Humans Caused a Major Shift in Earth's Ecosystems 6,000 Years Ago
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The book doesn't embellish. (The Donner party took one sentence out of that guide, and made a mistake.)
My reason for posting here is when the author was describing California; it was almost like reading fiction. The amount of wildlife was staggering. We were all told about the Bufflo, but there were so much more wildlife. Wildlife that we destroyed. One sentence really got to me. It stated, 'Salmon are 10 lbs. to 60 lbs.' I thought 60 lbs--it must be an exaggeration, but I think it's true.
Who is "we"? I didn't do any of the destruction. Did you?
I'm not saying "you" destroyed any wildlife. What I am saying is that (if you're American) you are reaping the benefits of a society that exists as it does because it dominated a continent, destroying much of the existing landscape and natural inhabitants. There is some level of responsibility that individuals have for prior actions taken by their society. Surely not as great a responsibility as if you'd done the actions yourself, or approved of the actions at the time they were taken. But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).
Every society on Earth exists as it does because it destroyed much of the previously existing landscape and natural inhabitants, most definitely including the Native American societies. If you read Over the Edge of the World, a fascinating book about Magellan's voyage around the globe, you'll find that as he traveled the straits at the southern tip of South America -- the most miserable, cold, dreary, and awful environment that could be imagined -- he met a miserable and starving aboriginal tribe: a tribe that, it turns out, had been pushed all the way to the tip of Tierra del Fuego by succeeding waves of "native" migration across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The sin of the United States is not original with the United States: it is the sin of every society.
> But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).
You could smuggle an elephant inside that parenthetical clause. For starters, how specifically is one to "rectify past wrongs" that were committed against people who have been dead for hundreds of years? And are the remnants of those societies that still exist today also obliged to "rectify past wrongs" against the people they aggressed on even farther in the past?
The poster dodnt say every wrong against everyone and everything ever has to be rectified. There are many concrete and affordable steps we can take to remediate much of the damage our societies have done and are doing to each other and the environment. I agree with the poster that we have an obligation to take as many of those steps as we feel we can afford.
THANKS.
Every human culture out there is responsible for wars and horrible crimes and destruction; primitive societies were no better (Hobbes Was Right (TM)), but only a few have built advanced and prosperous civilizations, and what is more, the West is basically the only which reflects on its past.
I'm over with modern western ethnomasochism.
Not if taken so far as to become self-destructive.
> Not sure what "modern western ethnomasochism" is,
It means that here in the West we are (were) the best (in relative terms) but we think we are the worst, and wish for our own end.
> Can you really have one without the other?
Oh yes. Godspeed to Asia which will inherit the future, learning the good bits from the West without the suicidal self-flagellation.
Nobody's suggesting you should be tried for the crimes of your ancestors, or previous members of your society. What we can do is stop doing more damage and try to rectify some of it, where it is reasonable and affordable to do so.
There's no law at work here though. If there is some specific issue you are particularly concerned about that happens not to have any such historical link to you, but it bothers you so much that you take a special personal interest in it then that's fine. But even without dedicating our personal resources towards righting the worlds wrongs, as tax payers, consumers and voters we often make decisions that bear on these issues. I think it's worth bearing that in mind.
I don't know what the answer is to the question of what actions I (and "we") should take because of my responsibility (and our shared responsibility). I do know that the responsibility I feel is greater the more tightly I am tied to a society or community. I don't feel much responsibility at all for homo sapiens' eradication of Neanderthals (assuming that's what happened). The actions happened too long ago and the "society" is too loose (homo sapiens). I do feel some responsibility for what my country's recent forebears have done; I feel a tie as an American and 100 or 200 years in the past is just a handful of generations.
For me it seems the minimum is to identify myself as an "environmentalist". Many (most?) of the objections to proper care of the environment come from people who argue against it because doing so will lessen business profits by a little bit. Even assuming it's true that it will lessen profits, seems like we need to devote more of our resources to preserving the environment. At a minimum, that should mean that businesses in our society should have to accept somewhat lesser profits (perhaps by being taxed) in exchange for better preservation of the environment.
Also, I have no problem with businesses that affect the environment negatively bearing much more of the cost to replace past harms. In the past, and even now, we've allowed businesses to pollute our environment (air, water, land) without them paying for the damage they've caused. They are among the prime offenders, although everyone does share some responsibility for being part of a society that's let those businesses operate as they have.
Not quite. What I was getting at is this argument is usually presented in the context of blaming the West generally or the United States specifically for various atrocities, and gently eliding how the societies which were aggressed upon were usually no different from a morality standpoint: it was simply a matter of who got to who first with a bigger stick in their hand. Not "everybody does it, so it must be okay," just "everybody does it, so casting blame on a specific group is, paradoxically, unfair."
For that reason, our responsibility to properly safeguard the environment and to ensure the rights of all people cannot be dependent on one nation or culture atoning for some crime their ancestors allegedly committed in the past. That just builds a never-ending tower of recrimination and anger. It has to be simply our obligation as human beings to each other, right now, today.
Also, given that you seem to already agree we have the obligation, your insistence on dis-acknowledging our cultural past as a source of the obligation seems odd. Nobody said the obligation had only a single source. The only reason to get angry, so far as I can see, is if a person thinks current steps are perhaps nice to do, but not obligatory. I fail to see how a "never-ending tower of recrimination and anger" can arise from someone simply giving an additional reason that supports the decision we've already made (that we have an obligation).
Well, look at it this way. If someone had killed my father, I wouldn't be satisfied with them saying "here, I'll pay for your college education and we'll call it even"; I'd want them in the electric chair. Similarly, a focus on alleged crimes of past cultures leads inevitably to angry demands for retribution for said crimes, followed by a lot of people replying -- with absolute justification! -- that they weren't responsible for these past crimes, or maybe the other guys were just as bad. Next thing you know everyone's screaming at each other and the formerly universal values have been turned into a political football. If you've got a concept that should be apolitical and universal, the last thing you want to do is prominently attach it to one side of a bitter cultural war.
The Elwha river in Washington State once had salmon topping 100 lbs! http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/will-giant-chinook-...
Many of the salmon now spawning in west coast rivers were bred in hatcheries - with significantly different genetics than those wild monsters of yore.
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/dec/hatcheries-c...
I've always found Genesis to be a beautiful poetic passage though I've never read it as having an alternate meaning.