Shifting cultivation
During the fallow period, shifting cultivators use the successive vegetation species widely for timber for fencing and construction, firewood, thatching, ropes, clothing, tools, carrying devices and medicines.
Rather they perceive an apparently chaotic landscape in which trees are cut and burned randomly and so they characterise shifting cultivation as ephemeral or 'pre-agricultural', as 'primitive' and as a stage to be progressed beyond.
Stable shifting cultivation systems are highly variable, closely adapted to micro-environments and are carefully managed by farmers during both the cropping and fallow stages.
Shifting cultivators may possess a highly developed knowledge and understanding of their local environments and of the crops and native plant species they exploit.
In the Ruhr in the late 1860s a forest-field rotation system known as Reutbergwirtschaft [de] was using a 16-year cycle of clearing, cropping and fallowing with trees to produce bark for tanneries, wood for charcoal and rye for flour (Darby 1956, 200).
In Eastern Europe and Northern Russia the main swidden crops were turnips, barley, flax, rye, wheat, oats, radishes and millet.
Steensberg (1993, 110–152) provides eye-witness descriptions of shifting cultivation being practised in Sweden in the 20th century, and in Estonia, Poland, the Caucasus, Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria and Germany in the 1930s to the 1950s.
By the Middle Ages in Europe, large areas of forest were being cleared and converted into arable land in association with the development of feudal tenurial practices.
With the loss of the forest, so shifting cultivation became restricted to the peripheral places of Europe, where permanent agriculture was uneconomic, transport costs constrained logging or terrain prevented the use of draught animals or tractors.
Julius Caesar wrote about the Suebi in Commentarii de Bello Gallico 4.1, "They have no private and secluded fields ("privati ac separati agri apud eos nihil est") ...
20 CE) also writes about the Suebi in his Geography (VII, 1, 3): "Common to all the people in this area is that they can easily change residence because of their sordid way of life; they do not cultivate fields or collect property, but live in temporary huts.
A growing body of palynological evidence finds that simple human societies brought about extensive changes to their environments before the establishment of any sort of state, feudal or capitalist, and before the development of large scale mining, smelting or shipbuilding industries.
As early as 1930 questions about relationships between the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization of the Yucatán Peninsula and shifting cultivation were raised and continue to be debated today.
Similar paths appear to have been followed by Polynesian settlers in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, who within 500 years of their arrival around 1100 AD turned substantial areas from forest into scrub and fern and in the process caused the elimination of numerous species of birds and animals (Kirch and Hunt 1997).
In the restricted environments of the Pacific islands, including Fiji and Hawaii, early extensive erosion and change of vegetation is presumed to have been caused by shifting cultivation on slopes.
The change from shifting cultivation to intensive irrigated fields occurred in association with a rapid growth in population and the development of elaborate and highly stratified chiefdoms (Kirch 1984).
These changes, as in the smaller islands, were accompanied by population growth, the competition for the occupation of the best environments, complexity in social organization, and endemic warfare (Anderson 1997).
However, the most spectacular changes, in both societies and environments, are believed to have occurred in the central highlands of the island within the last 1,000 years, in association with the introduction of a crop new to New Guinea, the sweet potato (Golson 1982a; 1982b).
The root question posed by these and the numerous other examples that could be cited of simple societies that have intensified their agricultural systems in association with increases in population and social complexity is not whether or how shifting cultivation was responsible for the extensive changes to landscapes and environments.
Rather it is why simple societies of shifting cultivators in the tropical forest of Yucatán, or the highlands of New Guinea, began to grow in numbers and to develop stratified and sometimes complex social hierarchies?
In a study of the Duna in the Southern Highlands of New Guinea, a group in the process of moving from shifting cultivation into permanent field agriculture post sweet potato, Modjeska (1982) argued for the development of two "self amplifying feed back loops" of ecological and social causation.
The greater protein available from the larger number of pigs increased human fertility and survival rates and resulted in faster population growth.
The rate of phylogenetic change is determined mainly by natural selection and partly by human interference and adaptation, such as for example, the domestication of a wild species.
Of particular importance is the ability of the society to change, to invent or to innovate technologically and sociologically, in order to overcome the "contradiction" without incurring continuing environmental degradation, or social disintegration.
Boserup argues, contra Malthus, that rather than population always overwhelming resources, that humans will invent a new agricultural technique or adopt an existing innovation that will boost yields and that is adapted to the new environmental conditions created by the degradation which has occurred already, even though they will pay for the increases in higher labor costs.
Other independent studies of the problem note that despite lack of government control over forests and the dominance of a political elite in the logging industry, the causes of deforestation are more complex.
One of the outcomes of cash incomes has been rapid population growth among indigenous groups of former shifting cultivators that has placed pressure on their traditional long fallow farming systems.
The settlers practice what appears to be shifting cultivation but which is in fact a one-cycle slash and burn followed by continuous cropping, with no intention to long fallow.
Shifting cultivation was one of the first forms of agriculture practiced by humans and its survival into the modern world suggests that it is a flexible and highly adaptive means of production.
[citation needed] Slash-and-char, as opposed to slash-and-burn, may create self-perpetuating soil fertility that supports sedentary agriculture, but the society so sustained may still be overturned, as above (see article at Terra preta).
