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Prehistoric Garbage Piles Created "Tree Islands"
sciencehabit writes "Piles of garbage left by humans thousands of years ago may have helped form 'tree islands' in the Florida Everglades--patches of relatively high and dry ground that rise from the wetlands. They stand between 1 and 2 meters higher than the surrounding landscape, can cover 100 acres or more, and host two to three times the number of species living in the surrounding marsh. Besides providing habitat for innumerable birds, the islands offer refuge for animals such as alligators and the Florida panther during flood season. The trash piles—a mix of discarded food, charcoal, shell tools, and broken pottery—would have been slightly higher and drier than the surrounding marsh, offering a foothold for trees, shrubs, and other vegetation."
McDonald's wrappers could be the swamp saving trash of the future?
There's bound to be some people who find this theory... *sunglasses* ...rubbish.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
History repeats itself.
I for one, welcome our new trashy island overlords.
"But officer, it's not littering. I'm building a habitat for endangered species!"
Describing clay pottery and shells as garbage is incredibly misleading. For an article that claims to be from a scientific website, this is a shame. This article is the reason no-brainer issues become politicized. Some poor consumer of the internet will go and tell policy-maker Mr. XYZ that garbage helps the environment. Enter stage left BP, Exxon. Mr. Policy-Maker says that pollution isn't a big deal -> Who cares about pollution, oil, etc. And the sustainable energy movement takes yet another step back all because of some pop-science article claiming garbage helps the environment. Are you kidding me...
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Are there any landfills left that do NOT capture and use the gasses let off from decomposition?
And yes, if you live in the woods and ceramics is the highest form of technology available to you, then broken pottery is absolutely GARBAGE - just as broken hair dryers and used up toothbrushes are garbage to us.
Many communities even collect yard trash, christmas trees and other organic matter for composting in community run composting centers. How is all this "garbage" harming the environment? Natural gas is worth money; compost is worth money; anyone tellling a policymaker to ignore these facts is not likely to be given much creedence.
You mean that fecal mountain of trash and sludge dumped off the coast of New York may be the next place for the rich and famous to live?
How do we know that the garbage didn't collect because the land was drier so people lived there?
Wou,ld u care 2 liuck my ballsz?
Apparently; so that was the plan behind the environmentally conscious crowd bullying them into no longer using those easily recyclable styrofoam containers!
I am afraid that you are totally incorrect in thinking a switch to paper increases the volume of waste.
There is a persistent myth that the McDonalds foamed polystyrene containers were more recyclable than their current paper packaging. This myth is used by people to try and show the environmental movement is emotional, rather than pragmatic & forward thinking (typically, there is a condescending "ho-ho-ho, those silly environmentalists have made the environment worse by replacing a recyclable product with a non-recyclable product" attitude).
However, the facts are that:
1) Food contaminated products are not recycled (most McDs food packaging is unsurprisingly contaminated by food)
2) Almost no foamed polystyrene is recycled in any case.
3) Switching to paper reduced McDonald's waste by around 90%
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
>> "But officer, it's not littering. I'm building a habitat for endangered species!"
The US Navy have run this scam a few times...
"It's not a derelict hulk scuttled in a delicate ecosystem! It's a hub for a new coral reef!"
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
There is no way human activity can contribute to the creation of habitat for wild animals and other organisms. Human activity can only destroy and kill. :rolleyes:
This is slashdot.
People don't RTFA, let alone the scientific paper *behind* TFA...
It seems like they simply found middens with some regularity deep in/on these tree islands.
Therefore one scientist contends that some of the islands may have grown from middens. Isn't it substantially more plausible that primitive humans, who generally tend to want to stand/sit/live on dry ground, would have sought out these relatively isolated (and thus somewhat safer) locations for habitation? That the middens are found deep in the islands only seems to me to mean that this - the value of a secure home - was even obvious to primitive humans?
One comment in the article bothered me: "The authors say the findings show that human disturbance of the environment doesn't always have a negative consequence." That seems...a rather insipid comment.
-Styopa
Without humans having a thing to do with it those islands form all the time. They form to a degree that the state has a machine that goes in and destroys the island. All that happens is that any irregularity that causes a bottom to be slightly shallower in a spot will tend to attract plants which over time build a thicker and thicker mat of cast off materials held in place by the roots of the plants. At a certain point the mat becomes heavy enough to actually press down against the bottom and trees and shrubs flourish making the little islands even more solid.
