The second title of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, is On Care for Our Common Home. Caring for our home, the planet, by blending in well, is what natives in many parts of the world used to do before colonization disrupted that, with some of them adapting and sustaining local environments, using centuries or millennia of natural wisdom.
As explained in part 1 the indigenous populations, throughout Australia ecologically managed huge areas of territory for hunting and farming, to keep fires spreading and concentrate areas for species they need to hunt, and plant for prey and their food. Until colonization and over-grazing cattle and sheep prevented the fire techniques regulating the landscape, and destroyed most of this careful balance. Incredibly this knowledge in plain view was ignored by ecologists until recently, seemingly by racial prejudice that wandering natives were incapable of such landscape engineering and on such a massive, universal scale, never achieved in human history.
Ten years of deep academic research and three years writing by Australian Prof. Bill Gammage, for a book was well spent on this astonishing management: The Biggest Estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia.
Gammage’s conclusions broke much ignored but much needed native knowledge. The aboriginally made mosaic terrain was firstly crafted by Aborigines through several types of planned fire burning, to create open closures in forest, and secondly, by replacing inappropriate plants with those friendly to their needs. Creating grass and other most useful plants in these enclosures for hunting attracted animals who prefer open space with forest nearby.
These enclosures created enough space and the right grazing for animals for meat. The distance allowed animals to move from one exhausted enclosure to another.
The open spaces made fertile by animal dung provided vegetables and fruit and medicinal plants.
As Gammage wrote: “Aboriginal people worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable. Where it suited them they worked with the country, accepting or consolidating its character, but if it didn’t suit they changed the country, sometimes dramatically, with fire or no fire. By distributing plants and associating them in mosaics, then using these to lure and locate animals, Aborigines made Australia as it was in 1788, when Europeans arrived.”
In part 3, beneficial native ecology around the world: the Arctic, the Philippines, the Amazon, Central and North America.
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