On Sep 24, 6:56?pm, wrote:
On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:06:23 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing





wrote:
On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 08:05:08 -0000, thunder
wrote:

Yeah, but, is it environmentalism that is the folly, or is it the resource
intensive consumer paradigm? On this increasingly crowded planet,
sustainability should have a place.

I hear this argument all the time and I can't say that I agree.

To tell the truth, the intensive consumer IS the driver of economics
and has been since, well, forever. It's how progress is measured.

To my way of thinking, we are limiting ourselves to this thought that
nothing can ever be replaced, but that's just not true.

Economies ran on human power, animal power, water power, steam power
and now oil power. The next big thing hasn't been developed yet, but
it will and life will go on.

I agree, it is arrogant of man to think the world will stay the same,
just because we like it like it is now. I'm sure the indians think all
of our development here was simply destroying the planet.


I was going to stay out of this one, but here's a weird segue.
The latest acheological finds throughout much of the western
hemisphere indicate that indigenous, pre-Columbian populations
*intensively* managed resources and the environment. And populations
were many, many, times larger than even the most optimistic estimates
the 20th Century. The European colonists that arrived in the early
1600's typically reported east coast forests without a lot of
underbrush, often describing the forests as like an English park. The
natives had learned to use fire to remove a lot of the underbrush.
When woods that are a few hundred years old are currently removed in
the New England states people are discovering native maize and pumpkin
mounds where agriculture was not previously known to exist.
Very few elk bones are found in middens (garbage mounds) of
archeologically examined native settlements that existed in the 16th
and 17th century, but in the 18th and 19th century the humber of elk
bones rose dramatically. Same with bison, there were more bison in the
American midwest in the 1800's than in the 1600's.

What happened?

Smallpox and other European diseases so decimated the natives that
entire cultures disappeared. Forests that had been intesively managed
were allowed to grow wild again, and filled up with underbrush before
the advance of white settlement. Grazing animals that had been kept in
check by large native populations, such as elk and bison, multiplied
at previously unheard of rates as their most dangerous predator, man,
temporarily declined.

Recommended reading: "1491" by Charles C. Mann
(not known to be a relative of any previous poster to rec.boats by
that name)

Lessons to be learned: Sometimes we change the environment
unwittingly (by introducing a disease, etc). And, man has always
intensively managed and utilized his environment, even the so-called
"primitives".






The climate is going to change. Get used to it. Buy some waterfront
property in Arizona and your kids will thank you.- Hide quoted text -

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