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.
There are second hand accounts from indigenous people, excavated bone sites with tools and spear tips, but reportedly no first hand recorded observations from Europeans of buffalo running off cliffs.
Buffaloes aren't exactly Main Battle Tanks you know: it's not that difficult to build fences that are able to stop them (it just won't be the light fences you have in mind).
Also, not voluntarily pushing the beasts to your fences is going to help a bit, since buffaloes don't run to cliff on their own…
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?
The conquerors have told their story for 2,000+ years.
Now we are telling humanity’s story, so that we all can take care of our shared home better, and learn to be wise stewards of this magnificent place called Earth, and her offspring.
When you say, "The conquerors have told their story for 2,000+ years," it’s indeed a delightful insight, but brutally simplified. Conquerors never merely "tell" their story; they impose it, they embed it in the very fabric of our reality, shaping our desires, our institutions, our very notion of what is normal! And now, this idea that "we are telling humanity’s story," who is this 'we' if not a new form of a subtle conqueror, perhaps clad in the robes of ecological concern and moral superiority?
Yes, we speak of being "wise stewards of Earth," but isn’t there a hidden arrogance here? The very term steward implies a mastery, does it not? Earth becomes something to be managed, controlled, and ultimately subdued under the guise of care and sustainability. This narrative seduces us with the promise that if only we manage better, all will be well, neglecting the radical openness, the chaotic unpredictability of nature itself.
So, what is to be done? Should we then resign ourselves to passive observation? Certainly not! But we must proceed with a critical, self-reflective stance that constantly questions our assumptions and our motives. Our struggle must not be to replace one conquering narrative with another but to recognize the ideological battles hidden beneath these grand narratives. We must confront not only the stories we are told by others but also the stories we tell ourselves. This is the only way we can hope to genuinely engage with our shared home—by understanding that our narratives are not innocent, not free of power, and certainly not free of conquest.
I'm asking you because you're the one who just laid the blame of the last 2000 years of bad things on Christ's teachings, and not on mankind's natural behavior. Somehow it was what Christ taught, because it didn't stop people from doing bad things.
So... you literally look at events like the Crusades, anti-semitism, slavery, the treatement of native Americans or any number of horrors done by Christians in the name of Christ and with the authority and sanction of the Christian church .... and admit absolutely no relationship between any of that and Christianity? No, Christianity isn't just the teachings of Christ, any more than any religion, or American law is just the Constitution. Christianity is also what Christians do, it's politics and government and militarism, culture and pop culture. Dogma and folklore.
What I'd like to be talking about is the relationship between the Christian religion and Western imperialism and the consequences of Christian conquest on the narratives of history (specifically the narratives of groups oppressed by that religion.) What you're engaging in is pedantry and a gross application of what I'll call the True Christian fallacy. Fair enough. We can't have a conversation about this. Good night.
When you use circular definitions, as you're doing now, you can re-define a word to be whatever is convenient to you. If Christianity is also defined by what Christians do, then what defines a Christian? You have to ground it in a concrete definition at some point, and that definition is: the teachings of Christ. If a Christian acts in a way that is against the teachings of Christ, then that is not Christian behavior, and is not representative of Christianity. That's a pretty simple and unambiguous concept.
Your "No True Scotsman" variant just shows that you don't really grasp this idea. Ironically, what you're doing by making Christianity a grab-bag of bad behavior from people you don't like, instead of grounding it in a clear and unambiguous definition, is a clever perversion of this fallacy.
That's the power of only seeing one story, minus context of what the rest of the world was like. Would you also call the history of what native american tribes did to each other evil? Or was it on par with the brutality of the times?
You're misusing that fallacy here, but I don't fault you, because my point is subtle. My claim isn't that their point is invalid because they're hypocritical about native american history, my claim is that their gauge of evil is miscalibrated, because only a certain perspective of history is amplified to this degree, minus the historical context that puts it on par with the times.
You seem to be implying there is some kind of conspiracy to portray one particular group as bad while ignoring another. I don't think that's warranted, there has been plenty of media vilifying America's natives. There is perhaps an effort to correct the record: history was written by the victors, and it has taken far too long for us to realize the many injustices that were carried out along the way. Understanding what we lost (in this case, vast Bison herds) is important. These losses affect natives and immigrants alike.
Be intellectually honest. Show me a single front page post "vilifying America's natives." You won't find it, but you'll find plenty in the other direction, because a large portion of HN's user base has a shameless anti-American slant.
No, my complaint is the pervasive anti-American history. People get actually upset if you notice it and mention it. As if the default behavior should be to cheerfully self-flagellate for American history.
Your comment misses the point so much it makes me sad! Seeing the pictures of thousands upon thousands of dead bison skulls is honestly astonishing and I think your snide comment "American bad, native good" is extremely reductive of the article, which even points out:
> Such reliance on a narrow ecological base ultimately proved unsustainable, pushing the bison populations into a steep decline by the mid–19th century.
Showing the native Americans role in the demise of the bison population.
> You have to wonder why history of a specific nature, about a specific people frequently surfaces ...
Probably because a lot of Americans use the site and learning about their history is interesting so it gets more points :)
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.