Ecological Culture and Industry

[LuxyLucy 691]

 

 

ISSUED BY

Primrose Kortrevich.

 

⸙

 

ISSUED ON

Twelfth of Msitza and Dargund, 578 E.S.

 

VA VE EDLERVIK,

A MAN MAY A WHILE

NATURE BEGUILE

BY DOCTRINE AND LORE

AND YET AT THE END

WILL NATURE HOME WEND

THERE SHE WAS BEFORE.

Among all products of an autonomous, autopoetic cultural realm, human ideas have their own histories. Such an idea distinguishes between humans and other things of this world, calling the latter ‘nature’, that which is not ‘human’, not ‘culture’. A conceptual dichotomy between culture and nature is commonly a characteristic of our modernity. But can also be traced in other settings, including, in some ways, Karoslund. The realm of science is this world apart from humans, an autonomous sphere of material things subject to its own casualty. The ecological principle recognizes the interconnectedness of living and non-living things through various relationships, predator-prey, competition, processes and cycles. Each set of closely interacting living and nonliving things is called an ecosystem; at a large scale, less closely linked ecosystems form a landscape, ecological counterpart to the geographers’ region.

 

How then is nature to be connected to culture and placed into time as a protagonist in a human story? How is environmental history possible? Is nature but a backdrop to human affairs, having no or insignificant actual effects on us? Or does natural forces reign responsible for human history itself. Is it not natural conditions that actually dominate, with climate especially the source of how our physiology, psychology, and social organization is shaped? Do the tropical and temperate zones produce peoples of different temperaments? Is the need to manage floodwaters what compels the formation of our elaborate bureaucratic states. 

 

All humans can know, use, or encounter the cultural construct. Nature, science, mythology, and everything purportedly known outside human consciousness is but an artefact of that consciousness. The non-cultural is unknowable and thus without meaning in human history. At most, one can trace the evolution of human ideas about the non-human but never really test these against any external reality. We must acknowledge the power of culture in shaping human perception and human actions in our past, but also the present. Material nature, living and nonliving, and human communications (symbolic culture) join in an interactive and reciprocal relationship mediated by human material life. Humans experience elements of the natural world directly but can grasp it only through cultural representation, mainly in the form of language. Once absorbed into the cultural sphere, this information is there subject to its autonomous actions and may become a part of a new cultural construct, a programme to do something of a material quality. The programme itself has, however, no environmental impact, no effect on the natural sphere, until human work there modifies the existing flows of energy and materials. Work and its outcomes then become subject to autonomous natural causation, which may itself alter subsequent human experience of nature. As culture responds - to represent experience and as natural processes are themselves affected by human work, reciprocal change rolls through the interactive system. The process is recursive; causes turn into effects which turn into further causes. Over time culture and nature co-adapt; they engage in co-evolution.

 

 

A DIFFERENT, ECOLOGICAL HERITAGE. Comes to the cultures of humanity, peoples who are termed ‘pagans'. This term marks cultures which are not ‘civilized’ by Heartlanders behavioral standards, for not following The Church of the Canon. Those who live to the north are plainly not, in part from their interaction with different environmental conditions. These peoples live and move about in a realm that is mostly wooded and more or less damp throughout the year. Hence their structures of living are in the first place adapted to dwelling among trees and secondly adapted to the particularities of climate and moisture of northern Aevos. Woodland adaptations include the practice of what can be called either alternating fallow agriculture or infield-outfield. In this arrangement trees are cleared near the settlement to form arable land and that arable is farmed each year until it becomes exhausted. Then the parcel is left to go back to pasture and a new arable field is cleared nearby. Much later on the first patch might again be put to arable use, but only after a long cycle had left significant brushwood growing on it and restored most of the soil’s fertility. Farmers also try to maintain fertility on existing arable land, such as the use of marl as a soil improver.

 

A cultural understanding of the world these people have, has been inferentially linked to the assemblage of land-based resources being used to support some kind of extended family unit. The resources of each household support practices we call mixed farming. Although arable is important, so too is livestock, significantly more so than in stereotypical Heartlander agriculture. Northern peoples show greater preference for cattle and pig and less for the sheep and goats favored by southerners. Cattle and pigs are well adapted to open woodlands and woodland edges. The cattle browse on leaves and other herbage while omnivorous pigs root from the deep soil the many things they like. I have found in my short time of shepherding the Koravian Greys and Markevian cattle to Karoslund, their quick affinity to the environment not too dissimilar from the northern reaches of the Karoswoods of home.

 

Norn material culture rests primarily on wood. Habitations are made from logs or more commonly vertical planks set into the soil. So too were fortifications. Over wide areas of Norland stone can be difficult to obtain and work, while wood is abundant. Building settlements and clearing land around the farmsteads opens up the woodland, forming edge habitat where sun-loving berries and various fruit trees multiply. As domestic animals use the woodland for pasture, it is further opened up. This changes the species composition in the woodland. Another adaptation to climatic moisture, the agriculturalists of the Norns seem to use symmetrical ploughs and have developed ways of handling this equipment to help manage water on their fields. Rather than just crumbling the surface and leaving it behind the track of the plough, they manipulate the tool to pick up some of the soil and move it somewhat to one side. Then by ploughing in a concentric path round and round a parcel they can push the soil in a predetermined direction. Used consistently over time the practice produces a slightly domed cross section, called ridge-and-furrow, with the soil in the middle of the parcel being higher and drier than that on the periphery, which would be marginally wetter. The ploughman gains some insurance: in an especially dry year the plants down in the furrow might still yield and in a wet year those a bit higher can do better. Ploughing these furrows also channels runoff, making it possible in the high precipitation zones to drain some excess water from the field. Southern farmers rarely wish to move precious water off their fields, but in the north a waterlogged soil threatens germination. Norn agriculturalists have also developed a garden culture that focuses on cool-season plants - cabbages, onions, roots, some of the legumes that will grow in the coolish winters, very similar to the ones favored by the people of the former Kingdom of Hanseti-Ruska. 

 

What people eat determines very importantly how they use land, but what people eat itself derives as much from cultural expectations as from physiological needs. In an agricultural society diet is the main driver of land use, but the intermediary between diet and land use is power, whether that power comes from a legal or coercive authority or from the sheer force of numbers of individuals who may be relatively powerless taken on at a time. People exercising either the power of numbers or that of legitimate or illegitimate coercion determine land use and thus construct their landscapes. A good first approach considers whether people eat bread and meat or not. Northern living calls for more energy than living in the south, and northern cultures are distinctly more carnivorous than the southern ones. But the choice of bread and meat is often more a matter of wealth and status than simply where a person lives, what they can afford, and what is needed for nutritional purposes. Elites want meat and elites want white bread. To elites' bread is an essential sign of being civilized. Wheat or rye bread is an established essentiality in Canon life. So, too, are breads acknowledged as the best vegetable food for humans. Humours define bread grain as the only cereal both warm and most. Other grains are either cool and moist or warm and dry. For the human body is also warm and moist, so a person who consumes a warm and moist cereal properly nourishes the body. If one would build up a human body and its vital blood, one eats bread if one could. Peasants eat cereals, too, and collectively in vast quantities, but not so much bread. Peasants eat porridge and peasants drink ale. Peasants' cereals go into these more fluid forms. Their cereals are more commonly barley, oats, millet, spelt, and other such grains. Cereals provide the cheapest calories; raising cereals supports more consumers at the subsistence level. Hence there is an elite cultural thrust towards cereal production and there is a growing mass cultural, actually nutritional, thrust for cereal production to meet the needs of lesser folk. Culture and nutrition together propel the trend of ‘cerealization’, with cereal grains gaining a larger role in the diet and in the agrarian regime. The move towards grain eating calls for greater emphasis on arable land in the agricultural sector. More land is put to the plough. The large scale of this has been seen in the arrival of the Haeseni diaspora that arrived in Norland, with the lack of developed housing and arable land, there has been a rush of infrastructural development, the clearing of woodlands and the sprouting of seed to accommodate the refugees.

 

Peasant farmers tend nevertheless to retain large pastures as they are obliged to provide so much grain to their lords that they lack further surplus to feed livestock. As livestock energies and excrements provide essential inputs to the peasant production system, peasant communities are desperate to keep land for their animals to graze. Elites who keep their carnivorous habits provide another force countervailing cerealization. Notably retaining a gourmands delight in flesh from the tastiest, fattiest, juiciest young animals. The noble elite can be seen as ‘top predators’, for they eat only the very best animals and lots of them. That consumption pattern means men of power are interested in continued production of certain kinds of animals, which also shapes management of land and configures the landscape. Assertion of elite interests in specific foods can also be recognized as driving changes in land use and peasant agricultural operations. We’ve watched in the centuries as free independent peasant farmers, who practice a variety of agro pastoral activities and consume a diverse diet of plant and animal products, cereal grains and other foods. Are taken over by professional fighters, to the detriment of the farmers. They lose lands to their new lords, an elite-centered spatial structure pulls peasants, willingly or not, to the forts where the militarily dominant group lives. Peasants now pay rents for the lands they work and dues for certain activities. The elite's diet will feature heavy consumption of protein and fat, mainly meat such as pork and white bread made out of wheat. It is a way to display status: the man who matters shows off on his table a tender pork joint and white bread to sop up the juices. Requirements to produce that diet are then imposed upon the peasants, forcing them to focus on cereal culture so as to provide. Farmers are pressed towards reduced diversity in their own production and hence in their own diets. Their agricultural system becomes more susceptible to crop failure and their diets simultaneously degrade.

 

What people decide they want to eat, the power they have to obtain what they want, and the effect on land use of the enforced decisions shape the encounter of humans and nature in an agrarian society. Bread and meat, power and numbers, together drives the transformation of our landscapes. As a result of demand and pressure, that is humans expending resources to meet their wants and needs, landscapes are reconfigured all across Aevos. The largest single form of such transformation, arguably the biggest single human force on our environment, is the large-scale process of clearance and intensification in agriculture that is primarily oriented towards the production of cereals. Most of what follows examines the process: first the great clearance of the woodlands of northern Aevos, then the parallel intensification of cereal production on southern landscapes earlier and differently transformed and under distinctive physical conditions. Additionally, drainage of wetlands in both north and south serves to create more land to plough for cereals. All these material developments correspond with normative cultural disparagement of people who did not focus on cereal production and thus know proper civilized behavior. All such cultural and material construction of landscapes involves an interplay of lords’ power and peasants’ work while creating micro-ecologies all across Aevos.

 

The landscape of northern Aevos is being transformed. What has been mostly covered with multi-use woodland, including parcels that were for short periods of time used as farmland and then left to go back to woods, then becomes permanent arable land. Simultaneously human settlements shift from the small and transitory hamlets to large and stable villages. The process of clearance is no simple matter of cutting trees. Taking down trees to use the wood has always been a normal practice. What is done is called assarting, meaning people grubb trees and shrubs out of the soil, pulling them up by the roots, ripping them from the ground so they can put a plough into that ground. One cannot plough where one has just cut down trees. Roots and stumps will break the plough and then grow back into a woodland. Even with the help of fire, people have to tear the trees out one at a time by muscle power, open the soil surface for plough agriculture, and convert the land from woodland to arable fields. The transformation of these wooden landscapes is accomplished in important part through the diffusion of improved agricultural equipment and techniques oriented to the production of cereals on heavy damp soils. The tool here is a heavy mouldboard plough which has been known in the north probably for some time but had been used only in very local circumstances. Upon the arrival of the Haeseni it is now being spread through most of the area as they bring their agricultural innovations to the region. Essential operational features include handles for steering and a beam on which are mounted a vertical knife and a horizontal wedge-shaped ‘share’. These metal blades together cut a slice from the soil. An angled or curved mouldboard follows to turn that slice over. The heavy mouldboard plough does not just crumble the soil surface as the lighter ploughs you’d see in Burgundy, but it digs into the ground, picks up the soil, and turns it over. This action helps drain wet soils and further lifts the soluble plant nutrients that humid northern conditions leach downwards, returning them to the surface where they can be reached by the relatively shallow roots of annual grasses such as cereal grains. At the same time, by turning a furrow the ploughman is able to control drainage in the field, guiding surface water in a preferred direction or off the field entirely. Especially on heavy soils all of this is much more easily achieved with the heavy mouldboard plough. The heavy plough has, however, technical, hence economic and environmental, implications. As compared with a lighter tool it calls for a stronger draught team: the ploughman has to put more oxen into pulling it and therefore has to have a larger herd or to pool his oxen with those of another. However, keeping more animals requires more fodder to maintain them. There is always tension: more land to plough means more animals to pull and feed. As such the curation of the Koravians cattle species are an invaluable arrival in the north as the ever expansive herds of Markevian cattle pull ploughs across the arable fields of Karoslund, while the Koravian Greys enjoy the shrubbery of the woods.

