Arrrghh I was gonna go play Stellaris but I guess we will have the Piedmont Prairie talk again because SOME PEOPLE still think trees = pristine nature. So! A thread, dammit!
If you are a longtime follower and have already been subjected to this talk, you are excused from class and may go play Pong in the breakroom.
So! Long long ago, here on the East Coast of North America, there was one of the most fantastic ecosystems ever created, the Piedmont Prairie. The Piedmont is a stretch of plateau that runs through a bunch of states.
Basically, walk west from the Coastal Plain. Everything you walk through before you hit the Blue Ridge mountains is the Piedmont.
If you do this, you will probably notice that the not-developed bits are full of trees. And if you are incurious and assume that the world has always been as you see it before you, you may think it is all wild and woodsy and natural.
Drop kick this assumption into the sun.
Drop kick this assumption into the sun.
Prior to Europeans showing up, this was home to the Piedmont Prairie, a funky oak savannah. Basically, imagine hundreds of miles of glades and big grassy clearings, with oak and hickory, chestnut and tulip poplar along the edges.
Like—ah—picture a power line cut through. You’ve all seen those, right? Tall open grass and mixed weeds, lined by trees. Now imagine tons of those cuts, like a honeycomb, with the trees in copses and lines.
This made a combination of woodland edge habitat and grassland habitat, and was one of the most biologically productive areas you can imagine. It supported people, plants, animals. It was a permaculture dream, if you’re into that. Shrubby understory, deer, birds, tree nuts...
...and bison! Yes, bison! We had bison here back in the day! Some asshole shot the last North Carolina bison in...*checks*...1799. Good job, loser.
Anyway, grassland mixes like this were fire controlled. This was not a “wild” landscape, this was intensively managed by the indigenous people for centuries. They knew exactly what they were doing. They burned, they planted, they harvested.
Between fire and bison, this kept the grassland from being overgrown by weedy tree species. It was a managed landscape, and it was managed for so long and so well that it held species that lived nowhere else. It was a unique prairie.
Then my people showed up and gave everybody smallpox, that being our godawful party trick at the time. The first European arrivals were all very impressed by what they called “the forest gardens” of the area. Wrote all about it.
Then the settlers show up a couple decades later and there are no forest gardens, just dense trees, and you get Cotton Mather’s ancestors talking about the forest being a howling godless wilderness full of trees and people are only allowed to hold property is they clear trees.
Now, Mather thought everything was a godless wilderness, so that’s not really relevant because some people are just like that, but the point here is that there’s no more mosaic of Piedmont prairie, it’s just thick ass woods.
Because, as it turns out, if your master ecologists who knew what the hell they were doing get reduced to a tiny fraction of their numbers and then also have to hold off colonizers, they are not keeping up the fire regimen. And all those weed trees ate the prairie.
And I dunno if any of you have ever fought off crappy second-growth woods, but they come in thick and they’re ecological wastelands. It’s what we dealt with out on Dogskull Patch. Do not assume tree = ecosystem!
A crappy pine wood like that is maybe something’s bedroom, but it’s not a larder. You can grow bark beetles and woodpeckers, but there’s no grass. Birds might nest, but they have to go somewhere else to eat. It’s not even a desert, because deserts are complex.
(There’s a VERY interesting theory that has been floated that the passenger pigeon was not a superflock before, but their numbers exploded in response to chestnuts suddenly invading everything. Healthy skepticism on that one, but it’s neat theory.)
Anyway. So here we are, centuries later. The woods have tried to reorganize into what we call a novel ecosystem, a mixed pine-oak-hickory-poplar thing. Takes awhile. It’s okay, but not great. Then we clear stuff and we’re right back to crappy second-growth pine.
These aren’t resilient ecosystems. They don’t support nearly the range that the old prairie did. But we’ve lived with it so long people think it’s normal, unless they’re ecologists or obsessed Gardeners who made it their life’s work to bring back some goddamn Piedmont prairie.
But to bring back a prairie on a large scale, it’s not enough to be a gardener. You gotta have ruminants. Prairies live because of grazers and browsers walking around, cutting up hardpan with their hooves, pooping, gnawing down trees.
Prairies are made of big herbivores in balance with plants. You can’t cut out the cows and bison (or tiny sheep, in my case) and still have a live prairie. And you can’t stop managing it. It’s an ecosystem that lives and breathes with humans.
So all these calls to just walk away and let “nature” handle things...well, nature is merciless. Nature says “everybody starves in the pine trees now” because nature does not give a shit. Nature says the endangered prairie plants are screwed.
Schweinitz’s sunflower. Georgia aster. Smooth coneflower. This is a list of plants hanging on by their teeth and toenails today. They were found in tiny remnant populations in railroad cuts and graveyards, places kept clear of trees. Botanists saved them.
Anyway. The Piedmont Prairie was goddamn amazing. It will never be more than shadow of what it was, but if we work like hell and LISTEN TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE FOR GOD’S SAKE we can bring back a pretty damn glorious shadow, and make things better for those survivor species.
And anyone who tells you to plant trees in a prairie to make it wilderness is an enemy of grass.
The End
The End
