NRCS Plant Materials Specialist Publishes Book

M. Kat Anderson, NRCS ethnoecologist, explains in her new book, Tending the Wild, that many types of land management were practiced by California Native Americans for centuries

Although conservationists may think of stewardship tools such as prescribed burning and intelligent herding of livestock to favor some plant species and control others as new ideas, M. Kat Anderson, NRCS ethnoecologist, explains in her new book, Tending the Wild, that these and many other types of land management were practiced by California Native Americans for centuries. “Historically California’s native peoples were referred to by anthropologists as hunter/gatherers,” said Anderson. “This implies a much more passive role than what the evidence shows. I think there is great room to learn from and collaborate with Tribes to preserve and use their extensive traditional wisdom in landscape management.”

Kat, located at University of California at Davis, works for the NRCS National Plant Data Center in Louisiana.  She conducted much of the research contained in the book — including literature searches, plant surveys and hundreds of interviews with Indian elders — as part of her doctoral thesis. In her work she observed that since human contact with Nature has too often accelerated environmental ills such as species decline, erosion or pollution, there can be a tendency to feel that the best thing people can do for nature is to leave it alone. However, she found that Native Californians understood their responsibility towards stewardship, not in terms of preservation, but rather as one of intelligent use and respectful interaction. “In many parts of California, Native Americans had an active role in the development of ecosystems — using fire, selective harvesting, pruning, sowing, and other techniques to assure a supply of food, arrows, baskets, and medicine. They saw themselves as integral components of Nature and often both the people and the species benefited,” she said. “The biodiversity and the structure of the plant communities that Europeans witnessed upon reaching California was very much a result of native people’s interaction with their ecosystem.”

For ten years Kat did additional research, hired illustrators and editors, and spent much of her vacations and weekends writing and organizing the material for the book. While the book was not written as part of her NRCS employment, such principles ought to find modern day appreciation in an agency where the age-old principles of holistic range management and prescribed burning are again finding a role. Kat was further motivated to write the book by the fact that through her many interviews, native peoples had entrusted her with important practical and philosophical information that she felt needed to be shared in a more accessible format than a doctoral thesis.

Tending the Wild will be available in paperback in February on Amazon and at Borders book stores.
Your contact is M. Kat Anderson, NRCS ethnoecologist, at 530-752-8439.