Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources

Anderson provides a very descriptive and well-researched account of California's flora, fauna and native inhabitants. She portrays natives as active managers of their environment. Through thousands of years of pruning, sowing, weeding, burning and sustainable harvesting, California had evolved into a lush, productive ecosystem. That is, until its destruction by Western settlers, and the starving and murdering of the native population from 310,000 down to 15,000. But prior to that, during twelve-thousand years of human habitation, the oak-forests, salmon streams and shrublands had all adapted to human management. That is why today, if we wish to restore ecological health and abundance, we cannot simply isolate nature into "preserves." That is merely another side of the same coin that had us pillaging and destroying nature in the first place: the coin that says humans are separate from nature. Instead, Anderson concludes, we must rediscover traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and reinstate native management practices. The one issue I have with this otherwise very well-written and informative book, is one of her presumptions. She insists we "non-natives" help restore ecosystems, so that "natives" can return to gathering medicinal herbs, to making straw baskets, to living traditionally. I'm no expert on modern demographics, but I think it's a bit stereotypical to suggest a lifestyle to someone based solely on their ethnic background. I'm sure these days there are people of native descent would NOT prefer that lifestyle, and some people of non-native descent who would! Anyway, such conclusions are part of the relatively tiny Chapter 3. The bulk of the book is chapter 2, which details the native management techniques, divided into sections such as basketry from grasses, arrows from trees, above-ground foods, below-ground foods, etc. Chapter 1 introduces the land and people prior to colonization, then gives a chronology of the colonization and degradation. I highly recommend this book for any students of history, anthropology, agroecology or restoration ecology, or for anyone interested in an mind-opening critique of modern "civilization."

As the great, great, great Granddaughter and a 5th generation California farmer, I found this book to be a courageous and inspirational account of what our ancestors encountered on their arrival into early California. Intuitively I am sure the findings are accurate, but I appreciate the level of academic rigor the author has pursued as well. In the last 5 generations, our family has suffered the negative consequences of human dominated farming to the point of genetic degeneration in our progeny as well as the eventual loss of our original family farm. We now have the opportunity to take these lessons and communicate the outcome in ways that help people adjust to working with nature - not against it. This book is powerfully helpful in this regard. For me, it is an essential study. Thank you, Kat, for doing the enormous amount of work required to write it!

In the last three years, I have watched 500,000 acres of San Diego county burn. I came to M. Kat Anderson's book after we nearly lost our home, which is neatly tucked between two pieces of reservation land; I got infinitely more understanding than I thought possible. She has given us a timely, well researched work, that gives homage to the people who came long before us. This book will sit on my shelf, next to "1491" (another must read, Americas before Columbus). The land nourishes all of us, regardless of race, color or creed. We need to learn from the past practices, to better care for the land. Many environmentalists use "pristine" when describing wilderness, and it is a misnomer. Without fire, there are no sprouting redwoods. Controlled burns are necessary. But try and tell your local political leaders that. Buy this book, read it and understand.

Blown away by the 360+ pages of "Tending the Wild' by Anderson. It is an amazingly detailed and researched book. The book squashes firmly the idea of innocent, unsophisticated savages roaming carefree in a garden prepared by nature in a balance that included not affecting it in any significant way. Instead the book shows how better science, including anthropology, paints a picture of Native Americans in California carefully and industriously tending and improving their patch of "nature" to keep it productive for the human harvest of plants, animals, and fungi. What we see now as nature is the untended, weed-filled, stunted, and overgrown remnants of what were essentially Native American gardens. I also like very much the details, from tending to production of usefule articles to cooking and eating. I am learning many new things! Right now I am particularly struck by the various things used to season food for salt, sweet, sour, etc. Definitely will re-read and add some notes about things that did not make the index. Over 100 pages of footnotes referencing documentation! A huge amount of detailed how-they-did-it and why-they-did-it information readily adapted to current "primitive" practices. Highly recommended.

Used book. Listed as good condition but the cover is severely scratched and at least 10 pages in the book are damaged and torn, some so badly that it's impossible to read the page. I love the contents of the book and give the book itself 5 stars.

We refer to "wilderness," but Kat Anderson makes it clear the wild has not been "wilderness" for quite some time. When coupled with Kat's "Before the Wilderness" you gain a better understanding of what sustainable is.

