In my hallway is two pictures of my great great grandparents. One is full Cherokee Indian. To refresh my memory I just glazed at them and have to admit they need dusting to remove a few spider web strings. Another thing I observe is that great ever so great grandmother looked quite ugly to be honest.
What do we know of her culture, not much, most if not all history was only recorded with the oncoming event of white man. We can romanticize of an ecological Indian of course, but we really have no idea what really occurred. Historically and Ecologically are just speculation at best. For thousands of year, all we know is perhaps a fire got out of control here and there, we do not know if practiced any form of land management.
Wiki gives us this... "Early researchers thought that no large burning was carried out by natives, but research during the latter half of the 20th century has shown that many or most of the presettlement fires were intentionally caused."
Then wiki says "CITATION NEEDED"...
Wiki says "Although there are no written documents describing the intentional, controlled burning of forests, it is believed...."
Wiki says "More forest exists today in some parts of North America than when the Europeans first arrived."
Now how would more forests exist today than back when there was perfect harmony and control with Indians? What would cause there to be less forest then than now? Big Fires perhaps that would of been even bigger if not for occasional fire started by lightning.
Genesis 1:28 is just part of the story...
You put all things under his feet. For in making man the ruler over all things, God did not put anything outside his authority; though we do not see everything under him now. Hebrews 2:8 Bible in Basic English version
Now how would more forests exist today than back when there was perfect harmony and control with Indians? What would cause there to be less forest then than now? Big Fires perhaps that would of been even bigger if not for occasional fire started by lightning.
The answer is one that the eco-Nazi's refuse to listen to ...
... Fossil Fuels like coal and gas and petroleum.
It is also why we still have wild animals and fish in the lakes and seas. It is precisely why we have forests. Wide-scale intelligent irrigation also helped, as did energy distribution and advanced transportation engines and efficient heating and cooling equipment, and fire suppression techniques, but the availability of naturally occurring dense stored-energy sources is what has in fact saved the environment.
There was maybe a billion people in total on planet Earth when oil was first utilized and the internal combustion engine and all its variants came along, and that directly led to the late industrial revolution and further advancements in use of coal and gas. And those one billion were already putting a hurtin' on the environment by burning every living thing that burned, shooting everything living thing that had fur, or whose flesh contained oil and were fishing out every waterway. If that population were seven times as large we never would have made it this far, not to mention the environment around us. We began using dead things instead of killing live things.
Had environment-saving fossil fuels never been exploited there would be hardly a cord of wood to be found. And rather than planting exotic and decorative plants, grass and trees, the entire picture would revolve around planting fast growing product to harvest for immediate fuel use. Same goes for farming in general, which would consist mostly of animals to be used for fur for warmth and other things.
Beasts of burden then became mostly pets and optional curiosities, and the secondary damage to the environment from the waste of horses for example, littering every city street vanished overnight. You would think that PETA and Sarah McLachlan would be able to figure this much out.
So the living environment around us was in fact rescued by recycling the ancient long-dead environment beneath our feet. The environment NEVER had it so good. Tell every eco-Nazi you know to put that in their crack pipe and smoke it.
Well, as you suggest, reality is more complex. I've read some 5,000 pages of Spanish diaries and Indian ethnographies. Here in California, we actually have very good records of first contact conditions, diaries that describe management activities and consequences in some detail. I'm the last guy in the world to romanticize how those Indians lived. I have been engaged in and documented a uniquely successful native plant restoration project for 25 years. So I actually do have some authority for what I said.
Now how would more forests exist today than back when there was perfect harmony and control with Indians? What would cause there to be less forest then than now? Big Fires perhaps that would of been even bigger if not for occasional fire started by lightning.
No, frequent fires, because they kill seedlings.
You put all things under his feet. For in making man the ruler over all things, God did not put anything outside his authority; though we do not see everything under him now. Hebrews 2:8 Bible in Basic English version
I don't deify Paul. He was a student of rabbi Gamaliel in the tradition of the Pharisees. Having read the entire Talmud Yershalmi Tractate Sheviis on the Sabbath for the Land, and having unearthed its original intent which was NOT practiced by the Jewish people at that time (for military reasons), and having spent two years re-translating Genesis 4 (because it's a mess), I suspect I have a better grip on that original intent. In fact, it illuminates much of what Yeshua had to say because HE quite apparently understood that original intent as expressed in Matthew 25. So I wrote a book on it. The Torah was written as a teaching using a skeleton of (even then) ancient oral histories likely derived from the time Moshe was living with Yitro the Midianite priest.