Reddit reviews Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

There are all kinds of things that modern people do better than hunter-gatherers. Until recently this did not include sustainable food production, but now it sometimes does. I don't want to say that permaculture has a monopoly on these techniques, or that everyone who says they're doing permaculture is growing food sustainably, but under the "permaculture" umbrella you can find techniques that go beyond sustainability, that grow food densely while increasing soil fertility and leaving niches for wild animals and "weeds".

Some of these techniques are rediscoveries or reinventions of indigenous horticulture, in which forests have been actively managed for human benefit. Keeping It Living by Nancy Turner is a good book about this. But we can do even better with tools and techniques that are uncommon or unavailable among primitive people: soil testing, hugelkultur, intensive composting, steel shovels, grafting, long-distance trading of plants and seeds, and a global information network linking millions of innovators.