 

The need for additional fodder can be met through another technical innovation with great power to shape the landscape. This is the practice of arable management best labelled the ‘three-course rotation’ employable on any number of fields. Southern agriculture typically adapts to the region’s perennial shortage of water by farming a parcel one year and then resting it the next, using the fallow to gather two years of water for the next crop of winter grain. The north has a wetter climate and heavier soils; water shortage is not the critical factor. Northern soils can grow grain two years out of three, carrying Snow’s Maiden grain for a year, harvesting in First Seed, leaving the stubble on the land until the following Horen’s Welcome, then ploughing and planting grains which will be harvest later in Amber Cold, and then resting the land for a year while ploughing the fallow to deal with weeds and leached nutrients. Hence northern practice can move from the two-course alternation between winter grains and fallow to a three-course rotation of winter grain-spring grain-fallow on any given piece of land. It means the land produces for two years in three rather than one in two, raising overall output. The spring grains are particularly oats and barley. Barley is the main ingredient for porridge and for beer, beer is essentially a somewhat more liquid porridge with fairly low alcohol content fermented in it. While calories are lost in fermentation, brewing makes good use of stored grain. Barley, and oats, too, can feed horses as well as humans, though neither make genuine bread. But making a three-course rotation work requires year-round moisture; it cannot operate under normal southern conditions where the summer drought kills spring-sown crops.

 

These innovations improve adaptation to northern production conditions. People are adjustingly more knowledgeable to the world in which we all live, gaining more grain while retaining pasture, too. Both during the seven months or so of the fallow year and the three or four between harvest of the winter grain and the next spring’s sowing, animals can go on the field to eat weeds and stubble and to drop their manure. This system incorporates pasture into the permanent arable. This, too, seems to be advantageous on heavy soils where moisture is available year round. Hence under the right conditions of climate, topography, and soil, the whole arrangement produces more crops per hectare per year than the two-course rotations or the infield-outfield regimen used on the light soils of southern realms situated in warmer climates. This new regime is a great deal of more work. It requires more work from the draught animals and more work from the humans. People will have to work more months of the year, more weeks of the month, and more days of the week to make this system produce. Why would a peasant want to do that? What motivates the agricultural clearances and transformation of Norlands landscapes? The answer is that peasants come under pressure. Pressure comes from subsistence needs: growing families that embodies the rising Norlandic population upon the arrival of the Haeseni diaspora that now have more mouths to feed. Pressures can come because lords coerce peasants, can demand crops or labour from them, and enforce those demands through the threat and exercise of violence. But peasants can also determine to work harder on positive grounds, the wish to operate more land and produce more crops, particularly if some local markets might be accessible. If a larger output generates a surplus of cereals in particular, they can exchange the surplus for other desired goods that are not easily produced on a subsistence farm. The pressures that lords might exert varies with what the lord seeks to gain. A lord wishing to increase his own cereal production by putting more labour on his demesne pushes peasants in one direction. If the lord wants rather to obtain more cereals without providing more supervision, the push is for peasants to produce grain rents, preferably wheat and not barley. In other circumstances a lord with much land that is not being used very much might have more interest in getting somebody to work it and provide him with some kind of income. A lord's decision to extract more labor, or more bread, or just any additional income strongly influences the kinds of pressures lords put on peasants and thus how the process of clearance and intensification takes place and relevant institutional structures take shape. The result is different landscape adaptations depending on local soils, on what local lords are demanding, and on regional social, political, and economic conditions, all across the vast area as the people clear woodlands and create grain fields in their place. In the course of these past few years, after the devastating but brief Second Aevos Coalition War, the formerly empty area northwest of Vjardengrad was opened up and settled by the Haeseni diaspora. What was once a few barns in the woods has now been deforested and developed into a proper rooting of civilization within the wilderness.

 

As humanity sets out to transform the landscape largely as sites for producing cereals, but also for non-cereal agricultures, and even on ground that have little at all to do with material outputs. Yet in all instances we’ve colonized nature to create new anthropogenic ecosystems. The interventions have deep environmental effects. Human actors mean to bring about environmental change and accomplish their purpose, but building the new agroecosystems also have unintended consequences. The intent in the clearance of woodlands, drainage of marshes, and irrigation of dry land is human colonization of natural systems. In ecological terms, the purpose is to create new niches where humans can capture a larger share of primary biological production. In order to obtain what we define as food, we’ve replaced old natural ecosystems with low annual productivity relative to the standing biomass of long-lived organisms (mainly trees) with new artificial ecosystems containing a lower biomass of short-lived pioneer plants (mainly grasses). With the transformation from relatively natural to the more anthropogenic, a high diversity of producing and consuming organisms gives way to a low diversity, ideally a monoculture, of annual cereal grains. A once diverse and complicated food web is replaced with a short food chain comprising a few domestic herbivores and many, mainly plant-eating because mainly peasant, humans. Such ecosystems with low diversity of short-lived organisms and truncated food webs are characteristically unstable. They require continued inputs of energy to keep them at the pioneer stage. Annual grasses grow on bare dirt. They live for a year or two, they cover the soil, and then in nature they are succeeded by other kinds of plants. Those who would keep on growing cereal grasses have to keep taking the land back to the bare dirt. Intensive cereal growing demands more human labor and more natural plant nutrients throughout the annual production cycle than earlier more loosely manipulated mixed agropastoralism.

 

Very large unintended consequences accompany the creation of the new agroecosystems. The very process of cutting and uprooting trees and converting open woods to permanent fields destabilizes relations between soil, plants, and water. Trees have been removed that once grew along the mountain slopes and the loss of woody cover results in more rapid and erratic runoff. Streams now alternate seasonally between springtime floods and dry beds in summer droughts. This is due to the clearances. An erratic runoff regime is simply the first element in a causal chain connected to transformation of the landscape. Human colonization on new lands and intensification of production on old ones initiates and accelerates large-scale soil erosion and deposition. The unintended results affect new landscapes even at some distance from the sites of direct human intervention. Broken vegetative cover coupled with soil and nutrient loss exposes large expanses of soil surface for seasonal removal. This most often occurs by water which then deposits the sediment further downstream. A three-course rotation leaves approximately four months between the time a winter grain is harvested and a new spring course planted. It is about seven months from the harvest of a spring grain, through the year of fallow, until sowing of winter grain on that field. Were that fallow left bare and open, and especially were it ploughed, the soil surface will become vulnerable to being washed away by precipitation and the ensuing flow of water. Pioneer farms are especially susceptible to environmental degradation because newcomers lack familiarity with local factors of risk. Settlers undertake to transform their environment and necessarily undergo an adaptation process while learning the limits of their new home, its climate, soils, plants, animals, and even micro-organisms of which they may be totally unaware. Commonly one well-attested result is major erosion in recently cleared regions. Here in Karoslund as we try to adapt to the tests of these new lands and get accustomed to its flora and fauna, it is but a constant balancing act of trying to flourish in our survival and not destroy the ecosystem we are yet to be accustomed too. A switch from woodland to permanent fields alters the runoff regime, which affects soil erosion and deposition, and all this affects the habitat for animals. Loss of woody vegetation transforms terrestrial habitats and alters carrying capacity for wild and domestic beasts. An overview of the landscape formation finds a process driven by the wants and needs of the few powerful and of the many poor. The process - call it colonization - transforms Aevos into a mosaic of artificial ecosystems, most of them designed to maximize cereal production. Grain fields interspersed with meadow, pasture, and large permanent villages replaced earlier mixed-density multi-use woodland where scattered islands of arable fields had supported small, dispersed, and generationally transient human settlements. Both cultural and economic, particularly cultural and natural conditions result in local and regional diversity of great historical longevity.

 

Livestock - cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, and poultry, too - are essential and ubiquitous elements in all agroecosystems. But pastoral arrangements also exist independently of the strong arable orientation, constituting a different kind of adaptation to resources and nature but also to links with other societies. Pastoral groups and livestock-based enterprises likely succeed only when they can operate in exchange with more agricultural societies, especially cereal producers. Mixed farming entails metabolic flows within the system between animals and the fields, crops, and people. For those who are livestock-centered, comparable flows are less internal and more between them and other societies. The animals that are reared and the products of those animals moved elsewhere, and notably food in the form of grain comes reciprocally to the pastoralists. So animal keepers who may be viewed as primitive and simple are in fact commonly in exchanges between societies as complex as those elsewhere internal to mixed farming systems. There are three relations of herds to space: local herds, i.e. animals that do not move very far in the course of their lifetime; patterns of transhumance in which animals may move dozens and up to hundreds of miles repeatedly during their lives; and situations involving open-range livestock that in some respects fit between the former groupings and in others respond to quite different variable. Local herds contain domestic animals that live and die within a space of perhaps a day’s journey, a dozen or so miles, always under the control of more or less the same people. This applies in the first place to the livestock of those mixed farming peasants. These are the beasts, draught stock, perhaps sheep, that will be put on the common pasture and make common use of stubble and fallow. They are sedentary. In some places they feed largely on rough pasture, stubble, and weeds. In others, depending on resource endowments and uses, much of their fodder comes in the form of hay. Hay is produced from meadows, places where grasses grow sufficiently that they can be cut, dried, and so kept for future use in that location or to feed animals elsewhere. Meadows are natural growth, not sown crops. They are characteristically associated with wetlands, small river floodplains, and some upland sites.

 

Grazing on common pasture, which ranges from the stubble field through wild herbaceous growth, small bushes, even to woodlands, the animals of a given village community are typically under the care of a common herdsman. Households do not send out someone to look after their own fed head of animals. Rather the community organizes itself so that one individual gathers up the beasts from where they have spent the night, puts them on the pasture, and watches over them during the course of the day. These mixed herds of sheep, cattle, and draught horses when they are not working; pigs might or might not be included. The animals are taken to their forage, then often ‘folded’ on the fallow overnight. A temporary enclosure on the fallow causes the entire herd to leave its droppings there and thus return nutrients to the arable fields. Excrement left on pasture escapes the arable cycle; that from animals kept in stables or barns are the responsibility and resource of the owner. The livestock of mixed farming peasants is one kind of local herd important for animal production, but whole agro pastoral societies also focus on local uses of livestock. Koravian communities have long continued to live using agro pastoral adaptations that elsewhere have generally been thought as characteristics of earlier times when animals have had greater roles in the resource mix than they do now in arable farming. Koravians cultivate the better land in protected and well-drained valleys, while keeping numerous cattle, goats, and sheep to provide dairy foods of great cultural and dietary importance, as well as meat, fibres, and leather. The last two products constitute valued exports. The animals winter at the farmstead and in summer move short distances to pasture in open upland woods.

 

Pastoralism, though normally practiced on land always or seasonally unsuited or unneeded for arable farming, still entails potentially large environmental impacts. The pasturing of large herbivores changes a plant community. Some forage plants react to grazing by dying and others by sprouting and producing ever more biomass. Effects also differ with the variety of livestock, for cattle, sheep, goats, and horses prefer to eat different plants and plant parts. Again, the plant varieties respond differently to this pressure. Additional consequences arise when large numbers of animals are imposed on the landscape, for their hooves will compact certain soils, further affecting which plants will continue to grow there and the amount or speed of runoff. Hooves may alternatively churn up the soil surface and so open it up for erosion. Introducing meaningful numbers of animals into a landscaper thus triggers a whole array of potential ecological consequences. Livestock are ecological connectors. Animals link humans and the cereal culture on one side and woodland or open pasture on the other. They help form the ecological relationships wherein agriculturalists and consumers make use of the biosphere.

 

The availability of four general kinds of resources, namely forage, fuel, raw materials, and timber, influences how humans colonize and manage woodlands. In the first place, woodland provides forage for animals: wood pasture is open to grazing animals which eat new growth, low branches, and as far up as they can reach. Goats can climb trees to reach their browse; cattle and sheep do not. A wood grazed by cattle is visually distinctive for its absence of ground cover and any still succulent branches less than about two meters from the ground. Wood pasture is also exploited by humans going out and cutting ‘leafy hay’, green branches that are then dried and used like hay for feed and bedding. Secondly, woodland is critically important to society for providing fuel as wood or as charcoal. Wood and charcoal are primary sources of heat and energy for our societies. Something of relevant note is that neither fuel wood nor charcoal typically come from full-grown trees. Big trees are too cumbersome to handle; they have to be laboriously cut up or hauled in great weight and bulk out of the woods for use elsewhere. Fuel wood and charcoal are made from branches cut from trees or out of smaller woody plants, stems of fingers to an arm’s thickness. Conveniently portable bundles of fuel wood provide good heat or are burnt nicely to charcoal, which is easier to transport. Woodland provides raw materials. From what grows in woodlands people make baskets, wicker, woven fences, wattle to hold plaster in a wall, and carve or carpenter useful objects of various sizes and scales. Also, from the woodlands people gather plants that meet dietary needs, yield dyestuffs and medicines, and serve a wide array of other purposes. Because, unlike the hard parts of animals, uncarbonized woody material quickly decays in damp northern soils. Finally, woodlands are the source of timber, meaning large beams, whole massive parts of big trees, the sort of material used to farm large human structures such as houses, castles, cathedrals, trebuchets, city gates, mills, or ships. Even regions that build largely in stone or brick have great need for construction timber and go to considerable effort to obtain it. Timber has to be hauled: the oak post for a windmill, or a ship’s mast or ridge pole. It takes heavy animal draught power to move such an object overland from a place in the woods where it has to grow to another place where it is to be put to use. A nearby body of water flowing in the desired direction is most welcome. Rafting of timber often occurs along the large rivers of Aevos, from the rivers Lahy and Dules of home. To lake Ancelie of Norland in which they may flow down the river Petra or Leitha. Elaborate rules have been developed for floating timber because the logs drive endangered riverside facilities and transient drive crews pose social and legal problems. Log drives are an important part of the way humans organize their use of woodland, to accomplish these valued uses of woodland requires know-how. Someone has to be familiar with the baits of trees and apply skill to their growth and harvest. That body of traditional ecological knowledge is called woodmanship - the knowledge and techniques for managing trees, whether by cutting them or by otherwise using them and still keeping the woodland going. Most traditional woodmanship is very much directed towards sustainable use. Woodmanship always applies specific purpose and orients to particular tree varieties. Managers and workers in woodlands handle different kinds of woods differently and for different results.

