Where there's not smoke...

I feel like this entire "tending the wild" perspective is just a backwards attempt to prove that humans have always asserted control so it's okay to do it now. Like we need permaculture to "save" us.
Even when fire has been used, was it really to "control ecosystems"? Is our sense of balance so fragile that we need to assert overarching schemes to justify our own actions?

I’d read that post about Mann’s book previously, Art. And I agree with a lot of your points. Mann is clearly swept up in a certain notion of “running things,” managing the land, etc., and oblivious, as so many are, to the reality that there were *earlier* folks here and elsewhere in the world who were living sustainably without creating a huge "garden." (Why are so many oblivious to those earlier folks??)

Yeah, I do think the "land management" and "tending the wild" advocacy is a way of hanging on to our civilized urge to control the world. And I do believe the scholarship is loaded. Most of the authors I’ve seen, as I've been researching this to write something on it, are very much engaged in ideology and advocacy. They admire the idea of indigenous land *management* and clearly promote and even exaggerate it.

Try looking through their works for specific, hard evidence this stuff was done to the extent they claim more than a few hundred or maybe a few thousand years ago. You might find a tidbit here or there, but mostly they just make general, unsupported statements to the effect that “The so-and-so people did this for millennia” or “People were doing this even thousands of years before the advent of agriculture.” When they do provide references, seemingly in support of such statements, I’ve often found, when I’m able to track them down, that they provide no such evidence whatsoever.

Of course most of those authors have never even considered any sort of post-civ future, so maybe its understandable that they promote a kind of quasi-civ, manipulate-and-manage view. But then rewilders latch onto their stuff, probably because it does allow them to hold onto that comfortable view while still thinking they’re letting go of civilization.

There’s also a clear bias in some authors’ statements against hunting and gathering, as if it’s a lesser way of life than one of active management, and they want to show readers that these indigenous people were *not* just poor little passive hunter-gatherers. Here’s just one of many examples, (along with what I said about it on FB), this one from early in Anderson’s “Tending the Wild”:

“The terms ‘hunter-gatherer’ and ‘forager,’ inaccurate anthropological
labels assigned to most California Indian groups, connote a hand-to-mouth existence. They imply that California Indians… plucked berries, and foraged for greens in a random fashion, never staying in any one place long enough to leave lasting human imprints. But as Tending the Wild demonstrates, the indigenous people of California had a profound influence on many diverse landscapes…” (p. 2)

“hand-to-mouth”? “plucked”? “random”? Are these not all weasel words? Does a bias not come through here to the effect that an IR HG existence without all the land management is almost pathetic or at least somehow lesser than living in a way that has such a “profound influence” on the landscape? (And does it ignore the positive ecological influence a simple HG, much like other species, would have?)

BTW, there's a study, more recent than the one I posted above, that arrives at similar findings concerning the human use of fire for land management during the paleolithic in Australia. I'll dig it out and post it soon.