Wed Feb 9 2011

Here at the Ref. Continuing my research and trying to find work. Keeping up with my reading and thinning out my email thicket. I am trying to get my stuff together so I can go apply to Seneca College, hopefully the new course is ready...

I was told I'd get a year knocked off a two year course for the work that I have already done. I had to explain that I had numerous challenges along the way.

Still reading Canada's Environmental History and finished reading "fire" which talks about...fire. There is a lot of history wrapped up in this essay, and it is horrendously complicated, simply because there are no overarching paradigms into which we can put the theories.

My summation: fire was used long before Europeans arrived here in Canada. It was used for practical purpose, to ready ground for planting or to clear ground to avoid weeds. Natives found that by burning ground, some plants grew back better than before, a fact which was not lost on John Howard and his controlled burns in High Park. In fact, burns in High Park are still used after a pilot program was created in the late 1990s.

Fire was also used as a method of communication as well as a weapon. In fact, there is some evidence that suggests that scorched earth tactics were used to both encourage hunting and ensure that opponents were kept at bay.

We have now also learned that fire is an elemental property which helps to contribute to the health of the ecosystems it affects. This idea is in contrast to the idea prevalent in the early 20th century, that fire was always a bad thing to have happen to a forest. I think we have learned now that fire can be a useful tool to have when we are trying to manage and keep ecosystems healthy.

The point of all this writing is to suggest that we can be flexible in our responses to what we are doing to the land and what we are trying to protect.

Tags: green, research