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sebenikela(another xpost-from-tumblr ag stuff ramble)
First off, dude, slash-and-burn is not the preferred nomenclature.
…but really though. Better terms: shifting cultivation, swidden agriculture, long-fallow systems…probably some others I don’t know about
Second off, cultivated/wild is not a binary. “Wild” land preeetty much doesn’t exist in places where humans can live. Where humans live, they manage the land around them in ways that change that land: burning it, grazing animals on it, cutting down trees for timber and firewood, harvesting wild fruits and nuts and stuff – “wilderness” kind of goes in the same category as “noble savage.”
So. Here’s what shifting cultivation looks like. I’m going to use the example of a village in Mali, because I am uh, extremely familiar with the area.
If you ask people who live there what kind of land is around, they’ll point out fields, and fallow, and maybe plateaus or hills or riverbeds or flood areas.
They don’t talk about “wilderness.” When I asked about that, why an area was “fallow” if nobody had ever farmed there, someone told me “well, we don’t remember anyone farming there, but who knows?” But even that kind of land was rare. Mostly you had “Oh, when I was a little kid my dad farmed there” or “I think maybe in my grandfather’s childhood there were fields there, or “well in the time of Samori Toure (circa 1890), we had fields there because a couple villages merged to protect ourselves.” (the history of this very specific part of the world is FASCINATING)
Traditionally, farming in a village like this followed a standard spatial arrangement. You had a ring of land right near the village that was continuously cropped, pretty much, and also got lots of manure/compost/trash (which was essentially compost until plastic became ubiquitous everywhere…), so the soil stayed fertile. Then in a wider area around the village there was shifting cultivation. You’d clear an old fallow – you’d leave some of the trees, if they were useful, and plant around them, but with others you’d pile brush around the base of the tree and set fire to it late in the dry season when the fire would burn hot and kill the tree. You probably also burn the field, generally, although if you planned ahead you probably did this earlier in the dry season when it was cooler and there was less chance of the fire getting out of hand.
And then you’d grow crops there for 5 or 6 years, until you started getting really persistent weeds or your yields started to go down because the soil was tired. If you have manure, or chemical fertilizer these days, you might be able to get a few more years in. Or you might do something clever with rotations including fallow years, and that stretches things. But when the land was tired, you’d go clear a new place, and leave the old field.
And when there’s plenty of land, you leave it for 20 years, or 50 years, or until your grandkids’ grandkids forgot you ever cleared it, and then someday someone else is like “huh, I want to plant more maize this year” or “my field is tired, I want to move” and that spot over there looks good.
Rinse, repeat.
The thing is, this is a perfectly reasonable way to manage land–when there’s WAY more land than there are people. Because you need those decades-long fallows, so trees can grow back and leaves can decay into the soil, so native grasses spread over everything, so someone’s cattle come eat the grass and shit on the land.
A stable system of shifting cultivation doesn’t expand much, and since one person can only farm so much land, if population is stable-ish and technology is stable-ish, a village can cycle through the same land again and again.
But in a lot of places, that kind of system has broken down, because population density has gotten high enough that there isn’t enough land to leave most of it uncultivated. Everyone’s trying to feed their kids, and they have draft animals now, and maybe a tractor, so they are ABLE to farm larger areas, and now the only land that’s still “fallow” is the rocky outcrops over there and the hilly spot on the other side of the road, where the soil’s shit anyway. Now there’s no time to let fallow land recover its fertility on its own.
And now you have a problem. You can rotate through different crops, include some more legumes. Some people dig a well on their field and trade a transhumant livestock herder access to the well and crop stubbles for the cattle to graze, in exchange for a big herd wandering around processing weeds and crop waste into nitrogen and phosphorous in forms plants can use. You start using purchased fertilizers, which give you a better crop to eat and/or sell, but also give you more residues that can go back into the soil.
Or, you start expanding into areas you never farmed before. Deeper into the jungle, because now you have pesticides and vaccines against trypanosomiasis.
Whatever happens, this is a huge transition, and it takes time. And Europeans made this shift A While ago, so in Euopean-diaspora countries, colonists brought ways of farming designed to be stationary. And in colonies where Europeans didn’t want to settle so much as just extract resources, they looked around at these stupid people wasting land right and left and took everything they knew about how agriculture worked in densely populated, recently-glaciated temperate climates and tried to apply it everywhere in the world!
And that’s why a lot of white folks (and people educated in colonial/neocolonial systems in general) look at a perfectly sensible way to manage land and start calling it ugly names like slash-and-burn and clutching their pearls about Destroying The Wilderness!!!
NB: yes protecting fragile ecosystems is important and there is def a place for protected lands but that is a whole NOTHER giant long ass post oh my lord
First off, dude, slash-and-burn is not the preferred nomenclature.
