we have in Missouri. Yes, I think these areas could benefit from increased human participation in the lifecycle, including hunting of species that are over-represented due to lack of predators. I think we need to restore species diversity, including non-human predators.

I first came upon this blog because I saw a reference to ‘re-wilding’, but now that I’ve read much of it, it strikes me that there are at least two fundamental types of re-wilding. In one of them, the primary focus is to prepare humans for life in the wild, by developing primitive skills, adopting a HG diet, etc.; and at least in much of the writing here, the collapse of civilization and rebirth of wilderness is expected to take care of itself. Another way to look at re-wilding is the intentional reshaping of agricultural, industrial and resource-exploited lands (clearcuts, gravel pits, etc) into healthy ecosystems where humans participate but do not dominate. On a personal level I lean toward the latter approach, and I sense that you are in the same mode, as are others who post to this site.

Most of our *real* wilderness areas in the lower 48 (legally declared under the Wilderness Act of 1964)aren’t that far out of balance, in comparison to non-wilderness National Forest, BLM land, private land, etc.

hmm, i think we’ve already found a point confusion. i’m using “wilderness” in a somewhat different fashion. i definitely don’t mean just the areas legally declared “wilderness”. in fact, we should probably just not use the word. my error. apologies.

there are definitely sections of ohio that, while private lands, are mostly forested and act as habitat for an array of “wildlife” (including plants). nearly all (if not all) of these forested lands are not old growth forests as you would have found them 2-3 centuries ago. personally, i think humans should integrate themselves into these areas as co-participants to form a healthy and diverse ecology (granted, i think we also need to do this in urban & suburban areas) but i think that if we just leave these areas alone, while they would eventually arrive at a healthy & diverse ecosystem, it would be an ecosystem without a place for us. considering the likely inevitability that we’ll “go back into” these areas at some point in the future (and as we see time & again, disrupting the ecosystem that has established during the interim) it seems reasonable to simply start reintegrating now.

btw, i understand your issues w/ trophy hunting. i’m def not including such practices when i talk about hunting as a part of land use or integrating into an ecosystem/bioregion.

“what if we gardened in/with/as a forest to produce food, medicines, fiber for people as well as food & habitat for wildlife?”

Sure, I agree with that. But I think the best approach is to re-forest the suburbs, burned-out farms, even the cities, with the system that you describe, rather than starting by pushing it into the further-out forests where no people live. It’s all about getting back to the garden. The trouble has been that people confused agricultural landscape with the garden.