Source: V. Smil, General Energetics,
Wiley, Chichester, 1991, pg. 239.)
[GJ—gigajoules, ha—hectare]
As we can see, certain techniques of gaining nutrient
resources from an are of land are more efficient than
other techniques, but that doesn’t mean that they
are the most productive. In order to support the
population densities that we have today, we need to use
certain techniques to get nutrient resources or create
new ones.
Humans of many different lifestyles have influenced
the environment beyond what their consumption and their
waste. The techniques in the table above are arranged
from least impact to greatest impact, but even
hunter-gatherer societies influenced their environments.
Let’s look at some Canadian examples of ecological
impact from hunting and gathering.
Canadian First Nation societies had passed beyond
simple hunting and gathering well before the arrival of
Europeans, but where hunting and gathering was practiced
food providers would use ecological management to improve
yield. In what was to become Alberta, people would burn
large areas in order to create clearings or corridors
throughout forests and other terrain. These clear patches
would influence the movements of hunted species. People
in the area (and in many other places throughout North
America) practiced sophisticated management of the forest
using fire, effectively controlling the maximum age of
the forests in the region (and therefore potentially
dangerous forest fire fuel). The presence of so many
towns and cities throughout Eastern Canada and the
Eastern United States with "field" as part of their name
is due in part to the cleared areas discovered by
European settlers. There is evidence that the great
amount of prairie in North America is due to the
ecological management of people there. Archeological
evidence seems to indicate that, rather than move to
areas that were prairie, societies moved to areas which
then later developed into prairies.
The First Nations of North America did domesticate
plants for use in agriculture, and in many cases, cleared
areas were used for agricultural purposes. Still, there
remained cases where forest management was used to
promote the development of ecosystems that would increase
the effectiveness or yield of hunting or gathering. In
many places in Ontario, the proliferation of wild
blueberries (or other plants) is not accidental—the
plants are not wholly wild, they are remnants from the
forest management of local residents.
This really is the point of this little excursion in
to ecological history: that not all in the wild is a wild
as it might seem. It is doubtful that there is any area
of Europe that has not seen some directed development by
human beings. The forests of Europe are all relatively
new, having seen significant changes in the course of
recorded history. The forests of Canada have also seen
human influence, how much remains to be seen.
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