Bill Tuthill wrote:


Environmentalism is an updated form of native american religion, I
suspect.
It's amazing how much influence native americans have had over our
culture,
especially considering how we mercilessly wiped them out. For
example,
the Iroquois Confederacy served as a model for US government.

I'm not sure that I buy the arguement that the Native Americans were
all that environmentally conscious. For example, the Iroquois
Confederation was formed to expand the tribes territory for the Fur
Trade and as a response to the encroachment of the Northern Tribes
supported by the French. They needed more territory because they had
decimated the furbearing populations in their original tribal areas.
Hardly a conservation ethic.

If one considers earlier Native cultures, there seem to have been
several that suffered from environmental collapses, maybe due to
climate change. The Adena in the East and the Cliff Dwellers in the
west for an example.