Great Book! Had to read this one slowly. A wealth of information on California plants. It convinced me to plant only Native California plants in my yard. A real inspiration and life changer for me.

Great book! Very thorough on many topics.

"Nature really misses us," laments M. Kat Anderson. "We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that's the reason why they're going away." Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home. It's an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability. In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency. They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young -- whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony. When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil. Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization's elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty. In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was "filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries." The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money: forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets. Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants. There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was "inexhaustible," and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste. There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages. In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City. They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging -- without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease. The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar. The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi -- wanderers -- homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures. The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land. They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods. They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives -- the plant and animal communities upon which they depended. Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals. Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn't lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate. California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem. Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food. They're rich in oils, calories, and protein. They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years. The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance. A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains. The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways -- pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds. Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded the size. The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology. They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to small tobacco gardens, prepared with digging sticks. Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture. A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants. This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon. California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem. So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region. They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization. They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves. They were not warlike societies. Their ecosystems were clean and healthy. They lived like real human beings -- wild, free, and happy. Tending the Wild is an important book. It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well. This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater. Richard Adrian Reese Author of What Is Sustainable

This book should become required reading for all High School and University students, teachers, and researchers with an interest in North American anthropology, ethnobotany, botany, biology, historical ecology, fire history, forest management, and history. It will be of particular value to readers with an interest in cultural and natural resources management, agricultural sustainability, and federal Wilderness policy, among other topics. The book is excellently written, organized, and indexed, for both general reading and specific reference uses. It is a wonderful addition to Anderson's other major contribution to science, Forgotten Fires.

Anderson provides a very descriptive and well-researched account of California's flora, fauna and native inhabitants. She portrays natives as active managers of their environment. Through thousands of years of pruning, sowing, weeding, burning and sustainable harvesting, California had evolved into a lush, productive ecosystem. That is, until its destruction by Western settlers, and the starving and murdering of the native population from 310,000 down to 15,000. But prior to that, during twelve-thousand years of human habitation, the oak-forests, salmon streams and shrublands had all adapted to human management. That is why today, if we wish to restore ecological health and abundance, we cannot simply isolate nature into "preserves." That is merely another side of the same coin that had us pillaging and destroying nature in the first place: the coin that says humans are separate from nature. Instead, Anderson concludes, we must rediscover traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and reinstate native management practices. The one issue I have with this otherwise very well-written and informative book, is one of her presumptions. She insists we "non-natives" help restore ecosystems, so that "natives" can return to gathering medicinal herbs, to making straw baskets, to living traditionally. I'm no expert on modern demographics, but I think it's a bit stereotypical to suggest a lifestyle to someone based solely on their ethnic background. I'm sure these days there are people of native descent would NOT prefer that lifestyle, and some people of non-native descent who would! Anyway, such conclusions are part of the relatively tiny Chapter 3. The bulk of the book is chapter 2, which details the native management techniques, divided into sections such as basketry from grasses, arrows from trees, above-ground foods, below-ground foods, etc. Chapter 1 introduces the land and people prior to colonization, then gives a chronology of the colonization and degradation. I highly recommend this book for any students of history, anthropology, agroecology or restoration ecology, or for anyone interested in an mind-opening critique of modern "civilization."

As the great, great, great Granddaughter and a 5th generation California farmer, I found this book to be a courageous and inspirational account of what our ancestors encountered on their arrival into early California. Intuitively I am sure the findings are accurate, but I appreciate the level of academic rigor the author has pursued as well. In the last 5 generations, our family has suffered the negative consequences of human dominated farming to the point of genetic degeneration in our progeny as well as the eventual loss of our original family farm. We now have the opportunity to take these lessons and communicate the outcome in ways that help people adjust to working with nature - not against it. This book is powerfully helpful in this regard. For me, it is an essential study. Thank you, Kat, for doing the enormous amount of work required to write it!

In the last three years, I have watched 500,000 acres of San Diego county burn. I came to M. Kat Anderson's book after we nearly lost our home, which is neatly tucked between two pieces of reservation land; I got infinitely more understanding than I thought possible. She has given us a timely, well researched work, that gives homage to the people who came long before us. This book will sit on my shelf, next to "1491" (another must read, Americas before Columbus). The land nourishes all of us, regardless of race, color or creed. We need to learn from the past practices, to better care for the land. Many environmentalists use "pristine" when describing wilderness, and it is a misnomer. Without fire, there are no sprouting redwoods. Controlled burns are necessary. But try and tell your local political leaders that. Buy this book, read it and understand.