 

The woodman’s technique called coppice takes advantage of the fact that most broadleaf species will sprout from a stump. You can cut the tree and have it, too, for it sprouts again. From these shoots will come a continual crop of rods, poles, or logs depending on the interval of years the manager will wait until they are cut again. Management of woods as coppice are important as land under tree cover shrinks and demand for wood proliferates with the population and its material culture. Coppice offers the possibility of sustained production of a regular annual yield of raw materials and of fuel, for coppice wood makes good bundles and charcoal. Rather than coppicing, some tree genera ‘sucker’: elms, aspens, and cherries need no stump but can be cut to the ground and will sprout from the surrounding roots to the same effect in ten-year coppice cycles. For all its sustainable aspects, coppice management has ecological impact. Long-term coppice brings regular human activity to the woodland, cutting and removing the crop. This traffic tends to compact the soil. Coppice weakens some tree species, which fail to survive more than two or three rounds of cutting and regrowth. Beech, for instance, gives up and dies, changing the species composition of the woodland. A coppice wood typically contains no trees any older than the coppice cycle being followed; there is no old-growth ancient woodland. Everything is small and brushy. It is a thoroughly colonized landscape, though still indubitably a wooded one.

 

A further risk with coppice is the attraction of tender new woody growth to browning animals. Animals must be excluded from a coppice, or they will eat all the sprouts and the trees will die. Coppice cannot, therefore, be combined with wood pasture. Small wood and forage are incompatible outputs. The alternative is to pollard, a technique involving cutting the tree further up the trunk, just above the reach of a browsing animal. Pollarding involves more human work and danger, swinging an axe atop a ladder. But then the sprouts come from above and animals can still browse below. A ‘shredded tree’ offers a further variant, providing the same protection as the pollard and timber production as well. By climbing the tree to cut branches for leafy hay the tree is left to grow, albeit more slowly. It provides a way to produce fodder, fuel, timber, and other raw materials, while still allowing pasturing livestock below, if at much greater labor cost. Not incidentally, this discussion of managing hardwood trees for continual harvest has only mentioned using an axe. Almost all cutting of standing trees is carried out with an axe or comparable blade and not with a saw. Carpenters, shipwrights, and other woodworkers have saws, but as soon as people became worried about possible overexploitation of woodlands or illegal taking of wood, saws were banned from woodlands. Compared with an axe, the ringing blows of which resound a considerable distance in the woods, the silent saw lets a poacher sneak about and purloin timber or firewood undetected. An uncommonality of woodsmanship is the planting of trees, whether as seed or as seedlings. Illatian peoples have helped spread chestnuts as a semi-wild food source. Otherwise, plantation forestry is of little use within the south but has been introduced for wood production by both Auvergnians and Reinmarens. Plantations are unnecessary in order to work with broadleaf trees managed as coppice, pollard, or shredded trees or left to mature until harvested as selected ‘standards’ for timber. It is needed if managing conifers which, with the exception of yew and juniper, do not sprout again when cut. Conifers are a relatively unimportant component of vegetation communities and most woodlands, especially those to the north of Aevos, they’re rarely managed for them. Only when timber production becomes the primary concern do conifers become central, for timber is what these trees most easily yield. Different purposes for woodlands call for different choices and different strategies.

 

The long-term trend in woodland management moves from multiple uses, that is to say extensive diverse woods with multiple uses of wooded parcels, towards management for an intensive but limited use - one wood to produce fuel, another pasture, etc. the trend away from multiple uses and towards a single use generates conflict between uses and among users. A peasant community reliant on traditional wood pasture for their livestock opposes a lord for whom coppicing for fuel and raw material production promises greater returns. But disputes also arise within peasant society because households require fuel too. Other struggles set lords who seek income from their woodland against peasants who need the whole mix of common resources to meet household requirements for fuel, building, and gathering resources. Agreements, contracts, or judicial decisions establish the right of a possessor of a whole farm in a village to take a limited number of timber trees - as selected by the lord’s forester - to repair a dwelling but forbid such a householder from taking wood to sell. A whole array of intensified management arises when the resources become scarce. Remember, however, that complaints about wood shortage may really indicate that the complainant thinks their wood is getting too costly, whether from competition among users or increasing distance of transports. Big trees remain but they grow ever further away and so become ever more expensive. Mere grumblings about wood shortages does not mean there are no longer woods, only not enough flow of wood product to satisfy someone at a price they are prepared to pay. The woods remain, especially in the north of Norland of which the characteristic has been a pattern of clearance and then sustained use of remaining woodlands. Of which contracts with the southern patterns of cyclical overexploitation, abandonment, and regrowth. In both regions, however, possessors and users of woodland and its products adjust to perceived limits on their resources.

 

One kind of wood pasture feeds not domestic cows, pigs, or sheep, but game animals, deer and boar. Some woodland habitats support furbearers: squirrel, beaver, water rat, wild cats of several kinds, mustelids, fox, wolf, and bear. All these living things have their uses for society, too. Terrestrial hunting is at times relatively unimportant for subsistence purposes. Wildfires do not by and large serve human dietary needs. Most people rarely hunt for food, but hunting maintains immense cultural importance. It is a key part of elite leisure and serves to demonstrate superior social status. Hunting also has interesting significance as a luxury economic enterprise supplying fur garments for personal use and, again, a visible claim to be elevated social rank. Both the hunt and furs make animals signs of something else. Woodlands are large enough that furbearers from them seem important. With huntsmen and local acquisition of furs but overhunting and habitat destruction in the form of great clearances have damaging effects on wildlife populations. Fur-bearers are depleted or extirpated. As more people colonize out into the wilderness, beavers, wild cats and other larger animals disappear and are only to be found in the most remote and rough uplands. The luxury fur trade has shifted to the north of Aevos, in which Norland has become the source for the largest quantity of furs, mostly squirrel skins along with fashionably rich and dark furs from various members of the weasel family. The south itself substitutes itself on rabbits. The first rabbits were reared in protected ‘warrens’. Fearing for these fragile little habitual burrowers, their keepers in the damp north put them on dry sandy soils or build them a light earthen mound for protection. When needed, rabbits are dug out, killed for the tender meat, and the skins used to line garments of lesser, but still well-off folk, especially townspeople. Rabbit provides an alternative to fur from feral domestic cats. Meanwhile the rabbits, having adapted ever more successfully to their new habitats, themselves have gone from feral and have spread all over Aevos. At the same time the native members of the related family, hares seem to have dwindled and, in some areas, disappeared.

 

Elite infatuation with the hunt as a recreation and display of status has motivated royal creations of special privileged jurisdictions called ‘forests. A forest is no woodland, but a legally protected area for managed game. Forests - were established by monarchs for whom hunting was a favored pastime and a manifestation of their royal power. The term and concept have carried across the world. Many follow the model of the royal forests, some aristocrats creating private parks for the same purpose. In forests and parks hunting holds priority over other forms of land use. While other activities might be permitted, even frequent, they are always meant to defer to the needs of the hunt. The forest or park is a distinctive sort of managed landscape, not wilderness but more a pasture growing game rather than livestock. Its vegetation is meant to feed the game, mainly deer and wild boar, its landscape is shaped to facilitate the hunt. With scattered trees and small groves, relatively sparse woodland often designated as parkland. Allowing the mounted hunters to see and pursue the quarry and to be seen and admired by spectators. The hunt is a ceremonial social act of display, initially by a prince, always by a great man. Surrounded by their huntsmen, dogs, and retinue of lesser nobles, the lord demonstrates through elaborate and bloody social ritual their identity, superiority, and prestige. Other hunts are undertaken by the princes' huntsmen and forest-keepers in obedience to orders to harvest deer for a great feast. The forest is thus a managed game preserve used for the production and hunting of semi-wild animals. The environmental effects of forests and parks are, on one hand, protective of the wild: certain habitats are retained and consumptive use of wildlife regulated by severe penalties against illegitimate taking. The effects are also destructive in several ways. Concentrations of game animals modify plant succession just as herds of livestock. Management and pursuit of animals for trophy kills means no concern for expending more energy than the quarry may yield. In this way the hunter does not behave as a natural predator and pursue the most numerous accessible prey but may rather select and chase rare animals to the point of extermination. Such prized game as bear, wolf, and wild pig are extirpated from lands.

 

The use of aquatic wildlife is in a different cultural context from the terrestrial, but the results are parallel. Water-dwelling animals, generically ‘fish’, matter for eating and only marginally for recreation. There is a fairly heavy exploitation of local aquatic ecosystems everywhere, both freshwater and inshore saltwater, for immediate consumption or short-term preservation. Fast smoking or salting can keep freshly caught fish good enough to eat for a few weeks. Peasants seeking their own subsistence do some of the work of fishing, but a larger share is done by full-time fishers who serve their lords but also go to markets to sell. With the rise of populations, the now-familiar pattern of clearance and soil erosion, along with urbanization all have had unintended consequences of driving depletion and destruction of limited natural inland fish populations. There is a constant imbalance between supply and demand. Fishing pressure shrinks the size of favorite varieties due to long-term consumption. Though humans have responded to these perceived shortages of familiar foods. Fisheries which have once been more or less common or open are increasingly privatized, brought under the firm control of lords who lease access at market rates to commercial fishers. The market sector expands to distribute fish to those who have had the wherewithal to buy. Rulers who claim authority over large bodies of water such as big rivers or large inland lakes begin to regulate those fisheries with an aim to preserve fish populations, limit the catch, and allocate it among various users by restricting the size of fish taken and the types of gear employed. Though at the same time expanding fisheries on marine frontiers where the pressure is slighter. The expansion targets certain abundant species that available techniques of drying, salting, and bringing can preserve in bulk for later consumption elsewhere. Such fish are herring and cod, sardines and hake to be found along The Bay of Seals or Hakon’s Maw of which major commercial fisheries have developed to catch and exploit the sea life of Norlands coastal waters. Just as dried cod and brined herrings spread to markets across Aevos, tuna flesh is cooked, barreled in brine, and sent south to Petra and Numendil, along with other cities across the world.

 

The assault also targets marine mammals, prized for their oil, tough hides, and flesh rated best among the ‘fish’, as it most resembles terrestrial meat. Opportune finds or captures of beached whales and attacks on accessible seal colonies in the bay. The Norns seem to be proud sealers working systematically across their maritime coasts, in a hunt for other creatures such as walrus or even the hunt of whales. The perceived shortage of fish also leads to purposeful environmental modification. There may be the construction of artificial pond structures to grow fish on landed estates or fuel the proliferation to rear species such as common carp. Domesticated carp are reared especially in artificial aquaculture enterprises to provide fresh fish to inland elites, the well-off who are too far from the sea to obtain fresh marine fish. Whole headwater streams are dammed and diverted to fill ponds of eventually hundreds of hectares, creating stillwater habitats where few had previously existed and further blocking the runs of native migratory fishes. Like rabbits, carp established feral populations too. An overview of humans exploiting their living environment reveals common patterns of human need - which drives uses in general and each specific use, of potential destruction, of conflict over use - and of efforts to manage. At regional and local scale, the diversity of Aevos’s natural ecosystem calls for indeed, helps create, specific local knowledge and social adaptations, for all that each rest on similar principles both ecological and socio-cultural. The latter means programmes and actions always serve the interests of people with power more than they do others or the environment itself. Still the colonization's of natural biological resources - from the cereal economy, through the sheep, to the coppice woods, to the rabbits, and the fish - often retain some sense of real natural limits, even when pushing against or beyond them.

 

 

FROM COLONIZATION OF PRIMARY BIOLOGICAL PRODUCTION IN AGRICULTURE. Woodlands, and other biota, we turn to the use and sustainability of mainly non-living parts of the environment. It begins with closer study of the energy basis for all society. There follow issues related to inorganic material resources, particularly mining and metallurgy, and then the wholly anthropogenic artificial ecosystems that are cities. Having observed the flux throughout. Energy is costly and always short in supply; society cannot pour cheap and abundant energy onto our intractable problems. Expending energy is not the first option and oftentimes not even the last. Energy is sparse; it has to be hoarded. Nearly all energy that we can command comes from capturing of the wind to torque our windmills or for instance, the kinetic energy of flowing water is then converted to mechanical energy in a water wheel. Energy is stored in mechanical form in a crossbow cocked by a soldier’s muscles and in a bundle of firewood. Although in each instance it then must be released in some other way. Work occurs only when energy is converted, through the mechanical and physical energy of moving air and water. The muscle power of humans and animals comes from our consumption of food, the energy that plants have captured for days, months, or at most years earlier. Almost nothing we eat has existed for more than a few months, at most a couple of years. Food is not stored very long, even a sausage made from flesh is of a very old plough ox, which still may retain some energy from year-old hay it had eaten as a calf, offering a store of energy. Humans, oxen, horses, donkeys, or any other organism that does draught work in society, converts into their own power the energy we digest. The rest of it serves to maintain the life cycle of ourselves as an organism. The perpetual struggle against friction means that even hitching many people or draught animals to add up their power eventually reaches limits that derive from the sheer weight of all the necessary harnesses. There are inherent constraints to the quantity and weight, the sheer mass, that can be moved using the muscle power that is the principal primer of our society. There is an advantage in the use of mechanical power by reducing its speed and thus slowly moving greater weights. Wheels on wagons will, if the situation makes rolling friction less than dragging friction, gain great efficiencies. But without a surface that has been flattened and made smooth and hard, wheels help little. Every cartload or pack sack, every plough, harrow, or weaver’s shuttle, every load of spices, firewood, water, or manure used by people is moved over the ground by human and animal muscle power. The food - and fodder-producing systems are essential energy producers for movement of bodies and materials.

