[gerbilly]

> That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to.

If you want to know what the natural state for an area is, ask a native person from a population that has un uninterrupted culture, that is if you can find one.

A native person I know often describes a discorded ecosystem by saying: "The land is sick."

To equivocate and to claim all states are equally natural, is to deliberately miss the point.

A healthy ecosystem—and most of us haven't ever seen one—is obviously healthy when you see it.

It's a tautology to say that everything is natural. You could argue that plutonium and dioxin are natural, but without considering the concentration and distribution, it's meaningless semantics.

[UnFleshedOne]

Chinese are "native people from a population that has un-uninterrupted culture". Not too great at preserving environment (reportedly improving lately I think).

Idea of a "noble savage" is a myth that is about as racist as it's opposite.

[healsjnr1]

This is a long way from my expertise but I think that what you are referring to ('Chinese') is actually a large group of varying cultural and ethnic people that has seen a huge amount of change over millennia. I think this is significantly different to what the parent was referring to.

[gerbilly]

Don't sling epithets.

My using the word 'native' was a proxy for a type of culture: a close to the land hunter gatherer lifestyle. You know one that would necessarily make them keen observers of their natural environment.

I could have said aboriginal, but maybe you'll take offence to that too?

[UnFleshedOne]

Ah, sorry, I didn't mean you are racist. Just the idea of noble savage. I should have been more careful with the wording.

Re: hunter-gatherer lifestyle, my understanding that people leading that are merely unlucky (or lucky) ones who didn't domesticate enough plants and animals to settle down and go through a population explosion. They certainly have a lot of knowledge about local ecosystems because they depend on that knowledge for survival.

But, a few successful domestications, some introduced species, few hundred years of nice weather and they will multiply and turn into the same kind of locusts the rest of humanity is. I think Maya or Aztec went through that. Hell, this was happening back when cyanobacteria was repeatedly wiping out life on earth before something figured out how to use oxygen. It is a general property of life -- consume and reproduce.

We might eventually grow out of it (I see a lot of promise in regenerative agriculture for example), but chances are not certain.

[phyzome]

Traditional Knowledge is a real thing, separate from the "noble savage" stereotype.

[krapp]

>Chinese are "native people from a population that has un-uninterrupted culture".

Didn't they interrupt their culture with extreme prejudice like fifty-odd years ago?

[TeMPOraL]

Such a native person can compare what they see to what they lived in the past, or at best to what the cultural memory can still vividly recall. Which is at best few hundred years.

[dmix]

Without advanced systems of agriculture where I was dependent on thing likes mass herds of Buffalo migrating through my local regions I'd see it as sick too.