I am not blaming them for all the "real damage" Just pointing out that they did do lasting damage.
I call lasting damage, or lasting impact, our cities, freeways, homes, and development caused by millions of people.
They also had cities, highways, homes and development caused by millions of people. If we all vanished today much of our infrastructure would be grown over and destroyed within a hundred years. The same thing that happened to them.
The difference between their style of land management and the modern is that we tend to clean up our messes but that is for two reasons. The first is that we know how to clean it up rather then just abandoning it for nature to do. The second is that we have the time, money, manpower and food to do so. Remember that these people lived just one harvest away from starvation and massive die offs. We aren’t and that gives us time to correct our mistakes.
There is a great deal of “wild land” left and if it has been tamed if you just leave it alone for a few years it goes right back to wild. Nature wins every time.
I am not attacking them I am trying to point out the silliness of the “Noble Savage who lives in harmony with nature” myth whether it is in the Americas or else where. The idea is dangerous and mostly promoted by people who have watched too many Disney movies and think that walking from one building to another is “communing with nature.”
A more primitive society uses many more resources and is much more polluting and wasteful then a more advanced society. But the exact opposite is being taught in school today and that is very troubling to me.
a.cricket
I guess I only question the wisdom of trying to find dirt on the indians as part of the debate. That is why I said in my first comment that we would look worse for winning. It gets us no further in developing a strategy now, and may only make us look like jerks, unless you expand on your point the way you just did above.