 

Where muscle power works using energy captured through the consumption of foods in a relatively short time span of at most a few years, burning a fairly old tree releases energy that it has captured maybe a hundred years earlier; coppice-grown fuel is, of course, much younger. Though how exactly these plants capture their energy is a particularly difficult notion to grasp. We all maintain the basic understanding that all plants require sunlight to grow, each with their own different preference for how much sunlight they need to grow in the best of conditions. The sun then could be acclaimed to be the source of all energy, at least that of our muscles for it fuels the growth of plants we may consume, or the plants animals will consume for we will then consume after. However, while I can explain how wind or water may push an object to derive its kinetic energy. I’ve never come across a reason as to how the sun provides this energy and as to how plants use it to grow, mayhap such is a secret Godan wishes to keep from us. Deemed unworthy to ascertain all of which are his gifts of life. The burning of wood provides heating and cooking, a household of four or five people will average just less than five tons per year, with significant regional differences from about one point five tons in Balian to ten or more tons in Norland and areas of colder climate. Fuel costs for these subsistence purposes are genuinely high; this wood has to be obtained in one way or another. It is expensive in money, exchange value, or labor time. It means that ordinary people tend to cook on very small fires and that most buildings are chilly at best except in the warm months of the south. Heating is accomplished with a small hearth made of stone, bricks, ceramics, or similar fire-resistant material. The small brazier is typical, a portable metal grill where some fuel can be burned and moved around to heat the space being occupied at a given time. These serve most southern buildings including very large palaces. Fireplaces, which enable a bigger fire and remove the smell and smoke from the room, are a northern innovation, associated with elite structures, particularly castles that have become more of residences, less purely fortifications. While some fireplaces appear in monasteries, by and large they are a lay development. Yet a fireplace loses most of its heat up the flute with the smoke. A more efficient heating device is the brick or tile stove, what Reinmarans call a Kachelofen. This technology originated in Hanseti-Ruska, it is a combustion chamber sealed away from the occupied space, both drawing air from and venting to the outside. The burning fuel heats the air and the ceramic cladding around the chamber and this fills the room. These highly efficient devices can produce significant quantities of heat. Otherwise, if people feel chilly, they have to cram more of them into a small space or live under the same roof, perhaps in the same room, as their livestock. Dwellings designed for the latter purpose developed among the Norns.

 

The perpetual need for fuel means all kinds and sizes of wood can serve. Any combustible such as straw. Lacking other use and protection is potential fuel, especially if it was nearby and reasonably dry. Dry wood makes a vastly superior fuel, for it lasts longer than green wood in its purpose. Most wood is collected dry by breaking off or picking up dead limbs or else harvested for fuel use but then stored for a year or more to dry it to gain more heat and burning time. It is no surprise that both peasant and urban communities with access to woodlands jealously guard their right to go in and acquire fuel by gathering dead branches or in some instances actually cutting trees, as potentially wasteful as the latter expedient might be. Wood provides the vitally important energy source necessary for space heating and for cooking. Besides setting cut wood aside to dry, the other possible treatment is to convert it into charcoal, an extremely good fuel. This is managed by heating the wood in an absence or limited supply of air, producing charcoal. A charcoal burner stacks wood and covers it with earth or turves so it burns slowly. The resultant charcoal provides significantly more heat and burning longevity then dry hardwood from which it may have been made. It takes three or three and a half times the weight of wood to make a given weight of charcoal, a fuel that is much easier to transport, much lighter, and burns without smoke and emits no contaminants because everything else has been burned off. No pollutants affect a process or final product made with charcoal heat. In consequence charcoal is the fuel necessary for most work involved in firing ceramics and in smelting metals; other combustibles introduce contaminants that damage the product. Lack of smoke and smell also makes charcoal the preferred source of heat in elite dwellings. Not surprisingly, therefore, charcoal is significantly more expensive than wood, so is not typically used by ordinary people who have access to local wood supplies. Maple and beech are, at least in Norland, the preferred source of charcoal, and professional charcoal burners often selectively exploit woodlands of these species. However, in mountain mining districts, maple quickly disappears with altitude, while beech responds poorly to some kinds of coppicing and also thins out at higher elevation. The common mountain conifers - pine, fir, spruce - were the woods those areas used heavily for charcoal production of admittedly inferior quality, but it is close at hand and thus lower in cost.

 

Hauling fuel is a huge and difficult task, calling for expenditure of much muscle power for the sake of the heat energy that is to be gained by burning. Most of the lands are deforested mainly for the sake of arable agriculture. But as those arable clearances slow, fuel demand comes to exert the greater pressure on remaining woodlands. A constant pressure is enacted to protect woods located near mines and salteries. Local fuel shortages lay behind royal restrictions placed on forges and a concern in municipal statutes in which clauses calling for general protection of woodland plainly echo conflict between the creation of arable land and the need for fuel. Worrying about wood fuel is a constant big issue for humanity, whether as wood or charcoal, biomass fuels provide most of our heat energy. Some alternative fuels deserve mention. People who live in wetlands call peat of which are ditched, drained and tilled to make, when cut into blocks and dried, a rather nice fuel. Peat is regionally abundant, so for those who live on top of great quantities, it is well worth using. Peat can be systematically mined - which is a desperately needed source of fuel in areas with relatively little woodland. It is most commonly found in the eastern parts of The Kingdom of Burgundy though within Norland it is to be commonly found within where the land derives its name from this fuel source, The Peatlands along the river Petra of which the lake Ancelie fuels the flow southward. There is also the extraction of ‘mineral coal’ and in Norland typically ‘lake coal’, because it arrives in Vjardengrad, the main center of consumption in Norland, by the large deposits within the open pockets of cliffside erosion from lake Ancelie’s basin. There are many extensive subterranean galleries underlying large parts around the city and lake of which heavy regulations are set to ensure that one does not mine into another and to best avoid mineral pollutants into the fresh lake waters of which is used for drink and aquaculture. Mineral coal is primarily used to burn lime for plaster, an essential building material for a city such as Vjardengrad as it burgeons in population. ‘Lake coal’ is cheaply dug from the shallow and rich surface deposits around Vjardengrad, but is expensive to ship due to its weight, for all its high energy use. The weight of coal means it is rarely used away from the mines unless it can be moved by water. It is also disagreeable when burnt. For there will be many complaints against the noxious fumes from coal, people really do not like the stench of coal smoke, and it is only accepted under duress when wood fuel is scant and costly which is a rarity in the heavily wooded lands of Norland.

 

The stink of coal makes it unacceptable for both food preparation and metalworking. Although different coal sources vary in particulars, mineral coal characteristically contains significant sulphur and phosphorus compounds of which is needed for the use of cannons, as well as traces of heavy metals. Food cooked directly over mineral coal tastes foul, so few willingly use it for that purpose. Smelting metal ores or working refined metals using a coal fire produces an alloy different to that desired. Resistance to coal for such uses have persisted until recent techniques were developed to obtain heat from coal without exposure to its fumes. Various methods separate the coal from the material being worked, so the heat can spread from some kind of reverberatory oven or the like. These new technologies are relatively recent in and developed piecemeal for industrial use and the development of coke, a decontaminated form of coal analogous to the charcoal made from wood. Though still the greater supply of heat energy in society comes from biomass fuels, wood and wood derivatives like charcoal. Inherently limited available supplies of these sources of energy need to be recognized as playing off against regionally different energy demands posed by the diversities in cultures. In the north space heating has greater cultural importance than it has in the south. Despite what are by global standards comparably chilly winter conditions, places in Balian are still heated only with charcoal braziers, while Vjardengrad has fireplaces within every home. People in the maritime north are much more concerned to have warm spaces than the people of the southern regions, which means the former are prepared both to develop the technology and to use more heat energy. On the one hand, the more abrupt relief of the cold in the south and the lack of navigable rivers across most of Aevos raise the per capita demand for draught power in transport; on the other hand, the lighter soils and simpler tillage techniques work in reverse, calling less for big ox or horse plough teams to put traction energy into agriculture. Perhaps these differences balance. The point is to recognize that probing into energy needs calls up many potential connections. In a similar mode, beer-drinking cultures have different energy needs from those of wine-drinking cultures: the former require grain to make their beverage and fuel to prepare it, calling in total for much biomass; the latter use no heat to process their wine, but it is typically moved from production to consumption sites with the water already in it, and so entails more weight, packaging, and transport. Beer is typically made in the locality where it is consumed, and the water is not moved any distance. So, quite apart from the different crop requirements, there are intriguing energy differences. We will make plain that per capita consumption of cereal and fuels in northern cities is significantly greater than rates of southern cities, something probably not only to do with temperature differentials but with cultural distinctions involving how much people eat and how much energy they use in preparing their preferred dietary elements. The context for these decisions is as much cultural as it is based on strictly physical aspects arising from non-living elements of the natural world.

 

The movement of rafts and sailing vessels on the water is the only non-muscular form of transportation. Running water is in fact essential for the transport of timber and fuel. Log drives and fuel rafts from timber harvested in the Ashveil Wilds, set off from Vjardengrad upon lake Ancelie and are sent downstream along the rivers Petra and Leitha to eventual users in Burgundy, Petra and Numendil. Little rowing and sailing skiffs, towed barges, and other small craft swarm on waterways everywhere. Anything that can be set afloat, even with a boat barely four or five meters long, is transported. Some of that movement does involve muscle power as people row, pole, and drag vessels upstream or use draught animals to tow them, but they try wherever possible to use the energy of running water. Sailing vessels are slowly adapted to make more efficient use of moving air. Around the maritime coasts ships reflect cultural traditions and designs with, in all cases, significant reliance on oarsmen. From Balian galleys to Norn longships. The regions subsequently share parallel evolutions of clumsy but capacious wind-powered craft, called navis in Balian. Its northern counterpart is the cog. These are not rowing vessels, being too short and tubby to set up for muscle power but driven mainly by one or two sails. They are ungainly, needing the wind more or less to work. While not very fast, a cog or navis can handle bulky mercantile cargoes. Southern and northern traditions have seemed to merge, probably in the heads and hands of shipwrights along the eastern maritime coasts of Aevos. These are what may be called ‘full-rigged ships’, with increased size, good sea-handling abilities, and a ‘mixed rig’ of a square and triangular ‘lateen’ sail. Offering greater maneuverability but delivering less power when the wind is in certain directions relative to the course of the vessel. The combination of the mixed rig provides the ability to sail closer to a contrary wind and, if the wind is favorable, to use the big sail for greater power and speed. The subsequent trend has to mix rigs, three masts, and more but smaller individual sails, which improve the ability to adjust to wind conditions and employ a smaller crew. The mixed rig thus uses less muscle energy and more wind energy. These chains of innovations create the means of connecting the entirety of our realms. Beside the weights of ship and crew, the greatest mass born by marine transport is itself energy supplies - foodstuffs and fuel. Really expensive goods, spices and precious metals in particular, come in tiny quantities and most of the weight carried on voyages comprise the crew, their fresh water, and their rations. Then very quickly the ships are put to such work as hauling dried codfish from Dunrath, timber and charcoal from Solgaard, the industrial goods of Vjardengrad, carrots and other foodstuffs from Grenzstadt, to cereals and animal byproducts of Karoslund, and similar commodities to and around Aevos. Biomass sources are key pieces of the energy system, even when sailors are better exploiting a non-biomass form of energy.

