Larry C wrote:

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.

I'm not saying that Native Americans were environmentalists, just that
modern Environmentalism had its roots in indigenous religion. In the
Torah and classical Greco-Roman literature, you seldom or never encounter
wonder of the natural world. Virgil's Bucolic (Eclogues) are mostly
about farming. In European literature, nature worship reached its peak
with German Romanticism, and even there, nature is largely tamed by man.

Whereas in (many tribes') Native American religion, places are sacred
in and of themselves. There might be a rock (present-day Devil's Tower),
or a place on a river (Ishi Pishi Fall on the Klamath) considered sacred.

It could be this respect for natural features that inspired Thoreau,
Leopold Aldo, John Muir, Edward Abbey (etc.) to formulate the seminal
ideas of Environmentalism. Unless you have a different theory.

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.

I don't know about the Adena, but the Anasazi cliff dwellers were either
escaping severe drought, or pushed out by invading Navajo, or both.