Posted on 01/17/2008 7:39:11 PM PST by blam
Early settlers drained marshy US landscape
19:00 17 January 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic
A milldam on Pickering Creek in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The dam spans the entire valley, and is filled to the brim with sediment (Image: Robert Walter and Dorothy Merritts)
Standard notions of the 'natural' eastern US landscape with its meandering ribbon-like streams may be misguided, suggests historical research.
In the US, a multibillion-dollar landscape restoration industry is guided by the almost intuitive notion that natural, gravel-bedded streams wander in single channels across the land.
This springs from the assumption that, when European settlers arrived in the 17th century, they found a picturesque landscape of forested hills and meandering streams that carved their way down the valleys and out to sea.
But a new study now overturns this notion, suggesting that the meandering streams are actually the result of early forms of land management imposed by the settlers.
This understanding comes from studies of stream geometry carried out in the 1950s. But Robert Walter and Dorothy Merritts of Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania now say those studies got it wrong – the New World was a wetland.
The new study suggests that rather than rivers being confined to single, winding channels before 20th century industrialisation, they were collections of many small channels spreading across broad wetlands before European settlers dammed them in.
Thousands of mills
"One of first things the settlers did was to clear the forests for agriculture and build tens of thousands of dams to run their mills," says Walter.
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.newscientist.com ...
.. and they did it without Environmental Impact Reports and lawsuits. wow.
Absolutely fascinating. If this hypothesis is confirmed, it revolutionizes our whole picture of the American landscape.
Native Americans would set massive forest fires to clear trees and undergrowth allowing the sunlight to stimulate new plant grow which increased the food supply to the animals that they hunted thus increasing the animal population.
Granola eating tree huggers won’t allow controlled burns or clear cutting to do the same and they claim it is because they are helping to protect the animals.
Sheesh.
You watch.
The enviro-fascists will want to drive us from our homes and convert our farms and pastures to swamps.
Is that sorta like a chocolate city?
The entire Back Bay of Boston (with it’s $2,000,000.00 condos) is landfill-——never could do that today.
Oooohhh Nooooooooos
There’s a bunch of those kind here in MI.
Yelling, Let the rivers run FREE!” they’re harping for all the dams to be torn out. Leaving those high-property-tax payers with mud for viewing.
I’m also wondering where all the fish that now inhabit the huge dam/ponds/lakes will go once THEIR habitat is destroyed?
Old maps of Iowa show a huge lake covering the upper third of the state. It was actually more of a swamp or giant pothole than a lake. The first settlers there did the only smart thing and built drainage ditches and canals. Good thing the wetland weenies are only concerned about saving wetlands on more modern maps.
Great report. A number of researchers have been noting that current erosion seems to be largely due to sediment already stored in or along streambeds. One tracking device has been the fallout from the early atmospheric bomb tests (I think it’s cesium but I forget). Low cesium content means old sediment, and that’s most of what’s being seen in streams (at least around here), and more measures instituted on farm fields won’t change it. Very interesting stuff.
dam settlers!
I am just glad to hear global warming might not be my fault after all.
btt
Does that mean we’ll be forced by the PC Police to give America back to the mosquitoes, typhoid fever etal?
Battle of Vincennes
Good thing they “got-r-done” when they did. Before the eco-tyrants and the epa.
Within the township are several creeks and runs, all of which are somewhat flood-prone and eroded. Historically, there were both mills and limekilns in this area. I can certainly believe it was swampier once than it is now. (We still have the mosquitoes . . . )
Today, the Army Corps of Engineers is undoing what it had previously done to the Kissimmee River. (They'd "channelized"—straightened—it.) Worse, State politics controls which direction Florida's polluted waters go.
To Lake Okeechobee, which is in trouble? Or to the ocean, obliterating many square miles of sea life?
Ten years ago, who would have imagined that Florida would run out of clean water? (And we still have mosquitoes...) :-\
BTW: How many of the settlers' marshes got drained by just "harvesting" the beavers that created the marshes in the first place?
The new study suggests that rather than rivers being confined to single, winding channels before 20th century industrialisation, they were collections of many small channels spreading across broad wetlands before European settlers dammed them in.
That could be true in some areas, but it is a widely sweeping generalization. The Hudson, East River, James and York Rivers were absolutely rivers, not swamps. They were used for exploration and commerce from the first days. The earliest maps, paintings and drawing clearly show rivers. The same can be said for most rivers I am familiar with. Naturalists often moved out ahead of settlers - drawing and painting what they saw.
I have no doubt that streams were damned, and many swamps were drained. Swamps were a source of mosquitoes and the land under the water was fertile.
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