Blown away by the 360+ pages of "Tending the Wild' by Anderson. It is an amazingly detailed and researched book. The book squashes firmly the idea of innocent, unsophisticated savages roaming carefree in a garden prepared by nature in a balance that included not affecting it in any significant way. Instead the book shows how better science, including anthropology, paints a picture of Native Americans in California carefully and industriously tending and improving their patch of "nature" to keep it productive for the human harvest of plants, animals, and fungi. What we see now as nature is the untended, weed-filled, stunted, and overgrown remnants of what were essentially Native American gardens. I also like very much the details, from tending to production of usefule articles to cooking and eating. I am learning many new things! Right now I am particularly struck by the various things used to season food for salt, sweet, sour, etc. Definitely will re-read and add some notes about things that did not make the index. Over 100 pages of footnotes referencing documentation! A huge amount of detailed how-they-did-it and why-they-did-it information readily adapted to current "primitive" practices. Highly recommended.

Used book. Listed as good condition but the cover is severely scratched and at least 10 pages in the book are damaged and torn, some so badly that it's impossible to read the page. I love the contents of the book and give the book itself 5 stars.

We refer to "wilderness," but Kat Anderson makes it clear the wild has not been "wilderness" for quite some time. When coupled with Kat's "Before the Wilderness" you gain a better understanding of what sustainable is.

Great Book! Had to read this one slowly. A wealth of information on California plants. It convinced me to plant only Native California plants in my yard. A real inspiration and life changer for me.

Great book! Very thorough on many topics.

"Nature really misses us," laments M. Kat Anderson. "We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that's the reason why they're going away." Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home. It's an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability. In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency. They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young -- whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony. When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil. Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization's elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty. In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was "filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries." The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money: forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets. Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants. There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was "inexhaustible," and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste. There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages. In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City. They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging -- without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease. The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar. The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi -- wanderers -- homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures. The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land. They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods. They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives -- the plant and animal communities upon which they depended. Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals. Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn't lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate. California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem. Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food. They're rich in oils, calories, and protein. They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years. The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance. A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains. The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways -- pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds. Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded the size. The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology. They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to small tobacco gardens, prepared with digging sticks. Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture. A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants. This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon. California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem. So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region. They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization. They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves. They were not warlike societies. Their ecosystems were clean and healthy. They lived like real human beings -- wild, free, and happy. Tending the Wild is an important book. It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well. This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater. Richard Adrian Reese Author of What Is Sustainable

This book should become required reading for all High School and University students, teachers, and researchers with an interest in North American anthropology, ethnobotany, botany, biology, historical ecology, fire history, forest management, and history. It will be of particular value to readers with an interest in cultural and natural resources management, agricultural sustainability, and federal Wilderness policy, among other topics. The book is excellently written, organized, and indexed, for both general reading and specific reference uses. It is a wonderful addition to Anderson's other major contribution to science, Forgotten Fires.

Provides enlightening insight into how thousands of Americans lived in the West for centuries without technology. Also has ideas for how we might restore some areas of the West to a more natural state.

A real eye opener on land stewardship. The land served them well under their care for thousands of years. In the under 200 years post contact we have managed to pretty well trash and poison it.

Changed my entire way of thinking about wilderness areas. Very good as a resource and just to sit and read. Impressive research went into this. Highly recommend it.

Fantastic book that has much to teach us about building a more sacred and intentional relationship with nature.

Wonderful book. Very informative.

great book for those interested in ethnobotany

Very detailed book concerning Native Western plants and their specific uses. Highly recommended for those whose interests lie in Californian Indians management, practice, and use of specific vegetal resources.

Fascinating to read, terrible at times (the Genocide by both the "Americans" and the Spanish), but fascinating history and a different viewpoint on the sophisticated land management practices of the "primitive" folks whose sophistication was totally overlooked by the invaders. David Cameron should make the movie.