…but really though. Better terms: shifting cultivation, swidden agriculture, long-fallow systems…probably some others I don’t know about
Second off, cultivated/wild is not a binary. “Wild” land preeetty much doesn’t exist in places where humans can live. Where humans live, they manage the land around them in ways that change that land: burning it, grazing animals on it, cutting down trees for timber and firewood, harvesting wild fruits and nuts and stuff – “wilderness” kind of goes in the same category as “noble savage.”
So. Here’s what shifting cultivation looks like. I’m going to use the example of a village in Mali, because I am uh, extremely familiar with the area.
If you ask people who live there what kind of land is around, they’ll point out fields, and fallow, and maybe plateaus or hills or riverbeds or flood areas.
They don’t talk about “wilderness.” When I asked about that, why an area was “fallow” if nobody had ever farmed there, someone told me “well, we don’t remember anyone farming there, but who knows?” But even that kind of land was rare. Mostly you had “Oh, when I was a little kid my dad farmed there” or “I think maybe in my grandfather’s childhood there were fields there, or “well in the time of Samori Toure (circa 1890), we had fields there because a couple villages merged to protect ourselves.” (the history of this very specific part of the world is FASCINATING)
Traditionally, farming in a village like this followed a standard spatial arrangement. You had a ring of land right near the village that was continuously cropped, pretty much, and also got lots of manure/compost/trash (which was essentially compost until plastic became ubiquitous everywhere…), so the soil stayed fertile. Then in a wider area around the village there was shifting cultivation. You’d clear an old fallow – you’d leave some of the trees, if they were useful, and plant around them, but with others you’d pile brush around the base of the tree and set fire to it late in the dry season when the fire would burn hot and kill the tree. You probably also burn the field, generally, although if you planned ahead you probably did this earlier in the dry season when it was cooler and there was less chance of the fire getting out of hand.
And then you’d grow crops there for 5 or 6 years, until you started getting really persistent weeds or your yields started to go down because the soil was tired. If you have manure, or chemical fertilizer these days, you might be able to get a few more years in. Or you might do something clever with rotations including fallow years, and that stretches things. But when the land was tired, you’d go clear a new place, and leave the old field.
And when there’s plenty of land, you leave it for 20 years, or 50 years, or until your grandkids’ grandkids forgot you ever cleared it, and then someday someone else is like “huh, I want to plant more maize this year” or “my field is tired, I want to move” and that spot over there looks good.
Rinse, repeat.
The thing is, this is a perfectly reasonable way to manage land–when there’s WAY more land than there are people. Because you need those decades-long fallows, so trees can grow back and leaves can decay into the soil, so native grasses spread over everything, so someone’s cattle come eat the grass and shit on the land.
A stable system of shifting cultivation doesn’t expand much, and since one person can only farm so much land, if population is stable-ish and technology is stable-ish, a village can cycle through the same land again and again.
But in a lot of places, that kind of system has broken down, because population density has gotten high enough that there isn’t enough land to leave most of it uncultivated. Everyone’s trying to feed their kids, and they have draft animals now, and maybe a tractor, so they are ABLE to farm larger areas, and now the only land that’s still “fallow” is the rocky outcrops over there and the hilly spot on the other side of the road, where the soil’s shit anyway. Now there’s no time to let fallow land recover its fertility on its own.
And now you have a problem. You can rotate through different crops, include some more legumes. Some people dig a well on their field and trade a transhumant livestock herder access to the well and crop stubbles for the cattle to graze, in exchange for a big herd wandering around processing weeds and crop waste into nitrogen and phosphorous in forms plants can use. You start using purchased fertilizers, which give you a better crop to eat and/or sell, but also give you more residues that can go back into the soil.
Or, you start expanding into areas you never farmed before. Deeper into the jungle, because now you have pesticides and vaccines against trypanosomiasis.
Whatever happens, this is a huge transition, and it takes time. And Europeans made this shift A While ago, so in Euopean-diaspora countries, colonists brought ways of farming designed to be stationary. And in colonies where Europeans didn’t want to settle so much as just extract resources, they looked around at these stupid people wasting land right and left and took everything they knew about how agriculture worked in densely populated, recently-glaciated temperate climates and tried to apply it everywhere in the world!
And that’s why a lot of white folks (and people educated in colonial/neocolonial systems in general) look at a perfectly sensible way to manage land and start calling it ugly names like slash-and-burn and clutching their pearls about Destroying The Wilderness!!!
NB: yes protecting fragile ecosystems is important and there is def a place for protected lands but that is a whole NOTHER giant long ass post oh my lord
no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 03:17 pm (UTC)people who have lived in a place for a long time tend to have a pretty good handle on how to not fuck it up! turns out!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 03:48 pm (UTC)1. The people burning the Amazon now are not in general indigenous to the area. They're settlers and large-scale farmers. This mostly matters in that they have no particular motivation to ensure that e.g. their kids can farm in the same place in 20-50 years.
