Posted by Peter Ceresole on March 30, 2009 at 16:12:28 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Braithwaite and Lewthwaite, was Owdon posted by 3rdamazon on March 30, 2009 at 14:25:23:
Also i'd guess (and I am guessing) that the medieval depredations were at least partly driven by a need for more sheep pasture
I was going by the situation in Africa today, which wouldn't be that different. I remember flying over a forested area miles from anywhere in Shaba (Zaire) for which I had seen historical forest cover data, and by the time we went there trees had become very sparse. I asked an economist on the trip about this great change and he said that it had been caused, within a couple of decades, by a small number of itinerant villagers, and that a few humans with some pangas can totally change their local environment. It was partly a need for pasture, but I was told it was more for firewood.
As to the villagers, there were few enough that from the air their presence was almost invisible. No visible paths or huts... There are tricks to this kind of thing, like telling from the air how busy a railway line is (the colour of the rails changes according to how many trains pass, and their weight, and how recently) and I'm sure there are equivalent skills for earthen paths and forest clearings but I wasn't aware of them at the time.
Africa is wonderful, though; we were mainly looking at the Shaba copper mines, which are large and open cast. We were in a Fokker Friendship, a twin turboprop airliner. I'd explained to the pilot that we'd like to get some aerial shots. Then it rained and the ceiling came right down. But as we came up to the huge pit at Kolwezi, where we'd filmed earlier that day, we went lower and lower and I suddenly realised that (1) the pilot was an ex-Belgian air force fighter bomber jockey and (2) he had flown us in below the rim. The pit was 3 km long and we did about 2 km of it below ground level. It was far too fast and too close to get any shots and anyway the ground level stuff we had was terrific, quite enough. But I've never forgotten flying down that. Not something you could do with an airliner, without asking, anywhere else...