Hard to read this article and feel proud to be a human.
A world without wilderness and wild animal will be an impoverished one indeed.
"The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-u...
However the bison numbers have recovered somewhat. Great whale populations are increasing. Maybe there is some hope for us yet.
You have to feel somewhat proud to have achieved such extreme evolutionary success. Only recently have we expanded to other meta goals like conservation.
By the measure that we apply to nearly every other species on earth, humans win.
Evolution is about competition. So I guess if your species destroys every other species then you have 'won' in some sense. But only in the same sense that you have 'won' a nuclear war if your counties is the only one in the world with any survivors.
For how much I obviously hated them, sometimes I feel proud for human pests. Be it locusts, rats, mosquitoes, cockroaches, ants, etc. They declare war on the mightiest species on the planet and are still winning! I remember seeing that humans are only the 2nd most prolific human killers (1st is mosquitoes) and was surprised! Compared to other animals on earth, they are certainly the champions of evolution.
True, but to be fair if it were mosquitos alone, they would be little more than an annoyance. They're only deadly because they've teamed up with a host of other microorganisms like the Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya viruses.
There was a documentary about mosquitos where a guy from the Australian Army said, that sleeping a night, with a lot of mosquitos -without protection- , could be your last night.
American governments -Federal and State- in the 19th century developed eugenics laws and genocidal policies against natives, to say nothing of horrible policies against blacks. Some of those served as inspiration to the Nazis. Horrible.
It hasn't worked perfectly though, as the vaste majority of American bisons (all but 4 herds in fact) aren't true bisons but have cattle genes due to hybridation.
The latest Ken Burns documenatary, "The American Buffalo" tells the story of the near-total extermination of the Bison, and by extension, the Native American Indian way of life, and includes many of these photos. I felt like it was a better presentation of the reality of the West in 3 hours than the 8-episode "The West" from the 1990s, which only spent a scant few minutes on the Bison. Highly recommended.
Interesting in the article they discuss how the introduction of the horse created a broader dependency on bison and more vulnerable by its availability. Ultimately though, smallpox is what did the most damage across N. America. Haida Gwaii for example went from something like 40,000 people to 400.
There's a book based on the documentary: "Blood Memory" by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. Beautiful pictures, good narrative - maybe a little pricey at $40 for the HB.
“General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins.”
The money quote, describing the root driver of the extermination — it was a policy to exterminate the primary source of sustenance for the Native Americans, to force them onto the reservations. The economic uses and mass hunting competitions were the result.
>>The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, primarily to pressure the native people onto the Indian reservations during times of conflict by removing their main food source.
>>Without the bison, native people of the plains were often forced to leave the land or starve to death. One of the biggest advocates of this strategy was General William Tecumseh Sherman.
>>On June 26, 1869, the Army Navy Journal reported: “General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins.”
It has always fascinated me that the people migrating to oregon territory for the gold rush in the 1850's were some of the very very last people to ever see vast swaths of the United States in its pristine, natural state. I wonder if they had any clue that within a matter of a few decades it'd basically all be gone.
Referring to land the natives had inhabited for something like 15,000 years as "pristine" and "natural" is somewhat erasing their accomplishments, no?
Pristine and natural North America had mammoth, horses, and many other megafauna which were rapidly hunted to extinction. But somehow the American Indian evolved culturally, adapting to their environmental niches and cultivating the land to maintain a lifestyle dominated by hunting, with some farming. This involved more-or-less extensive changes to the landscape.
America before the White man came wasn't pristine or natural. It was bountiful.
Seems unnecessary to jump on the guy for his word choice. It's easy to do and it makes you look good when you can give a little speech correcting him. But I don't think it really helps anybody. It seems more like a flex of your education and vocabulary than anything else.
> Referring to land the natives had inhabited for something like 15,000 years as "pristine" and "natural" is somewhat erasing their accomplishments, no?
Erm, no? Seems kind of racist to say otherwise? The plains indians entire culture revolved around preserving and respecting nature. And I'm pretty sure it's only theorized that the paleo-indians wiped out the mammoths, and I'm not sure how that's the problem of the white man or even the native americans of the mid 19th century.
Extending your argument to its logical absurdity, no environment can be considered "pristine" unless it's the literal primordial sludge the first life emerged from. Very odd nitpickery.
Almost makes it sound like if Horses alone were introduced, but no other white man colonization, that the Indians might have wiped out the buffalo also, if left to their own devices.
Wouldn't this be more in line with other megafauna extinctions? The only reason Indians didn't also wipe out this megafauna was a technology change, the addition of horses.
Butcher's crossing is a great book set against this backdrop. The pithy ending - bison fur was just really a fashion fad - is, if not the entire truth, at least very sobering.
I recently read "The Once and Future World; Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be" and basically everything think as nature is an illusion.
We humans have decimated every species on the planet. The planet used to be teaming with wildlife, now its mostly empty and quiet except for the humans.
The discussion here reminded me of the Pratchett Discworld story that I least liked - and I bought and enjoyed almost all the books over the decades they were published.
It was the one about the ghouls - hated and despised, until it was figured out they made beautiful music, and were warmly applauded in a crowded concert, triumphantly closing the book.
Whee, close call. If they didn't have any entertainment value and just propagated diseases, that would be another story.
> The arrival of horses, originally brought by the Spanish, revolutionized hunting techniques. By the early 1700s, horses had become integral to the nomadic hunting cultures of Indigenous groups.
...
> Attracted by previously unimagined hunting possibilities, Native Americans poured into the Plains from all directions, creating one of most renowned hunting cultures in history.
Does the author mean to imply that the plains were unihabited until the spanish introduction of horses?
A world without wilderness and wild animal will be an impoverished one indeed.
"The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-u...
However the bison numbers have recovered somewhat. Great whale populations are increasing. Maybe there is some hope for us yet.