This book is quite thorough and an important WEALTH of information concerning the fact that CA was very carefully tended by the unimposing interactions of native peoples that were in the 100s of thousands before white settlers' arrival. The "garden of Eden" that many described CA to be was not "wilderness" as defined by most as untouched by man. This book exemplifies how human beings are an integral and vital part of nature and our responsibility to its sustainability is crucial. I am not thrilled by the need for the author to legitimate everything through academic--not necessarily empirical--findings, for it leads the reading to be a bit tedious at times. Otherwise a MUST READ for anyone who takes the slightest bit of pride in what is left of this beautiful place we now call California.

This incredible book answered so many questions for me regarding exactly how something like agriculture could be invented incrementally by transitioning from gathering lifestyles to ultimately learning to actively "manage" wild resources. It in fact highlights a type of proto-agriculture that is in many ways superior to our modern farms with their straight lines of identical plants. "Tending the Wild" does respectful justice to the encyclopedic knowledge some North American tribes have/had about how to exploit plant resources in a sustainable fashion. If the world is to be saved, it will certainly involve a resurgence of such wisdom and practices.

This book is covering ground not found elsewhere about the way of Native Americans in California interacted with nature to actually improve the health of forests and wild life. I am thrilled to find it.

Interesting.

I love this book for the history and culture.

Interesting and full of information. I see this as a good, in depth account of how an adapted, hunter, gatherer, and integrated form of society can nurture and survive without destroying the environment. Insightful look at how our Native Americans used the natural environment, selected and nurtured native flora, and shaped the diversity of the continent before the European invasions.

re-reading it again, lots of information. Some of the information is not quite right, but many traditional communities are not free in giving out the real facts.

This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and insightful book on a subject not well known and even less appreciated by the general public and many natural resource managers ---viz. the careful management and use of a diversity of plants by Native Americans necessary for their subsistence and daily life. It is based not only on historical records and collections, but on many interviews with tribal elders,extensive field observations and skillfully-designed field experiments that replicate and confirm specific traditional agricultural/horticultural practices.It makes for very absorbing and enlightening reading.

one section is duplicated and a set of 20+ pages is just missing

Excellent!

Brilliant analysis of the tending of nature by indigenous people.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It points out how poorly the Native Americans were treated and the beauty and knowledge of their culture that was overlooked due to the arrogance of Western Civilization.

When I first came to California 15 years ago, I liked to take off cross country on my hikes in the many natural areas around San Francisco bay. I soon learned that such cross country treks would sooner or later leave me facing nearly impenetrable chaparral. Worst of all, the chaparral was invariably suffused by poison oak. A day or two after the hike, the itching would start then the blisters would form and then two weeks later, I would finally be free of the effects of the poison oak. I always wondered how the Indians managed to get around this kind of landscape. They must have developed their trails and kept to them, I concluded. Tending the Wild offered some new insight. The Indians used fire extensively to manage the landscape and make it both easier to travel through not only for humans but also for animals and also to shape the landscape by encouraging the growth of plants useful to them. And setting fires wasn't just a matter of encouraging certain plants to grow. Fires also burned down shrubs to the ground, a form of coppicing so that when the plants put out new shoots the next year, the shoots would grow straight and without branches, making the new shoots ideally suited for weaving baskets and making implements such as arrows. Indian land management in effect was a form of subsistence economy somewhere between farming and hunting and gathering. It might even be argued that hunting and gathering as imagined in the past, that is as mere random wandering in search of plants and game was never an accurate portrayal of how people related to the natural world. As soon as humans had control of fire and rudimentary tools, they probably started managing the land that they lived on for their benefit, encouraging certain plants over others and discouraging vegetation not to their benefit. Tending the Wild is a fairly long book, 360 some pages of text followed by a little more than a hundred pages of notes and bibliography and fifty plus pages of index for a grand total of 526 pages preceded by another 28 pages of front matter. It will take up just over an inch and a half of space on your book shelf. Illustrations are in black and white. You might want to consider the digital version if shelf space is an issue. The bulk of the text is taken up with detailed descriptions of how various Californian Indian groups interacted with their natural environments. But this is not a how to forage book or nature guide. Absent are illustrations of plant species and that sort of thing. If you are a part time forager, this book will be of little help to you. The author's key revelations can probably be gotten by reading the introduction and the first few and concluding chapters. Much of the center of the book is filled with encyclopedic listings of plant management techniques employed by Indians. The author also advocates for the resumption of Indian style environmental management that falls somewhere between blatant resource extraction of the type practiced in national forests where the logging industry is the prime beneficiary and wilderness areas where a complete hands off policy tries to create an environment that shows no trace of human impact at all. I would concur with the author that Indian style land management practices in which fire and selected pruning and seed distribution creates an environment suitable for subsistence living might be worth trying again. But California's present population is roughly 100 times what it was before European settlers first arrived and traditional land management practices would invariably collide with property interests of the current population. Still, there is plenty of government managed land in California where at least some of the traditional practices could be reconvened.