 

 Moving air and water provides alternative ways of moving things, but likely the more important contribution made is to drive the most complex and powerful engines. These are mills. Watermills, that is grinding devices powered by waterwheels. Water-powered mills have gone through an important technical evolution through the ages. The machines began long ago as simple small ‘horizontal’ mills, with a vertical shaft linking millstones at the top with a wheel suspended in the water below and oriented to rotate in the horizontal plane. Driven by the current, the spinning wheel rotates the upper millstone to provide the grinding. The design works on small, fast streams. A larger vertical waterwheel geared to rotate horizontal stones became a great tool of economic development and source of power for humans. All run from undershot wheels, some of them mounted on abutments under bridges and others as ship mills, where the entire mill is mounted on a raft or ship hull anchored in a river where the current turns the wheel. This application is better adapted to fluctuating river levels than as a land-based installation, but when extensively used on northern rivers it can be shut down for weeks by winter ice. Really successful energy capture came with the development and proliferation of the overshot wheel. This design delivers the water from the top, so the wheel is driven primarily by the weight of the water as it falls from a height of three meters or more. Ideally the water hits at about the three-quarter point of the wheel. An overshot wheel works on a small high-gradient stream but, unlike the undershot or breast forms, also on a slow one. The latter situation calls for a more elaborate weir or dam to back up a head pond, and then a mill race or leet to channel the water to and from the wheel. The proliferation of waterwheels is closely associated with the process of centralization, for they are primarily designed and used to power the grinding of grain. They are also linked with seigneurial wealth and power in local society. Creating a watermill takes considerable investment to obtain water rights, establish control over the flow of the watercourse, and then build the physical structure of the mill itself. Maintenance and repairs add to the cost. People of power build mills to extract compulsory milling dues and thereby seize a larger share of the peasants' abilities to produce cereals. However, resistance to such is quite rare as they provide huge savings in peasant labor. The difference between grinding grain every day by hand in the household and doing so occasionally with the use of this power engine, even if for a fee, releases them from a level of food preparation of significant quantities for household labor and employment elsewhere. There is a strong link between the creation of watermills and the increased production of textiles due to the labor-saving quality the watermill provides.

 

The person who runs the mill is a professional miller, a person who, with their own household, concentrates their time on it. They hold the mill as a tenant or lessee and for their services collect a fee, usually something like a tenth or fifteenth of the quantity of grain brought to the mill. The miller pays a portion of that to the lord and the other portion is their own livelihood. With the creation of watermills, and the dominant overshot design, they interrupt the natural flow of the river and form a barrier on it. The mill pond floods out riparian meadows or fields and may damage upstream properties. Others who want to use the river to move goods up- and downstream come into conflict with the miller or mill owner. Likewise, animals such as salmon or sturgeon seeking to move upstream to spawn run into problems, as do the eels which migrate downstream. Millers often make a good side income by trapping fish as they concentrate along the barrier. The fishing rights for a mill, which results from the human modification of the river’s flow, are thus also among the features of this environmental intervention. So, too, are decrees and legislation from regional assemblies and territorial princes ordering mills to provide passage to both river shipping and migratory fish. Waterwheels epitomize the use of natural physical processes to extract energy and the social environmental consequences of this colonization. Windmills are a much more recent device then waterwheels. The windmill is particularly well adopted for use on flat terrain with strong winds such as the fertile valley to the south of New Valdev. Windmills generate much less power than do large waterwheels, but they can be hitched up in tandem. The first form of windmill is called a post mill, the entire mechanism and structure is mounted on a post and turned as one to align the vanes to catch the wind. Post mills continue to be used in many places. Further technical development has evolved from the whole mill being moveable to the tower or ‘smock mill’ design in which only the top part with the axle for the vanes is adjusted. This allows the much larger structures of, for instance, Koravian windmills. The evolution for the post mill to the smock mill permits more effective operation. The overwhelming majority of mills serve exclusively for grinding grain into meal or flour. As an aspect of centralization, they aid the subsistence flow of energy from plants to food, from the agricultural sector into the kitchen, and thus the consumption sector.

 

Industrial mills such as sawmills and fulling mills, paper mills, crushing mills, hammer mills, and the life call for a mechanism different from a grinding mill, which still employs a rotary motion. The working action of a sawmill goes back and forth, and a fulling or hammer mill up and down in reciprocating motion. Industrial mills are applications of the camshaft, essentially an axle with humps or bumps that can trip something up and down and so convert rotation into linear motion. Use of windmills for pumping also a reciprocating action is used during industrialized peat extraction when the soils are sinking and causing worry of floods. The greater diffusion of pumping mills and water-powered pumps of which are the most powerful fixed engines we may use. Just as energy needs can push us to move economic activities closer to reliable sources of fuel, waterpower pulls various manufacturing enterprises to these energy sites. Papermaking and the fulling of woollen cloth, both activities are centered in rural sites where falling water can drive the mills. Access to waterpower is an essential factor to the growing numbers of processes engaging in extracting and working metals and sometimes used to drain mines. Moving water and air are not only themselves inorganic sources of energy for a culture overwhelmingly dependent on organic biomass, but they are also an essential means of access to the inorganic mineral resources that we have come to employ in rising quantities.

 

Life in Aevos rests upon biomaterials. Practically everything anybody handles comes from something that had once been alive: leather, wood, wax, thatch, plant and animal fibers, oil, bone. Metals are nevertheless essential, always for edged tools and common wherever durability is a critical requirement. The human colonization of inorganic nature has significant environmental and cultural linkages. Those of high intellectual culture understand metal as something that comes from the earth. Thinking in terms of four physical elements and the theory of humours, within hollow places deep below the visible soil surface subterranean heat sublimates a mixture of earthy and watery materials into vapor whence, over time, the purer metal hardens out. Continuing slow metamorphosis ripening base metals into noble silver and gold. We may link this natural process to that used by skilled alchemists. How smelters use heat to separate gold, silver, iron, copper, and other metals from the stone with which are still mixed. After strenuous labor has dug from the earth some selected earth-stuff, in the space of a few days the smelter cooks it into metal. So, too, might one hope to take some base metal, carry out arcane procedures, and generate gold and silver. As emerging from the earth like plants or springs of water. But people do have to go to the earth to secure metals. Mining and metallurgical activities spread widely across Aevos with mining areas scattered about wherever usable minerals might be reached, from the surface to, hundreds of meters below ground. Many features of this industry are common irrespective of the metal sought. Once found, an ore body is exploited until it runs out or is out of reach into strata too deep or too filled with water for miners to work.

 

Mining rights, the acknowledged claim to seek and extract that which is in the earth, are everywhere associated with the overlord. Mining is considered a regalian right, transferred to territorial princes. The holder of regalian right grants access to free individual miners in return for their payment to him or her of a ‘royalty’ on what they take out of the ground. Miners typically start as individual entrepreneurs and form self-governing communities under the authority of some officer of the overlord. Mining camps are boom-and-bust phenomena. Rather than single large workings, many mines long remain small, often seasonal, enterprises, commonly found clustered. Where the size of an ore body allows, what begins with such family-scale shafts dug by individual laborers eventually develops into larger undertakings financed by local lords and nearby investors. Starting with a need to produce raw materials to construct things such as rural monasteries, these evolve into key sources of institutional cash income. Later, for example in mineral-rich ranges, lay lords and urban entrepreneurs are often provided the necessarily large commitments of capital. These investments particularly involve drainage, for water in mines will ultimately become the most common limiting factor in their productivity. Many larger sites delve so deep that they run into water problems. Water can be removed from a mine by having a line of small boys pass buckets back and forth and this is certainly done. Miners dig drainage galleries as much as a thousand meters diagonally through the mountain down to the valley floor so the water can run out. Of course, this does not work if a mine has already followed the ore body deeper than the valley itself. Waterwheels can power a windlass, pumps, or bucket chain of one sort or another. Though eventually even these will fail to keep up and the mines will be abandoned till hopefully, one day, more effective drainage techniques become available.

 

Mining and metalworking have become the largest single source of pressure on surviving woodlands in many localities. Mines need timber for pit props and other construction, while the whole growing metals sector requires vast quantities of fuel. Ores are initially, and in some places always, transported to the fuel: it is cheaper to move the rock to the fuel than vice versa. Smelting and forging originally operated at relatively low temperatures and slowly consumed local fuel sources, then moved on to another fuel resource as each locality was depleted. Then as techniques improved, all economically accessible woodlands went out of production. Development of high temperature smelting in blast furnaces makes it possible to work larger ore bodies longer, though it demands more fuel. In some mining areas extensive clear cuts, particularly of mountain conifers, are used to create fuel. Many mining areas develop an extensive trade in wood, floating fuel down mountain streams from higher altitudes to the smelters and forges. Some areas develop specialized coppice managed entirely for metallurgical purposes. A mine that controls such a fuel farm is assured a regular but limited annual supply of energy. Some mines operate for only a portion of the year because that is as much production as they can handle with the fuel on which they can rely. Mining has significant environmental impacts beyond the issue of fuel. Mines clear surface vegetation and break the ground surface to reach the ore, opening up the ground particularly of mountainous areas to erosion. Miners, whose job underground is one of the most dangerous industrial occupations in Aevos, face gas, cave-ins, and other hazards. After extraction, the ore is washed and crushed: this polluted water with dirt and metallic toxins. Smelters emit quantities of gases like large amounts of sulphur dioxide, producing highly corrosive sulphuric acid when mixed with water. Particulates and heavy metals from ores and smelters appear in the soil, plants, animals, and human beings. A better understanding of these environmental impacts and the technological processes that drive the metal industry to consume so much fuel requires separate treatments of non-ferrous and iron metallurgies, as they work quite differently.

 

The three most important bulk metals exploited by us are non-ferrous, namely silver, lead, and copper. Few places produce gold, which is largely obtained from the Scyflings of Kazan and the Emberglades of Hyspia. Silver ore in Aevos contains much more lead than silver. This mineral, galena, is an amalgam of lead and silver sulphides and the rich lead ore to be found. Because the lead-silver ores and also copper minerals smelted are mainly sulphides, the ore has to be reduced, using some other chemical to pull the sulphur compounds away from the metal. Which is why charcoal is such a critically important input for the metallurgical industry. About ninety-eight percent of the metal content in galena is lead and only a mere two to four percent silver. Mining galena and purifying the metals from it yields a thousand kilograms of lead for each kilogram of silver. Leaving Aevos awash in lead, which allows us to use this lead for roofing large buildings such as cathedrals and for water pipes; lead serves to hook together the pieces of stained-glass windows and as brackets and staples connecting stone works. Lead is included in pewter, solder, and other alloys that can be melted, cast, and easily worked. We’ve for the longest time had more lead than we had known what to do with, at least until the development of cannons. Lead-silver sulphide ores are smelted through a double roast-reduction process with an operating temperature of between seven-hundred and nine hundred Celsius. At these temperatures the lead begins to melt and the silver dissolves in the molten lead, while other impurities mostly burn or float off as slag. The second step is to oxidize the lead, leaving behind the silver and great quantities of lead oxide, which can easily be taken back to lead if desired. This is how all silver is extracted, with the development of a high shaft furnace, which uses an air blast to achieve temperatures in the range of twelve-hundred Celsius and liquifies the metals much more quickly. But to obtain a consistently successful air blast a water-powered bellows works best. At this point the smelters, which have been located in the upper watersheds in order to be near their fuel supplies, move several hundred vertical meters downstream to where a larger river can drive bigger wheels to generate the air blast. Copper is one of the few metals present in nature in its pure form; ‘native copper’ is simply lumps of copper produced by natural geological forces. Copper production largely involves exploitation of copper sulphide ores, undertaken in a single-stage process whereby the ore is directly reduced by burning with charcoal. The Saiger process allows reduction of more difficult copper-silver ore. This opens up whole new ore bodies. The new method first reduces the copper-silver mix, then introduces lead to dissolve the silver from the insoluble copper. After reducing the silver from the lead by traditional means, large quantities of copper also remain.

 

Copper is valuable as the foundation for bronze and for brass, the latter being an especially important alloy, a blend of copper and zinc, is then made not by combining the two pure metals but rather roasting their two sulphide salts together and yielding the alloy directly. Production of lead, silver, and copper through these smelting processes generates significant toxic contamination of the environment. They emit dust, fumes, and heavy metals, not only those being refined but traces of others as well. This pollution causes anomalies in vegetation, with soil toxicity causing plants to be unable to grow, breaking down plants if they even do appear at all. When floods erode waste dumps from zinc works, suspended sediment flows down the river and into the meadows. When cattle graze on now dry grass, the metal content of zinc salts kills them all. Iron-making produces comparatively little particulate, gaseous, or toxic effluent, but it imposes even greater energy demands than the non-ferrous metals. These demands multiply greatly. Originally iron was produced from what are called ‘bog ores’, accretions of iron oxide (rust) that form in acidic wetlands where iron is present in underlying soils and rocks. Iron-workers also make use of soft iron ore, and then work with red oxide ore, a harder mineral containing heavy concentration of iron oxides and silicates commonly associated with some other metals. From such materials methods can extract a ton of raw iron from ten tons of ore and eight tons of charcoal. Producing that eight tons of charcoal will take thirty tons of wood, approximately the annual growth increment on a five-hectare beech coppice wood. Fuel costs are forty to eighty percent of production costs for making iron in this way. Iron production follows what is called the ‘direct process’, going straight from the ore to nearly pure wrought iron. This begins with a hearth or low shaft furnace equipped with small air ducts and a bellows that feeds air into the burning mixture of iron ore and charcoal. In this ‘bloomery’, temperatures in the range of eight hundred to nine-hundred Celsius causes most of the ore’s impurities to liquefy and run off as slag, while the resultant pastry lump or ‘bloom’ of iron, still retains significant impurities, could be kept hot on a forge and the remaining slag beaten out physically with a hammer. The eventual product is relatively soft and workable material, very tough but never molten. Waterwheels appear in association with bloomery iron production, at first more for grinding and polishing a final product, and later for driving hammer mills.

