Posted on 10/17/2011 6:43:48 AM PDT by Red Badger
The good news is that this “study” should drive a stake through the heart of the story that native Americans were living in simple harmony with Mother Gaia.
Got it.
Hmmmm.
This is so PC, what's not to like?
>Gaaaaack!
So to the environmentalist left, Columbus should be a hero. Thanks to Columbus, both global warming and deforestation were halted and reversed, and the “population bomb,” as Paul Ehrlich called the menace of over-population, was defused.
“since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived”
That figure was pulled out of a hat, of course. But even if it is true, I might ask, “90 percent of what?” And no one would be able to answer me.
What evidence do these scientists have that the Americas had been deforested before they were reforested only to be deforested again? There were civilizations in South America and varying amounts of agriculture here and there, but weren’t these by and large pastoral/hunter-gatherer people? They weren’t clear cutting to build condos, is what I’m getting at.
Maybe the cooling came from the sun and THEN the people all died.
I suspect if you had a time-lapse movie of the sun it would flicker like a candle over thousands of years time.
I burn my garbage.
Author Charles Mann makes a case for this based on the following;
Early mound builders in the continental US and their like in Central and South America had only stone tools and no draft animals, yet built massive structures in a relatively short period of time (carbon dating.)
For a good read, I’d recommend Mann’s “1491” and “1493” about the Americas before and just after the arrival of Europeans.
Sooooo, deforestation is a good thing, then?
Genghis Khan got a lot of credit recently for his marvelous work in combating global warming through horrendous massacres of conquered peoples.
Want to bet ol’ Chris Columbus gets any similar praise? ‘Cause I’ve got a little money to wager.
Johhny Appleseed caused the Little Ice Age.
I don’t, I dump it on Liberal’s front lawns so they can compost it or seperate it for recycle. Just doing my part to make sure they feel good about themselves.
I think the population estimates for what is now the US and Canada are guesses based on very little information. Definitely a lot of Indians died because of the newly-introduced diseases, but determining the previous population level is hard--and the life expectancy had been low. In Mexico there is better information, showing a dramatic decline in the population after the conquest, but the population density had been a lot higher there.
If there were fewer Indians killing deer, there would have been more deer eating young trees, so would the forests have increased so dramatically?
Did they consider the impact of reforestation in China under the Ming dynasty?
The ecology of North America would not have supported such a number of people? It would have requires dozens of settlements on the scale of Cahokia. In any case, the decimation of the indian population was probably no more than that of the Black Death in Europe.
Which sucks up more CO2 and puts out more O2?
An acre of trees or an acre of grass land.
The article claimed 90% not 10%.
Some people here seem to be having some difficulty separating issues. I agree the study is bogus, but the misconception of pre-Columbian America as a couple of hunter-gatherer Indians roaming through the forest is false. There were massive civilizations in Central America, South America and some southeastern parts of North America (Mississipi). They didn’t grow maize in a forest.
They used ‘slash and burn’ methods, same as the South American native do to this day........when the land wore out, they moved to a new area and repeated the process. The old areas became meadows as they regenerated the land and eventually forests.............
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