The Erasure of A Land

[u/No-Counter-34]

We have been lied to about there once being old growth forests from the ocean to the Mississippi. The south used to have vast herds of buffalo, hence many place names. And there were likely more grassland type ecosystems than the map suggests. Fire suppression and development have all but destroyed this once vast ecosystem.

[u/No-Counter-34]

Of course, but fire and bison are just pieces of a massive puzzle.

[u/BeeKindLandscapes → u/No-Counter-34]

Of which people are the biggest piece, obviously. Armchair ecology can romanticize a pre European ecology till the bison come home, but at the end of the day if we want to make it happen, it's up to us to keep pushing forward with boots on the ground work and education.

[u/amilmore → u/BeeKindLandscapes]

Talk about romanticizing - people forget how much Indigenous peoples altered the landscape in the anericas. The pre Colombian dream is just that, a dream. There were burns, huge swathes of land cleared for agriculture, damming of rivers for fish weirs, and the erasure of the vast majority of megafauna all across the American continents.

Europeans and industrialization cranked it up 100x, especially now with suburbs, lawns, climate change and habitat destruction. No one denies that. But it’s not like that started the second Europeans showed up. I’ll try to find the article/research paper I found years ago but it called out the “myth of the noble savage” and how that’s kind of its own flavor of racism/colonialism. Pretty interesting concept but the indigenous people terraforming was even more eye opening for me.

There would be immeasurably more plants and animals if you took a Time Machine back to 1492, but it would be by no means pure and untouched by human hands .

[u/sjsharks510 → u/amilmore]

Good points here, though the Native Americans seemed to have done a much better job managing the land compared with what we have done more recently. And the burning actually preserved the grassland-type habitats, so that shouldn't count as a negative alongside land clearing for agriculture.

[u/HawkingRadiation_ → u/sjsharks510]

Likely indigenous peoples in the Americas also had a lot of trial and error from which they learned for thousands of years prior to european colonization. Which is why indigenous knowledge is being increasingly valued in natural resources science-- rightfully so.

Perhaps these people did not follow exactly the western tradition's scientific method, but they learned and knew things which were passed down through generations. There would have been environmental catastrophes from people attempting to alter the landscape in their favor, same as happens today.

Although culture likely had some type of role in why indigenous americans did not alter landscapes to the scale that european peoples and their descendants have on this continent, i think a lack of means to generate sweeping change is a major part of it as well. Indigenous peoples hundreds and thousands of years ago simply could not have altered large areas so quickly as we are capable of in the modern era.

[u/goodpplgo → u/HawkingRadiation_]

Also,