 

Another step exploits recognition that wrought iron can have carbon added to it: when it’s heated high enough, a small quantity of carbon makes steel; but if the temperature is higher still and larger amounts of carbon added, the iron melts and can be run into an ingot called a ‘pig’. This ‘cast iron’ has been molten and now takes the shape of a mould. Production of cast iron is achieved in a blast furnace. Iron made in a blast furnace can be identified because the high-temperature slags are distinctive and the iron itself noteworthy for high carbon content. ‘Pig iron’ can be re-melted and cast into another mould. Cast iron is hard but brittle, good for certain kinds of applications and not for others. For some purposes cast iron must be re-melted and more of the carbon extracted to get it back to steel, which is a low-carbon alloy intermediate between wrought iron and cast. Big bloomeries can produce a few hundred kilograms of wrought iron; a blast furnace yields between three and nine tons of cast iron from a single charge and operational cycle. It takes some weeks to set the furnace up, to operate for several days, and then tidy up afterwards, but possible output of iron suddenly increases by an order of magnitude. In places with long traditions of ironmaking like the Dwarves of Urguan, these iron masters have to compete for waterpower sites with operators of fulling and tanbark mills. It is not unusual to see waterpower operating a dual installation in which managers can switch back and forth between running the mechanized air blast into the furnace and running it into a refining forge. Individual entrepreneurs with their own small bloomeries make most of Aevos’s iron. Iron-workers are often thought to possess almost magical skill, able to bring vitally important weapons and tools out of rock, coal, smoke, steam, and the furious noise of hammering. Such small-scale, often itinerant, workplaces are assembled into larger enterprises on estates. But as technical breakthroughs come to the fore, iron production has become much more associated with lay lords and investors. Environmental aspects of manufacturing industries also need recognition. Some of them are very heavy consumers of fuel. Glassmaking heated to a viscous state a mixture of reasonably pure silica sand with potash, which is obtained by burning wood to ashes, running water through them, and then evaporating the water. Which can create one kilogram of glass from somewhere between one and three cubic meters of wood, ninety-seven percent of which goes to make the potash and only three percent for the fuel to fuse the potash and sand together as glass. Very early waterpower was brought to this industry to generate higher heat. Salteries are also major fuel users. Hot, dry places along Beleth Beach can produce salt by evaporating sea water in shallow artificial basins for the Balianite glass industry. But further north it is accomplished by boiling sea water or the output of natural brine springs in large metal vats. Around Burgundy and further north in Norland salt is made from the ash of salt peat. Peat that has come to be heavily mixed with sea water is cut, dried, and used as fuel. Then the ashes are dissolved in water and this water boils to extract the salt. The heat for each batch comes from burning the peat for the next. In some areas along the Peatlands of Norland, peat mining is largely oriented towards the production of salt, using the peat as both raw material and energy source.

 

Another important extractive and manufacturing sector uses essentially no fuel. The people supplying one of the main building materials, stone, worked in quarrying. With picks, wedges, sledgehammers, and human and animal muscle aided by simple pulleys and derricks, they cut and move tons of rock. The phenomenal multiplications of stone buildings. Local sources save great expenditure of energy to move heavy stone. Elsewhere and more generally large amounts of this essential and prestigious material are transported almost exclusively by water. Manufactures other than metals and stone remain in the organic realm. Many small objects are cut from animal bone, the byproduct of the butcher’s trade, as are the skins needed for leather. Besides animal hides, tanneries use a great deal of fuel and generate considerable noxious organic effluents as well. Both tanneries and woolen cloth production also uses some mineral resources (fuller’s earth, alum) as part of their processing. Fabrics made from flax or hemp use fibers extracted by a process of rotting out the rest of the plant (called ‘retting’), which leaves an effluent lethal to living things that drink from or live in water contaminated by it. Most manufacturing enterprises produce certain toxic wastes, and they absorb sometimes very significant quantities of materials. However, as all are typically localized, large areas damaged by pollution are rare.

 

Also localized but widespread and ever more central to the expanding socio-cultural system of Aevos are cities and an increasingly integrated urban network. Urban ecologies form special relationships between the cultural and natural spheres of our world. We will establish the features of the urban sector and the culture-wide socio-economic phenomenon. Little towns, both resuscitated and new, tend to acquire internal self-government after their original economic evolution, and a wave of new urban foundations arise. Urbanization creates a new kind of landscape with problems and possibilities for local environmental management and establishes metabolic patterns that affect environmental relations across much wider areas. Cities provide new human environments. Juridical boundaries and physical walls cut the city off from its immediate surroundings. Within is very largely a built environment full of people. Cities crowd humans and commensal organisms - these creatures that have successfully adapted to living close to human beings rather than trying to get away from them - densely together. This they do in physical surroundings that have been purposely modified for human social needs. Building practices and living habits replicate their vernacular rural origins. Wood, wattle-and-daub, and thatch construction, unpaved passageways, stored foods and raw materials of organic origin provide ample habitat for rats and mice, pigeons and sparrows, cockroaches, and certain exo- and endoparasites (liver fluke, tapeworms, lice, fleas), as well as the dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and horses townsfolk intentionally keep nearby. The close proximity of people, households, and animals mean easy transfer of parasites between different households and hosts. The one mitigating factor is frequently recurring fire, which clears things out for a time.

 

Further, the urban landscape is increasingly and then purposely impervious. Despite the sometimes-significant intramural burial grounds, gardens, and even vineyards or meadows, towns are a terrain of beaten earth, of buildings, of increasingly paved squares, streets, and courtyards. Rain or melt water, as well as any spilt liquids, either runs rapidly off or pools on the surface, floods, and so offer more habitat for additional kinds of creatures willing to live beside humans. The city is environmentally very different from a rural village. Urban authorities, be they officers of a traditional lord or officials of self-governing communes, are well aware of the hazards of urban life. They promote planning, sanitation measures, and the exile of offensive or dangerous trades to downstream or extramural locations. So, for example, the banning of flax or hemp preparation, cleaning of fish, and dumping of tannery waste in a river. Communal legislation requiring butchers to take their waste to designated dump sites outside town. Municipal authorities obliging each householder to clean the street in front of their place each week under pain of a fine and, in some cities, weekly rubbish removal services. More lavish cities may even have sewer canals that run through the city and return back to the river with its load. The aim of this urban environmental management is improving the quality of life for citizens, not environmental protection. Paved streets and fire-resistant stone, brick, and tile construction come first to the prestigious commercial, administrative, and residential quarters in the city center. The best part of town, as the center is in all cities, remorselessly more salubrious than where laborers' dwellings cram beneath the walls or cluster around the city gates. Nevertheless, cities always suffer distinctly higher death rates than found in the countryside. Cities are death traps for little people. While established mercantile and craft families can last through generations, a very large floating population of impoverished newcomers - rural-urban migration - turns over rapidly. Cities soak up rural surplus of people.

 

Cities are unusual ecosystems because, unlike most others, urban ecosystems cannot maintain or replace themselves. City ecosystems are formed and maintained by cultural inputs, really in one sense by inputs of information. Much as rural decisions make woodlands into fields, urban cultural ferment generates programs, which generate work, in this case the construction and maintenance of the city itself. Cities are not colonized ecosystems, either, but rather wholly artificial ones. Urbanization does not transform nature but creates an entire second nature. Natural processes certainly go on in every city, but many of these processes did not exist, until the city was created. Most city people are engaged in non-agricultural activities. Hence in metabolic terms they are not ‘producers’ and have to continually exchange materials and energy with a differentiated interland outside the city's boundaries, physical or conceptual. It may be estimated that four agricultural producers are needed to support one non-productive individual. Every city exists by exchange with what is outside the city. Cities cannot be without a more extensive ecological presence because cities do not themselves produce what is required to maintain the life of the organisms within them. In consequence urban centers call for analysis in metabolic terms, examining the flows of energy and materials into a city, staying behind in the city as a sink, and flowing out of such a city, her, concertedly, the cities of Aevos. From a spatial perspective this approach is an urban market supplied by regions famously conceived of concentric rings. Though with non-contiguous quality of some inflows, an importance of urban effluents, and the environmental impact of all these movements. Into every city flows foodstuffs (cereals, meats), water, fuel, building supplies (wood, stone), raw materials (fibers, skins), and human beings with their all too material bodies. Cities do not engage in primary production, so they must import energy. The very nature of the urban ecology means cities are dominated by consumer organisms and consumer activities. Vjardengrad consumes between thirty-four thousand to thirty-five thousand tons of grain each year. They use it for food, for drink, and for animal feed. These quantities of cereal take the output of ten to fifteen percent of the arable land around Lake Ancelie to the estuary at Hakon’s Maw, all accessible by water transport. The grain literally floats into the city. The supply zone connects to all parts of Norland along navigable waters.

 

Concentrated urban demand for heat energy organizes and sustains intense coppice wood management on thousands of hectares close to major cities. Wood fuel is produced as near to the city as people can devise or cheap water transport provides. For Petra, woodlands as far as Norland, up and down the river Petra are needed to feed wood into the city. The Petra bores fuel wood and timber from as far as Solgaard, where it is sent down Father’s Froth, navigated around the city of Vjardengrad upon the lake Ancelie, then sent down the river Petra. Urban demand for energy also drives commercial application of fuel, such as the coal veins of lake Ancelie, or the consumers of dried peat. Water delivers grain, fuel, and building materials to towns and is itself a critical metabolic input. Water supply for urban sites is a matter of quantity and quality. Most sites in the urban network of Aevos are located on rivers and streams, so townspeople begin simply exploiting natural local supply, dipping surface water the same way as in a village. Urban growth outstrips or degrades natural local supplies. The response to that shortage depends on local conditions and the kinds of sources that can be acquired. Towns in some areas turn to technology that has originated in monastic water systems, piping water in from springs or upstream diversions. Others use extensive rain-water cisterns, which have both monastic and castle forerunners. Fortifications are sometimes built right on the water and others high up a waterless crag. Castle designers have to consider how deep a well can be successfully dug or else arrange runoff from every hard surface in the castle to flow into a storage tank. Towns thus have models from which to adopt piping or cisterns. It is next to impossible to find a serious urban water supply system in Norland, even in Vjardengrad. Such systems are mainly private which is to say they serve the wealthy and powerful while most ordinary households obtain their water from wells tapping into water under the city or rely on water that professional water carriers bring in from lake Ancelie.

 

Some metabolic inflows come to rest in towns. Cities are a sink, a place where materials settle, and energy is released into entropy. Towns are sinks for wood and stone, as for cultural and biological wastes. Matter accumulates in cities. Culture reuses and recycles a wide variety of materials just as it does symbolic elements. Clothing is passed down from owner to owner until what once graced a prince has become mere rags wrapping a beggar. Bone is made into a wide variety of small utensils and tools, spoons, needles, and the like. Urine is recycled as a fixing agent for the dying of cloth. Built structures decay, are refurbished, or pulled down and a new one erected on the rubble, often reusing the old materials. Cities are also sinks for human bodies. Though it is often required to cremate a corpse to dissuade necromantic corruption. Many wish for their resting place as close as possible to the relics of saints, holy people whose remains are kept in or near an altar. As towns grew up around a cathedral, church, or another with many revered bodies, people try to await eternity in that company. Space within the church is limited, so reserved for the most influential, but close beside the church up against the wall bodies may be buried, reburied, and accumulate, and bones begin to surface if not cremated. To make room for newcomers, other skeletons may be intentionally excavated, removed, and stored in charnel houses that line the interior walls of the cemetery or the exterior walls of the church, or they are placed in a crypt below the building. This accumulation, too, raises the soil surface. The elevated level of old urban cemeteries and in fact the rest of the ground of the city is a contribution from the insoluble remains of the human bodies gathered beneath. Further materials stay in latrines, cesspits, and middens. 

 

Outflows from cities include re-exports and value-added manufactured goods, likely more biomaterials (woolen cloth, leather, wood) than metals. Equally out of cities, large quantities of waste. Widespread practice intentionally directs effluents out of the city into the surroundings, especially down any available watercourse. Latrines are typically placed directly over streams that flow out of town. Cesspits have to be emptied into rivers through gates after dark. Landlocked pits are periodically dug out by members of special guilds and the contents carted by night to rivers. Vjardengrad barges its solid waste down to the tidal reaches of Hakon’s Maw and let the churning currents slosh it out into the sea. Market gardeners and vineyard operators may even buy such for use as fertilizer to keep up intensive horticultural production. Each city's primarily market-oriented economy establishes its own extensive ‘ecological footprint’. Cities not only change themselves, but they also impose change on outside, sometimes even distant, natural and colonized ecosystems. Urban growth itself can provoke abandonment of nearby villas. The combination of transport costs and regionally different natural endowments mean that the material effects can occur in rings around the city or be discontinuous if the city draws from or sends its effluents to far-away places. Characteristically, bulk or perishable goods come from very close to the city. Urban demand for peat likewise destroys agricultural use of marshes and boggy landscapes, turning them into sandy heaths or open-water lakes. 

