I recently re-reread The Grapes of Wrath for my reading group, and it was evocative, and thought-provoking, and even topical, and I remember why it is one of my three favorite books. I often disdain reading older non-fiction books though, simply because I assume they will be out-of-date. There are exceptions, most notably Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and Lynn Margolis’ Acquiring Genomes, which chronicle knowledge our society has lost and rejected theories now accepted respectively. Nonetheless, when my husband offered me Nature’s Operating Instructions, having checked it out and decided not to read it. I noticed that it was a climate-oriented work from 2004 and nearly passed it up.

I’m still reading it, and already have dozens of new insights and at least one new Big Idea. A Big Idea is something that changes the way I see everything, or a good portion of everything, so a new Big Idea is pretty exciting for me.

Meanwhile I’ve had a new small idea about blogging which I’m going to try today. That idea is that I’m not going to fact check everything like I’m writing for the New Yorker. The first topic is a bulb called Bodicea, except I’m not sure of the exact spelling, but it’s close to that. I’m writing it like a genus name (capitalized) but it may be a species name or even a common name. It doesn’t really matter to the story and it takes a while to track this stuff down. I’m guessing most of you didn’t know I was doing that anyway so you won’t miss it.

Anyway, this Bodicea was a foodstuff for folks already living in…California I think…when European explorers arrived, and on into the 19th century. After the natives were sufficiently suppressed though, it disappeared. A scientist somewhere else, let’s call her Jenn, saw some Bodicea growing and tried to dig it up but found it quite difficult. She was surprised that a hard-to-harvest plant would be so beloved and manage to find an anthropologist, we’ll call him Kevin, who studied the tribe and knew a living person who had the story from his n-greats grandparent: the Bodicea were harvested at a particular time of year using a special stick to pry the bulbs out, then they were shaken before being placed into a basket.

Jenn recreated the stick and waited until the next particular time of year then approached her Bodicea patch. She was easily able to pry large bulbs from underground, and noticed that each was covered with smaller bulbs. When she shook the large bulb, the smaller ones flew off. She didn’t need her science cred to suspect that this method would not only provide food at this particular time but also spread the B. patch, but being a scientist she tried it for a few years, and so it was.

Which is to say, B. health and spread were dependent on humans just as orchids depend on pollenating wasps or forests depend on soil containing mycelium. These plants may survive without the partner organisms, but they won’t thrive. So now we have human beings as a key part of the web of life in at least one case.

There are others. The region of “undiscovered” California we now know as “the Bay area” was rife with forests of trees interspersed with meadows that supported huge herds of grazing ungulates, hundred-count pods of cetaceans, salmon runs so thick one could “almost walk” on them, as well as bear, wolves, and mountain lions. In every case, specific actions of humans can be linked to this surfeit of life, for example, controlled burning to manage forest undergrowth.

One tribe in particular, and no I’m not going to look up its name, was allowed to collect oysters from nearby bays until 1920. when the National Park Service took over and decided this was in conflict with Nature, which should be free of human interference. Though there were numerous oyster beds in pre-European California, there were eleven thriving ones until 1920, and now there are none. Or maybe one, I don’t remember. They died pretty quickly after tribal harvesting was banned, as tribal citizens said they would. The NPS investigated, and found that selectively removing the larger animals at a specific point in their life cycle allowed the smaller ones to spread out and grow, making the entire colony resilient.

The Big Idea, in case you haven’t see it yet, is that native peoples weren’t benefitting from robust nature in sort of a native Garden of Eden languor, but instead were actively managing nature to mutual benefit as a keystone species. Once you start looking for this, you find it everywhere, including a recent Science article on multiple managed tracts in the Amazon that still have superior soil, and the idea that natives managed huge herds of both buffalo and passenger pigeons, not least by maintaining the productivity of their habitats.

One corollary of this is that by separating us from nature, viewing it as something that happens far from us, we threaten not only other species but also ourselves. That is, we threaten nature not by our existence but by our absconding from our caretaker roles, to the extent that we hardly recognize natural cycles, much less support them, which could mean we will lose them.

In a life of perhaps excessive sci-fi consumption, I have encountered more than once the concept of a planet populated by humans whose surface is completely covered by cities, which could only be conceived by someone in this post-nature state of ignorance. What could the people on such a planet be breathing?