Pioneer human communities, like pioneer plants, cannot sustain themselves indefinitely without reciprocal succession.
Evidence
Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets—swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture. Pioneer human communities, just like pioneer plant communities, have an important role in regeneration, but they are not sustainable in the long run. When they reach the edge of easy energy, balance and renewal are the only way forward, wherein there is a reciprocal cycle between early and late successional systems, each opening the door for the other. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1049
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the pioneer-oldgrowth ecological frame from ch. 70 and ch. 68-69 passages about cedar and old-growth reciprocity into a social-historical claim about settlement as ecological succession. — connects to: Humans are obligately interdependent and cannot survive without groups — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 385; Initial cooperation despite backward induction is what sustains living societies. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 138
- SEED: Could ground an essay comparing settler-colonial expansion to pioneer-species ecology — the same succession logic that says pioneers open space for later species reframes what ‘settlement’ and ‘restoration’ mean.
Broader Connections
- Initial cooperation despite backward induction is what sustains living societies.
#corroborates(0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 138 - Humans are obligately interdependent and cannot survive without groups
#qualifies(0.75) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 385