The device that eats these islands looks like a paddle wheel boat with the paddle wheel in the very front of the boat. That wheel beats into the vegetation and pushes it onto a barge like deck. The operator keeps the wheel chopping at the island until the entire island is loaded on the barge. Sadly large nuimbers of bass and other fish as well as snakes and turtles are also loaded onto the barges.
I often visit the everglades. 2 meters would be a mountain in the everglades. When walking through the tree islands (called "hammocks" or "heads") I don't recall seeing anything this high in the everglades at all. There are differences in elevation, yes, and they do affect or reflect differences in plant species. But you're mostly talking about a difference of a few inches. Certainly not meters. The park guides always point out how the hardwood hammocks occur in areas maybe a few inches higher than the sawgrass prairie.... maybe a meter if you're comparing their elevation to the floor of a slough...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I read TFA, and seriously, it meanders and sort of wilts away before it's even halfway through. It's almost like the people interviewed to support the theory abandon the theory mid-sentence and just give up trying to say that, seriously, people threw all this trash into one spot and did this.
Are we to go against all of our understanding of native Americans being a people who utilize every single remnant of every possible thing in some design, or tool set, or medicine? All of a sudden there's this idea to just "chuck shit into the bog over there" until it makes an island just sort of out of nowhere?
Somebody else on /. already commented that it's far more likely that this was a conscious effort to raise the land above sea level for habitation. If I recall this is already folk lore about the natives in Florida, that they purposefully land-filled sections of the Everglades. If that's the case how is this news?
One person asked if there wasn't some sign that those natives were "already agricultural". I believe there is a lot of evidence supporting the idea that any attempts to subdue and reform natural environs is directly evidence of domestication of some plant or animal, and that domestication and agriculture are fairly frequent bedfellows. So I'd guess probably.
And another person remarked that it's just as likely that these sediment layers formed on top of existing humps of land and that the discarded remnants of -- what again? Animal matter -- were left behind by their fellow animal predators. There's nothing in the article about broken pottery, tools, or any other signs of human habitation, just "peat", "soil" (as differentiated from peat which is a soil form, so I'm guessing sandy soil mixture), "bones" and "guano". Peat is just semi decayed plant matter. Any standing or accumulating water that can host plant life can produce peat. The only remaining question is what moves large amounts of soil around. It wouldn't even take moving a large quantity of soil to create these mounds.
There are so many possible and even likely scenarios, that I had to wonder what their evidence was. But there are no cited findings in TFA. Just some theories!
And then there's this entire slant, the whole way it's presented from title to certain remarks in the article, that suggest it's alright to haphazardly discard trash. Even going so far as to contradict the founded image of natives as conservationist and leading waste-less lifestyles. So I'm wondering, wtf? Who asked this person to writ this article, do they have vested interest in waste management, and was there money involved?
The theorist is from Canada. I live in Michigan and I know firsthand that Canada prefers to dump their trash in America.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
This is hardly news to anyone living in Florida. There are shell middens all over the state... They are almost always by water and nearly all contain broken pottery, oyster and clam shells and broken artifacts. The natives essentially threw hard garbage in a spot, waited until it stopped smelling and then used it to keep above the water line and the mosquitos. Pretty smart really. A lot of roads in florida have the shell middens underneath instead of limestone. It wasn't until the last couple decades that they started protecting them as something of historical/archeological value. God only knows how much history was lost as we paved our way to suburbia in the 50s and 60s.
Get a web developer
By far the highest points in south Florida are its landfills; see, for example, this beauty on Florida's Turnpike in Deerfield Beach. When global warming floods the area in [insert date of your choice here], these landfills will become tree islands in the new Everglades.
Let's start a nationwide campaign to improve the quality of our garbage! When you think of garbage - think of Akim!
Is the trash there because humans also took shelter in these tree islands, or did the trash create the tree islands?
Canadian researchers had a winter in Florida on expenses and got a publication out of it? Win!
Ok, so wading through the everglades to dig for ancient garbage while avoiding the alligators isn't everyone's idea of vacation, but Montreal got some real snow this winter.
Has no one considered the fact that... Thousands of years ago the only humans inhabiting the Florida region were small Native American tribes? So how could they possibly create such huge landfills by themselves? Much less, those tribes consisted of maybe dozens of people at best, whom would never be able to create that much waste. Especially as the only inhabitants for "thousands of years" were people who utilized anything and everything to the max, and could never possibly create enough waste or trash to form these "Tree Islands". There is no way that this information is credible.