As any wilderness explorer knows, maintaining a diet high enough in calories to keep constantly on the go for weeks at a time requires considerable effort, even with today’s freeze-dried, prepared wilderness foods. Native peoples’ travels across the North American continent were similarly demanding. This should give anyone pause, particularly those who have traveled the seemingly barren northlands or arid high plateaus of the Southwest. Such travel and even daily living demanded both a high level of knowledge of what plants were useful, and a high level of skill in using such plant resources without destroying their future capacity for similar benefit.
Since the first edition of this book was published, certain facts have come to light that present-day foragers will, I hope, take into account when considering their own uses of the bounty of creation. Yes, native wild foods are still there to be found, free for the enjoyment and taking. But the population of humans on earth has nearly doubled since the first edition of this book was published, while the amount of wild country populated by such wild plants has declined steadily.
There is yet hope that the forage and the forager alike can persist in harmony. William Cronon suggested in his book Changes in the Land that Native Americans managed the land to increase its productivity of what we call wild plant foods, which in turn increased the health of the people. This communion of mutual service is specifically demonstrated at Shenk’s Ferry along the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. It is an eighty-acre wildflower preserve with over seventy species of native wildflowers in a region that has been settled by humans for over eight thousand years. This preserve has everything against it from a conservation biology standpoint; it is small, has been logged, has two railroads defining its boundaries, has two power lines running through it, and had an oil pipeline running through it that was removed for scrap iron in World War II. It had a hotel at the bottom of it, had a dynamite factory blow up in it, and was a Native American village for more than three hundred years inhabited by both the Shenk’s Ferry people and, after them, the Susquehannock.
At first, the diversity of Shenk’s Ferry seems enigmatic. There are two key factors, however, in explaining it. The first is that no cows seem to have ever grazed the woods, thus avoiding the destruction, which cows accomplish very quickly, of native plants. The second, and perhaps more important, is that when one looks at the flora of the valley with an ethnobotanist’s eyes, one sees food, fiber, and medicinal plants in a higher concentration than in any of the surrounding areas. This pattern is repeated for a number of other former village sites along the lower Susquehanna River. We therefore encourage the practitioners of the ancient arts we detail herein to ask themselves what will the land and its bounty testify to the nature of their passage three hundred years hence? Will the land testify that you were a truly wise forager, tending the wilderness bounty and enriching it? By all means, practice these skills, but let your passage over the land be marked by increased fruitfulness and enhancement of its bounty. Increase the fruitfulness of those patches of wilderness right next door. Make sure you also know and follow all laws regarding use of plants on public and private lands.
D. K. F.