Hmmm. The Indians Weren't Hippies, After All!

[Meta Blog]

Originally from Gus Van Horn,

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....

***

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.