 

In retrospect, does the evident environmental impact of urban living, the inorganic economy, and energy extraction, speak of failure to maintain sustainability? Does society push beyond ecological limits and bring about its own collapse? Remember that the urban sector (people, landscapes, material and energy flow) remains a small fraction of the material life of our majorly rural societies. The interactions that people have with their inorganic and non-living environment are but a fraction of those they have with their living or once-living surroundings. Hence any assessment of the overall relationship of civilization with its natural world must always acknowledge this as a predominantly agrarian society in which we have colonized the biosphere to tap energy flow. This is the only standpoint from which to consider the sustainability against overexploitation and endogenous anthropogenic collapse. That we have changed our natural world, even permanently, has been amply shown. The question now is whether our impacts bring about a breakdown of our own ecosystem. The difficulty is to assess or diagnose conditions, stresses, and trends in time where actual outcomes may remain ambiguous and catch up in other independent casual chains. Sustainability always applies within some bounding framework. The long-term continuity of a rate of coppice production becomes moot where a smelter's ore body flooded out or the wood itself cleared for arable fields. So, too, centuries-long maintenance of certain cereal yields to support a peasant household ceases to matter when the lords or kings' takings are abruptly increased. Some plausible stable context is a likely precondition for helpful application of the sustainability concept.

 

On the side of primary production (the organic economy), uses of local ecosystems are fundamental to the survival of individuals, families, and whole societies. Their adaptive colonization's of the natural world keep them alive, functioning, and reproducing for many human lifetimes while imposing demonstrable impacts on their environments. In that sense the initiation of certain uses and impacts plainly do allow future generations to continue living from those same ecosystems. At the opposite extreme, practices which visibly diminish productive resources are also clear: imagine mining soil nutrients, losing soil to erosion, and depleting, even extirpating, certain wildlife species. Yet situations are rarely so simple. What of subsidizing a ‘home’ ecosystem by extracting from another, such as fertilizing arable land with leaf mould from woodland or turves from pasture? Certainly, some well-known practices are intended to limit or mitigate rates of exploitation and to restore productivity for continued use. Carefully managed rotational cycles in arable fields, in coppice, or even in fishponds demonstrably continue for centuries so long as the producing and supervising human unit remains in place. Who can show an inevitable loss of social viability for someone lacking pine marten or sturgeon? Change, even change to be mounted from a biodiversity or conviviality standpoint, is not ecosystem collapse. A damaged ecosystem is no longer pristine but may not have lost its resilience. 

 

The energy sector importantly links primary organic production to use of non-living and anthropogenic resource systems. Emergent local shortages of wood fuel are indisputable and so, too, are subsequent rationing or limits on its use, but also intensified production methods (coppice), efforts to reduce transport costs to draw on hitherto untouched reserves, and strong regional turns to mineral substitutes (peat, coal). But when human numbers and demand recede, consumers largely abandon the substitutes and wood fuel again suffice. Increasing use of wind and waterpower draws on limited but renewable energy. Inorganic materials have less quantitative significance for society, although their use is always essential and gain importance owing to technological changes on both the production and demand sides. No use of stock resources such as minerals is ever infinitely sustainable; the issue is rather the depletion rate. Local exhaustion of stocks and wider environmental damage from destructive emissions have been shown. The formation, growth, and spread of the urban sector intensifies many environmental pressures, but also efforts of urban authorities to manage these. Some of that management, however, simply transfers effluents to other, previously less stressed, ecosystems. In sum, then, ought these relationships of societies to their natural world be understood as unsustainable, as themselves leading to destructive overexploitation and collapse? Sheep pastures for wool production and arable cereals, both serving the urban economy, reduce woodland to the point of general wood shortage and grassland to that of erosion. Long use of arable fields means inevitable fertility decline. Commercial demand for silver outstrips technical capacity to maintain output levels of mining. As overambitious princes default on their debts to the city's bankers, a crash is inevitable. For those who see human material economies as embedded in larger ecosystems, it is an intellectual and ideologically inviting proposition that we push too far in all of our relationships with the natural world, sending it over some kind of threshold, and leaving ourselves suddenly vulnerable to ecosystem collapse. We see clear signs of impoverishment, production failures, immiseration, and food and other resource shortages in many parts of Aevos. A great depopulation from war, abandonment of farmland, and regional episodes of soil erosion. Are these to be attributed to the failure of society to apply knowledge and develop appropriate technologies to sustain a stable relationship with the natural world? Do people make the wrong decisions? At the operation level, do we misunderstand our environment and interactions with it? There emerges a need to explore how we make decisions on the use of natural resources and respond to these effects on the uses. Who and what establishes the programs, determines work, and eventually revises those efforts in view of new experiences?

 

 

HUMANS APPLY OUR ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNICAL KNOW-HOW. Within, socio-cultural rules which identify who can decide what of the natural world is to be used, when, and in what way. These are customary and legal determinations of relations among people rather than religious or philosophical understandings of relations between nature and humankind. While divinely ordained natural law gives humankind all things in common, ‘by the law of custom or statute, this belongs to me, that belongs to someone else’. Property rights encompass the ownership, possession, usufruct, and acknowledge limits to uses of natural resources. They necessarily have social and environmental implications. Of course, the history of property rights and of the authority of the state contains much without direct bearing on human relations with the natural world, so we will try and explore the aspects which are or are said to be prime determinants of human decisions and impacts on natural resource use. Dependent peasants have tacitly to acknowledge that the land they use belongs to their lord and the lord in turn to recognize that peasants need access to various resources to produce what he demands of them. Free peasant proprietors dispose of their own ager (setting aside kinship constraints) and in many places enjoy abundant nearby waste and woods essentially uncontested. Emperors and kings assert public authority over such ownerless tracts, including the power, which they exercise, to grant the land and/or use to favor henchmen and churches. Over the centuries other lordships grow from princely allocation or sheer violent seizure of jurisdiction over people. The trend to privatization (creation of lordships) is nowhere totally and need not immediately have affected farmers’ disposition of resources. Some peasant communities retain impugned access to waste, woods, and waters/ most, at least in long-settled regions, have grudgingly to concede that they exploited fields, pastures, and other resources on sufferance and in accord with some kind of custom, known but unwritten and thus in all but its very existence now lost to historical knowledge.

 

In most countries customary practices have been gradually replaced with more formal legal regimes, perhaps more conducive to identifying points of conflict and certainly to recording disputes and their outcomes. As legal theory itself emerged from the competing claims of kingship and religion to inspire concepts of canon and secular law, oral manorial custom - the way things are done on a lord’s estate - likewise evolves into systems of manorial law, which defines peasants’ obligations and conditional rights, especially to the land and communal resources from which they live and serve their lord. This evolution occurs parallel all over the realms of humanity. Where free peasants allods survive or lords decline to exercise close supervision, farmers might enjoy very considerable freedom to divide, alienate, transfer, and determine the use of their resources. In all normal circumstances, then, there arises an expectation of communal self-regulation, long held in illiterate memory but eventually made materials in ‘bylaws’, ‘customs’, ‘ordinances’, or ‘statutes’ and, mostly much later, in records of their enforcement and of their defense against reactivated or newly conceived lordly claims.

 

In custom and law many communities share decisions on resource management, whether they hold common rights of use on what belongs to a lord or exercise collective rights of ownership. For all the technological and institutional diversity of the exemplary regional cases, all share socially restricted entry, and awareness of limits, mechanisms to control and allocate uses, and efforts to fend off encroachment or willful disposition by lords. As from Norland a symbiosis of grain and stock-raising intensifies on intermingled and unfenced strips, farming households in especially the championing countries of agricultural intent there is a shifting of relations of neighbourly cooperation to collective control over farming practice itself. The trend affects the rights of individuals within their communities and the relations of communities to their lords. Individual tillage of arable fields come to be paired with the common regulation of crops and seasonal routines on adjacent strip parcels which comprises a ‘field’ as rotational unit, and with common pastoral access to waste pasture, uncultivated spaces within the arable fields, and the stubble and fallow of the arable itself. Peasant ploughing of individually held parcels might be cooperative, but is not collective, while the sowing, harvesting, and possession of cereal yields pertain to each household separately. Community bylaws punish those who plough over the boundary or otherwise intrude on land of their neighbors, but also any who dare to sow in the field designated as fallow that year or to leave a strip in a field under crop. This rule can compel reallocation of land among peasant tenures to ensure each has equal parts in each phase of the rotational cycle. Communal bylaws of harvest constrain even the use of individual arable holdings. Removal of the crop is commonly restricted to daylight hours. No one can put livestock to pasture on his or her parcel until the whole field has been harvested; and then other bylaws set dates or a process to determine when harvesting has to be finished. In another place seven days of gleaning (gathering fallen heads of grain) are allowed to landholders (only) before the stubble field is opened for pasture. Very frequently none are allowed to glean unless they have themselves labored in the harvest and village landholders require no more harvest work.

 

Villages manage common meadows as they do arable fields, seasonally assigned to individuals to take the hay, and thereafter treated as common pasture. Other bylaws and institutional arrangements control use of common pasture which has, for instance, to be protected against conversion into arable fields. Pasture commons derive from long-term use by certain farmsteads and can only rarely be traced to specific grants by a lord. Legitimate access to these resources evolves over time from free use of unclaimed waste lands beyond the arable fields, through drawing boundaries between adjacent villages, to opening the arable fields for pasture after harvest and in fallow time. Making this intensified arrangement work requires employment of a common herdsman and enforcing pasture rights as inalienable apart from tenure in the land itself. Long-standing residence, property holdings, and status in the community determines rights of limited (equal or pro-rated) access. Later under continued pressure of human and animal numbers, villagers began to ration (stint) pastoral uses according to similar criteria. Pasturing of sheep is legally delayed until less-close-grazing cattle and horses are well fed. As circumstances change, communities adjust their rules and stints. Intercommoning largely disappearing as the human population grows. Progressively smaller numbers of beasts, and those not sheep, are conceded to households of landless cottars. Even good-sized peasant farms are increasingly limited to that number of head they can carry through the winter; and some regions disallow the pasture of cattle owned by others. In strongly manorialized Norland the collective decisions embodied in village custom are established in the lord’s manorial court, where his local reeve or an outside steward draws a panel of jurors from the larger householders to state village practice, agree on adjustments to those bylaws, and identify and punish offenders. Many places appoint special ‘wardens of autumn’ to enforce the communal regulations. While the entire community attends the court to bear witness and accede to the decisions, violators’ fines go to the lord. 

 

Many places include the lord’s demesne in the pattern of collective management simply because his strips intermingle with those of tenants. Though an unseparated demesne is thus held to the same cropping-harvesting-pasturing calendar as the peasants, lords often force collective harvesting of their strips first (labor rent), forbidding others hiring day laborers before the lord’s crop is in, and reserving overnight folding of livestock (manure deposit) to their own strips. Besides exercising coercion within the common fields, the lord’s superior ownership threatened their very existence, should he decide to consolidate his own arable fields and run it outside the collective regime, or to shut down peasant access to his pasture or woodland and then turn those resources to some other purpose. Nevertheless, an outstanding feature of common-field regimes is their resilience, providing the basic property rights framework for peasant agriculture over large expanses of northern Aevos and specifically among Norlanders for centuries. This amalgam of private and community rights evolves across transitions from spare rural settlements to domestic and frontier expansion and great regional densities and then again to the depopulations and regrowth experience through their traumatic history. Beginning with a lack of real markets for consumables or labor, the common fields still prevail; in the thoroughly commercialized times we have entered. Is this better described as stagnation or sustainability? As human settlements and cultivation of the limited suitable terrain intensifies, communities of neighbors defend their mutual rights in what is called a mark against both outside lords and other nearby communities. Local organizations of such fellow commoners crystallize when population growth forces the exclusion of newcomers, while passing continues access to the high summer pastures on to the recognized heirs of those with established rights. Some of these groupings coalesce as corporate entities for an entire mark, others as villages with communal rights to a specific portion, and still others as collective recipients of grants by a lord asserting superior authority, who then also retains a share.

 

The most essential features evolve locality by locality, when people with access rights place limits on their own shares. Many places allow each farmer only as many beasts on the summer pasture as he can overwinter on his own crop of hay; others determine a total carrying capacity for their grazing and partition it among the holder of rights. Typically, no outsider who acquires land in the community receives any right in the commons without the agreement of current possessors. They further set boundaries on communal lands and roadways, regulate access to woodlands for fuel, timber, hunting, and various gathered materials, prescribing the handling of diseased livestock, appointing overseers, and both set and impose heavy fines on violators. Some places maintain village-level commons for draught and household animals kept year-round at the farmsteads; some include meadows and stubble pasture among the common resources, others do not. Pastoral mountain communities do not lack pressures of rising demand, but they respond by enlarging the communal resource base: their institutional arrangements for common use and management persists because they prove well adapted to their environments and pastoral land use. Resource conflicts arise when lords are motivated by prospects of revenue or recreation infringing on common rights. Arbitrary exercise of private rights can entail ecological as well as social tragedies. It takes only a lord's decision to initiate transforming the landscape from one biome to another. Yet given stable environmental conditions private lordships can also provide long-term sustainability. Especially in Aevos we must take care not to conflate environmental justice - equitable human access to things of nature - with the protection and sustainable use of natural systems and relationships. But conflicts over rights and uses of such systems provide one reason for a third force to intervene in our times between private owners and common claimants.