2. A lot of times in the Amazon, the leading edge of the deforestation is logging, legal or illegal, that creates roads and opens up space. Farmers move in after that and burn whatever the loggers left to prepare land to plant. So the agricultural frontier can move more easily than if people had to clear rainforest by themselves. Which is a shitton of work unless you have a bulldozer and a bunch of chainsaws and other fuckoff giant machinery.
3. Technology: shifting cultivation systems tend to break down when you get a lot of mechanization, because suddenly one person can maintain waaaayyyy more land than you could with hand-hoe or even animal traction based cultivation. There's tractors in the Amazon-frontier area, and even poorer farmers can rent one to prepare land.
4. Nobody's going _back_ to old fallows, they're just pushing further in. So instead of cycling through the same land area they just move on. Soybean fields turn into grazing land for cattle managed by different people from the soybean farmers, and it turns into this sort of treadmill.
Really, the key is that in the Amazon it's a linear process: you keep moving further in. Whereas in West Africa, traditionally the village stays put and the fields just rotate around. There's one village I visited where they showed me the grave of the village's founder who supposedly fought with Sundiata Keita in the 1200s--and the village has moved since then, but once that was to a hill that was easier to defend from raiders, and then in the 1960s when they were confident enough that there wouldn't be more raiders coming, they moved the village to where there was a better water source. All within a few kilometer radius. And the whole area is still a patchwork of crop fields and woody savannah and there's plenty of trees--but probably very little of it is truly "primary forest" anymore in the sense that nobody has ever cut trees there.
Now, in that same village they were having problems because the gov't issued a permit for commercial logging, going against all the local land tenure conventions, and so now there's maybe going to be a bunch of newly cleared land people will move into. Plus, making charcoal to sell in Bamako is becoming a huge business, and charcoal making requires a fuckton of wood, so that's contributing to deforestation, and population is growing, and... basically, this system is not going to be tenable much longer. That's true in a ton of places. It's not a system that's sustainable with a growing population, either, because then you do start needing more and more land, which you either take from your neighboring villages, from protected areas, or by reducing fallow lengths--which then means you don't get the regeneration you need on fallow land so you go from trees to shrubby shit to grass to no actual fallow at all, and then you HAVE to bring in fertilizers of some kind because you just keep mining what's in the soil and pretty soon there's not much left there TO mine.
The current Amazon expansion is a lot more like the expansion of agriculture across North America--poor (white/non-indigenous) people can get land for cheap! You just have to go clear it!
Interestingly, there's evidence that indigenous peoples in Amazonia practiced a kind of shifting cultivation for ages: they'd clear small gardens, but leave useful trees--and there's evidence of this in the fact that useful trees are more common in areas near rivers where people tended to live. Then they also used huge amounts of charcoal in places they wanted to maintain for long periods (google biochar or terra preta, there's people who get super excited about this stuff). But that is also a system that only works when population density is low (and you're not getting your land stolen, logged, and turned into cattle pasture).
There's SOMETHING really interesting about settlers views on land and farming compared to indigenous or ...the (WAf) french word is "autochtones" which is more like "people who are From Here" idk the connotations feel different to me.
Settlers vs. settled, maybe. Anyway, I keep feeling like I ALMOST grasp some concepts there but I can't get them to condense into actual WORDS so I'm left flailing around like THERE'S A THING. THAT'S IMPORTANT. WHAT IS IT AND HOW DO I SAY IT.
aaaand now i have to go to a meeting so i will stop babbling.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-18 04:48 pm (UTC)https://news.globallandscapesforum.org/12424/indigenous-communities-slash-burn-changing-landscapes-amazon/
I'm not an expert either, but my understanding is that the cultivation cycles are particularly short in the Amazon due to the soil quality, and I've heard talks by ecologists working with traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) talking about indigenous knowledge of the uses of "wild" plants that take over a recently cultivated area after it is "abandoned."
I've also heard weird-ass agronomy-oriented talks that discussed how gigantic mega-ag soy fields in the Amazon create relatively little harm because they're all in one chunk and so don't fragment the landscape. I believe I asked the speaker where that left small-scale traditional sustainable slash-and-burn systems and the response I got back was something like "oh, yes, this is just a model, we'll clean up the details later." (If I recall correctly, the research was funded by Unilever, which honestly doesn't seem that bad as gigantic international for-profit megacorporations go, but is still a gigantic international for-profit megacorporation.)
A ton of bad science / technology / technocracy is premised on "we'll clean up the details later."
no subject
Date: 2019-10-03 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-03 10:13 pm (UTC)I am amused, though, by the apparent overlap between architecture and agriculture in this one place: NATURAL/MANMADE IS A FALSE AND UNHELPFUL DICHOTOMY. I remember VIVIDLY my TA expounding upon this in my second studio, asking us where we'd put the line between the two. Were planted beds "natural"? Were fields "natural"? Were heavily trafficked and managed forests "natural"?
Anyway. Cough. Yes.