This excellent book written about the management of California land by the native people in the past, is also a textbook of what we will need to do in the future to survive. M. Kit Anderson has written a revolutionary book. The wealth of information on how Native peoples managed the California landscape in a sustainable way finally does justice to these people and their way of life - a people who were so cruelly treated by the Spanish and American invaders. The author explores the ecological management skills of California native peoples without romanticizing them or ignoring mistakes that they made. The modern environmental movement created the myth of the unspoiled wilderness untouched by human hands. Tending the Wild debunks that myth and levels some well earned criticism towards those environmentalists who failed to appreciate how the California native peoples were successfully and actively managing the California landscape, as were other indigenous people around the world. But the wealth of detail the book provides on how the Native Americans successfully managed the California landscape is also a model of sustainable living that has much to teach all of us. We learn an alternative to the destructive environmental, agricultural and development practices of our time. Practices that are destroying our ability to not only preserve the beauty of the landscape but to use the landscape wisely to provide for our needs in a sustainable way. Anybody who is interested in sustainable living should also explore books on Permaculture by authors like Bill Mollison, David Holmgren and Toby Hemenway. Permaculture is a modern attempt at designing for sustainable living. Permaculture designers have studied the sustainable methods agriculture, horticulture, building and community of indigenous people from all over the world. As world oil production peaks and as the effects of global warming are felt, we will need all the help we can get to re-learn how to live sustainably on this planet.

In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson has painted a very different picture of indigenous peoples than most civilized people could even begin to fathom. She begins by taking us through the history of California and its Native peoples. Using accounts of explorers, missionaries, pioneers and anthropologists she shows how those of our culture came to California with no understanding or lens with which to understand native land management. Rather, like everywhere else, civilization saw resources to extract, came and conquered California and her people. With California's wildlife & Native cultures now decimated, newer research has shown that Native land management actually contributed to enhancing the biological diversity and abundance of life. Anderson argues that if we wish to restore our mutual relationship with nature, we must learn these ancient management techniques and implement them immediately. Although she uses only California Natives to back her thesis, we can witness these same principles among indigenous cultures the world over. This book works not only as a history of indigenous horticulture in California, but mostly as a beginners manual for those who seek to understand more about sustainable, indigenous land management. This book rocked my world. Don't miss out, buy it now!

missing pages 189-210, but received a call back from a real person at University Press of CA.; will replace!

Kat Andersons well researched book can be used by conservationists, land managers, ecologists, scientists, historians, and others to better understand historical Native American land use in California. This book helps dispell the myth of passive Native American resource management and provides examples of how Native Americans influenced much of the landscape prior to European contact and how removal of their influence continues to effect the environment today. Anyone who considers themselves and expert or has an interest in California vegetation and issues surrounding its ecology and use should read this book.

The book is a well thought out and interesting book. One interesting point is that the Yosemite Indian people or Natives of Yosemite were primarily Mono Paiutes. The proof about the Paiutes being the ones who did the fire cleaning practice in the Sierra Nevada foothills was an article written: Leopold, A. 1920. "Piute Forestry" vs. forest fire prevention. Southwestern Magazine 2:12-13. Aldo Leopold wrote an argument against certain practices but that was before we had more information concerning the Piute Forestry (Paiute) practice was re-thought. All of the earliest Indian photos show the titles "Piute" and not Miwuk in Yosemite. So hopefully in the next re-reprint the book will have a correction to the real early Native Americans of Yosemite, the Paiutes, instead of the incorrect title of Miwok. Besides this, the book is very interesting.

Kat, its wonderful!!! Long live the Wendell Berry Club. Miss ya, Joseph and Linda the cattail botanist!

The book of all books great and interesting read very informative a must have book for anybody intrested in ecology or the environment. The native Americans are a Truly amazing group of people that we should listen too and learn from.👍

Outstanding - must be the definitive work on the subject.