 

Struggles over the right to determine uses of natural resources are complicated but also makes voluminously visible to us the entry of a third party, the overlord, prince, or territorial state. One cannot deny the general notion that a higher public authority is rightly responsible and empowers the ability to enforce the public good; its renewed practical application in fiscal and judicial realms by monarchs and their successors is familiar to all. Progressive enlargement of the concept follows, more explicitly taking in religious practices, economic life, and environmental relations. Attention here is drawn only to the last, its applications, forms, and consequences for owners, users, and their resources. Acknowledged public authorities intervene variously both by private lords (owners) and users (collective or individual) of especially non-arable resources. In halting steps and against continual resistance to constrain behaviors of both sorts of private interests. This inception of governmental interest in regulating resource uses arises from mixed, even opposing, motives. In some circumstances these are at first fiscal or, later, driven simply by the increased ambitions of governments and their officials to curb the autonomy of great or lesser subjects. Equivalent pressures come from below, as disputants call upon their overlord to adjudicate between them and set regulations in the way of further conflict. With whatever mixed impetus, actual programmes and actions further require identification of resource issues as objects of governmental intervention. Princely and republican regulations come out in tandem with those of estate owners, villages, and urban communities, for this is an age congenial to legal enactments, but public authorities seek openly to ground their rules in common good superior to private interests.

 

The particulars of constitutional forms, technologies, or the ecological place of the activities brought under public oversight affects how states actually seek to regulate resource use surprisingly little. Royal license requirements serve, as do those on commons and private concessions, to restrict access by private market contractors and subsistence commoners alike. Operational regulations single out techniques, seasons, and particular resources. From protecting water quality by banning the processing of flax and hemp, to promoting urban sanitation by prohibiting dung, filth, and other corruption from the lanes and waterways throughout the realm, to ordinances prohibiting the (silent) saw in woodlands and reserving certain tree species for use as timber, to ordering weirs and other structures removed to reduce damage from floods. Rationing of livestock on pasture, the quantity of trees cut, the amount of animals caught and sold, or even total consumption itself are meant to prevent overexploitation. Many territorial officials go from confirming and enforcing older local regulations to determining and enforcing similar ones of their own. While state control measures thus emulate the local rules they are meant to supersede, the enforcement mechanisms are more explicitly integrated into larger agencies of public order and justice. A rhetorical shift commonly parallels jurisdictional change. Despite different institutional particulars, state interventions to limit or constrain decisions by private owners and users increasingly appeals to a greater public interest, whether expressing in generic terms or more concretely. The framework of state intervention is consistent. Authorities experience a problem, resource shortage or environmental hazard, which is diagnosed as human failure, the result of overexploitation, wastefulness, and disobedience (to law). The programme for remedy is regulation and enforcement, which entails licensing users, restricting the techniques to be used on the natural system, and rationing the time, location, and/or varieties to be exploited. Secondary considerations arise from more political conditions: fiscal motives have initial but less later importance; more common is a need, often voiced by subject users themselves, for conflict resolution in the resource area as in others (social violence, inheritance, etc.).

 

Both the leading material dangers and the secondary more cultural ones fit comfortably into broader ideological programs to establish or display the authority of the state and, to that end, to assert the importance of the ‘common good’. But then the relative weight of environmental risk management, resource conservation, and the allocation of benefits among competing users. State officials favor more standard and more rational approaches over the varieties of local practice. The state's further tendency to prioritize single favored uses (timber or field production, river navigation, etc.) gnaws away at traditional multiple uses and the diversity of natural ecosystems. Overall, and perhaps to no one's surprise, state intervention proves more inimical to the resource access of peasants and their communities than to that of private landowners. The latter has to accept more limits and/or fiscal charges on their exploitation of what they think belongs to them. Cultural consensus holds the realms and things within it all as made for humans, who in a world of sin and labor rightly possess what is subject to their use. Characteristic possession is, however, of rights, not a whole and unbounded object or claim. Layering of property rights in the same natural object probably inhibits individual or collective possessors from some kinds of destructive overexploitation and certainly establishes the large cultural framework for resource conflicts of all sorts. Indeed, the shape and courses of disputes over the ownership and use of things of nature are little determined by particular qualities of the resource itself, its metabolic place, or the technologies used to colonize it. The same sorts of issues and protagonists come to the fore. Over waters deemed threatening or valuable, and over the animals to be taken from all sorts of habitats. Yet conversely, prevalent property rights regimes, products of larger cultural constructs and constellations of social power, do not themselves determine a priori the sustainability or destructiveness of colonization's of the natural sphere. While the individual or collective quality of the decision-makers certainly partition social gains and losses from exploitation of nature, it determines the destruction, depletion, or durability of a colonized ecosystem less than do the choices of each actually made in an economic and ecological context. Both resource commons and exclusive private rights produce ecological disasters and long-stable adaptive systems.

 

Powers claiming public authority (the state) visibly entering resource conflicts on grounds of ‘common utility’, ostensibly to prevent depletion or to reduce risks to human life and property. Societies generally do acknowledge a need for a degree of protective regulation, for all that each interest group prefers it be of someone else. On a case-by-case basis, it can be difficult to untangle pursuits of the public good from its use as a cover for partisan attacks on rivals or for self-serving aggrandizement and displays of state power itself. Authorities who present themselves as ‘public’ enact laws claiming to preserve and improve environmental conditions and therein frequently appeal to ‘the common good’. This legislation has to indicate some ‘constituency’ aware of and wishing for the resolution of what would be called environmental issues; appeals to the general welfare resonating with politically significant groups. But also, numerous occasions when at least some such enactments are enforced and so do infringe on the rights and punish, perhaps even alter, the behavior of persons who claim and/or use the resource in question. Does this make polities unconcerned for what are recognized as hazards and damage? What matters for environmental outcomes comes to an accurate diagnosis of problems and effectiveness of solutions. The state has become an important determinant of what natural elements belong to its subjects and what they can do with that possession. State intervention is not, however, notably productive of new or different uses of nature. Public thought and policy remain thoroughly utilitarian even when asserting broad social concerns. Environmental protection for its own sake has no meaningful role in official discourse. Strong cultural forces thus greatly determine who establishes programs, who carries out the work, and who gains the rewards from deepening human colonization of Aevos’s natural sphere, but differences among human actors commonly fail to determine large environmental outcomes, notably the scale and sustainability of human actions in nature. On the contrary, all the prerogatives which culturally assign to certain individuals, groups, or institutions remain subject to powerful forces from the natural sphere.

 

Humanity has initiated and undergone seminal cultural developments which inflect basic ways we perceive and represent our experiences of the natural world and then set plans and priorities for material action in it. Much has autonomous origins in a symbolic cultural sphere itself. Cultural paradigms are shifting. While some departed from the course, others continued trends across critical thresholds. This period must be through transitional because in practice and not always consciously, we redefine our expectations towards the natural sphere. At least five such autonomous aspects of cultural evolution alter how we regard the world around us: empiricism, quantification, vernacular literacy, humanism, and ever-pressing claims from markets and from states over use of natural objects and materials. Writing about nature lends growing authority to empiricism and within it to quantifications as tools for learning, thinking, and reporting about the natural world. As a general pattern of lay knowledge of the natural world is acquired through respectful observation of it. We must be consciously careful on how we investigate the operations of nature. “Godan wants us to know the greater origin of things and not simply accept a created object as a creation but to research and learn why it has been placed there. We can investigate and establish what the wool on sheep and the bristles on pigs are good for and assign each its proper place.” Representations of time and space take on quantitative form. Time is an inherently abstract dimension, not intrinsically segmented such that a universal unit begins when the sun comes up or ends when it sets. In place of the natural ‘day’, yet this conception of time as a quantity conceded with the invention and proliferation of mechanical clocks that do break it down into arbitrary units without regard to specific natural events. Cartographers likewise evolve ways to portray the uniform measurement of space. Representing everything from the entire known world to specific continents, countries, and regions. All of these ways of thinking about and with numbers and quantities enters into how people encounter the natural world and represent what they experience there.

 

Extension of innovative seeing and thinking is aided by vernacular literacy in tandem with development of print culture. What begins in secular government then spreads downwards in society to estate management, town administration, business, family correspondence, and the like. This practice has established a genuine ‘middle class literacy’. Almost everyone at least knows someone who can read. It also means demand for written literature to edify, inform, and entertain has attained unprecedented scale. The demand was first met by adopting paper, a writing medium made from rags. No longer are written texts dependent on skinning sheep, goats, and calves. The greater response to demand for written texts is the development and proliferation of printing with moveable type. The printing revolution created more written materials. Each text could spread more widely; each reader has access to more texts. Print magnifies the preservative power of writing. Print fixes texts, making each a standard product. It allows texts to be saved and accumulated more easily than done by hand copying. Print stabilizes texts and the languages in which they appear. People can read a text and distinguish between what they already know (having read it elsewhere) and what is nearly learnt and now to be grappled with. For all these reasons books are a normal part of everyday experience for readers and for those people who can read. Knowledge of the natural world now able to reach a literate community. Authorities see themselves as either confronting a substantive issue or needing to assert their superiority over putative subordinates, which they do by claiming responsibility over use of the world of nature. Though commonly prefaced by worries over resource shortages or the common good, none of this state activity is visibly undertaken for the sake of the environment. Poorly funded administration and enforcement always hobbles claims to state power and so do the recalcitrance of lesser authorities and users of the resources. At times struggling as much against outside intervention as they do against the actual measures imposed. Technical adaptations cross thresholds of effectiveness to achieve broad acceptance and far-reaching consequences. The blast furnace and each such innovative replacement of a bloomery increases by a factor of ten the local capacity for iron production, while demanding only four times more charcoal fuel. In the mining sector a surge in metal production keeps up with a rising demand through the use of larger and more mechanical draining and lifting devices which make more efficient use of muscles as well as waterpower. A person turning a crank has his power magnified by a series of gear connections to drive an endless bucket chain for lifting water from deep in a mine. A full-rigged ship, provided a larger, stutter, vessel, both handier and capable of long ocean voyages. This design shrinks the size of the crew relative to the load it carries but demands more technical proficiency in navigation over long distances. These ships pull more energy out of the wind to move what could not have been moved before.

 

There are four further assertions of human power over the material world. Mechanical clocks appear widely in public urban settings, becoming a proud feature of each new town hall or display structure, places where all can witness local wealth and fashion. Clocks set the time in a day, all of them equal in length and not, as monastic hours had been, shorter in the summer night than daytime and the reverse in winter. Made materially manifest by the hands of the clock, equal and quantified time sets the rhythm for daily life. Town officials prescribe when employees are to open the gates in the morning and lock them in the evening on the basis of when the clock reads a certain time. Time has been transformed. Clocks serve in the rising skill in the precise handling of materials. Though mostly made of wood, key parts are of metal. A clock that can keep more or less accurate time for a week or two proves the pieces possess some degree of precision. The same quality can also be seen in the astrolabe, produced in greater numbers and used more regularly. Another device where materials are manipulated with growing accuracy is the printing press and moveable type itself. As elaborate in its precision and its moving parts as are clocks, the press makes relatively greater use of metal for, as distinct from the smoothly running clock, it has to exert force and absorb abrupt impacts. Wooden pieces wear nowhere near as well as metal. Cheaper but fragile wood is relegated to rarer larger letters and illustrations.

 

Cannons are a highly effective and important use of metal. The idea of an explosion propelling a projectile out of a tube which inventors have to propel the tube itself. From an environmental perspective the ever-rising amount and sophistication of metal use has equal significance. Quantities of metal being used by armies have risen rapidly. Soaring capital and resource costs of war drives states to contrive ever more elaborate institutions and grounds to interfere in their subjects’ relations with nature. New cannon-resistant defense schemes lay waste to the immediate environs of cities, to the critical use of them upon ships. Officials entering private cellars to scrape from the walls blooms of the saltpeter needed for more gunpowder. Pursuit of this natural resource means seizing control over the geochemical process itself. Cannons not only enhance the ability to kill humans and other organisms, but they also embody a collective shift of cultural patterns. And most have to do with power. Power is the primary attribute of water-driven machinery, the strongest terrestrial devices that we can control are ever more complex water- (and to some degree wind-) driven machines serving all sorts of resource extraction and heavy manufactures. A waterwheel drives a shifting camshaft being used to draw wire. This force pulls a rod of metal through a hole in a sheet of heavier metal and thus makes it a smaller wire. The brute task is no longer attempted or limited by the strength of a man or ox. Or a bi-directional waterwheel with a diameter, with controls for an operator to direct the wheel’s rotation. The entire mechanism drives a huge windlass that lifts water from a mine by means of a bucket made by stitching together five or six whole ox hides. Waterpower no does what neither people nor draught animals could originally accomplish. All these innovations - blast furnace, mine drainage, full-rigged ship, clocks, press, cannons, and water-powered machines - manipulate material surroundings. Humans’ self-evident ability to transform our physical world. The distinction here draws between self-generating cultural phenomena and those evolving from continual adaptation to the material world may be visible only in retrospect for the sake of coherent discussion. It is important to acknowledge its far from merely being driven by such natural forces as climate, disease, or geographical relationships. Aevos’ cultures are actively transforming themselves in ways that impinge directly on how humans experience and work in the natural world.

EA BYK ZWE ZANYOTSKER ZWEER EA TER PETRAVEZKER,

HER LADYSHIP, PRIMROSE EMELYA KORTREVICH.

[HIGH_FIRE 5490]

In between putting what was written into practice as per his day to day, looking after the author of the piece and general labour, it took Jiri a few weeks to finish the article. Every evening with about an hour to himself he would sit and marvel at the work that had been put into the writings.Truly did he admire Primrose for her mind and how she worked.