Hmmm. The Indians weren't hippies, after all!

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Bleh! The current round of experiments is wreaking total havoc with my schedule. If I'm lucky, I'll finish early enough to spend some time with my wife in the late evening on Valentine's Day.

Just a quick post this evening during some dead time before some measurements....

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Reader Adrian Hester pointed out to me a very good article that obliterates the environmentalist myth that the American Indian had no effect on wildlife populations.
When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California's natural condition -– a product of Native Americans' living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage.

That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years -- from 1997 to 2004 -- painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American [sic] garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn't possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years.

Broughton concluded that California wasn't always a lush Eden before settlers arrived. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned to "fabulous abundances" only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s.

Broughton's study of bird bones, published in Ornithological Monographs, mirrors earlier research in which he found that fish such as sturgeon, mammals such as elk, and other wildlife also sustained significant population declines at the hands of ancient Indian hunters.
Oh. So Western civilization is not the Great Satan of the religion of Gaia after all.
Broughton believes the Bay Area harbored a prehistoric native population of 50,000 to 150,000 before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. He believes that birds and other wildlife rebounded only after early European explorers came into contact with natives, infecting them with fatal diseases such as smallpox, malaria, and influenza and killing off as much as 90 percent of the Indian population.
Of course, that means that mankind, including the Indians, as a whole is evil, if your standard is some sort of utopian abundance of wildlife. Never mind that in nature, some kind of predator eventually evolves or moves in to take advantage of such abundance. Ask what is so special about man as a predator and you'll be on to what it is that the environmentalists are really crusading against.

That last paragraph also brings to mind a quote from research biologist David M. Graber I learned about a few years back in George Reisman's masterful essay, "The Toxicity of Environmentalism".
It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
Even the Indians weren't, by these lights, "part of nature". Since man is the rational animal and the environmentalists damn him for using his mind to survive, the only way for man to "rejoin nature" is to die. This is the logical end of the notion that the faculty of reason is somehow "unnatural".

Read the article on bird bones and Reisman's essay both. Each one is very worthwhile.

-- CAV

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yo, Gus, great essay on the bird bones. There are a number of good books about the actual ecological impact of humans on the North American ecology, which was in fact substantial. A very fine book that goes into the nuts and bolts of several issues is Shepard Kretch III's The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. There are also some good chapters in William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. More generally, Martin Lewis's Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism has a lot of good stuff in it, as does Wallace Kaufmann's No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. The latter two are written by environmentalists who have become disaffected with much of the environmentalist movement, so they have a solid knowledge of the way the movement coheres--you might say they know where many of the bodies are buried.

But in short, the myth of prehistoric Indians living in some sort of static harmony with nature is not borne out by the evidence: Indians in the American Northeast managed the wilderness for the benefit of their preferred means of hunting on a heroic scale, so much so that when their impact faded away under the impact of English settlement, the whole ecology of New England forests changed over the span of about a century and a half. Similarly, remnants of massive feats of engineering have recently been shown for the Amazon basin, often treated as a pristine wilderness, that greatly modified the ecology there. (After the population of the basin collapsed thanks to disease and slave raids by the Portuguese, the jungle returned; many traces of the former large population attested by early Amazonian explorers were simply lost to the massive water flow into and through the Amazon basin (something like one-third of the entire hemisphere's flow of fresh water, if I remember aright). This article is just another piece of evidence about another putative paradise (Ursula Le Guin, for example, who has gushed over the precolumbian harmony of the California Indians in several of her essays, such as "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be") turning out to show that probably humans weren't all that different even there.

Gus Van Horn said...

Adrian,

Thanks for the interesting comment and for these references. And thanks again for that tip.

Gus