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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist.

Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London.

I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World:

My video essays: https://youtu.be/ZLAvBiols2Y and https://youtu.be/U4NZdciDozI

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/030...

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Reminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found:

"Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."

(I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)

I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading.

Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife.

When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance.

So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators.

And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance.

(This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)

> the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife

Native Americans weren't a monolithic group, and the balance with wildlife is just a part of the noble savage myth, for most of the groups. Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

It might be seen as self serving for western industrialists to promote the noble savage idea as 'myth.'

Notice that there isn't a 'noble industrialist' meme? I wonder why?

> Aztec

> before collapsing (and before Columbus)

In the alternate universe you come from, who was fighting Cortez?

They weren't referring to Columbus as the person who conquered South/Central America (there were quite a few conquistadors involved there... not just Cortez).

They were referring to the arrival of Columbus as the watershed moment that signal the arrival of Europeans en masse to the Americas.

I'm not saying they were referring to Columbus as the person who conquered Central America. I was amused by GP's insinuation that the Aztecs had somehow collapsed before Columbus.

> Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

On a second reading it seems that GP had most likely meant that they were deforesting before Columbus, not that they had collpased before Columbus, but it's still strange to refer to getting conquered as a "collapse".

Unsure why this is downvoted. Toltec empire ended around 1200 AD. Mayans... hard to define, like the Rome technically even still around. The Aztec Empire was right there when the conquistadors showed up.

They weren't saying the Aztecs weren't there. They were saying the Aztecs had massively deforested areas prior to the arrival of Europeans.

>noble savage myth

Closet racism. There is far more evidence that Europeans destroyed these cultures and ignored their advances, than there is proving this so-called myth.

See for example, the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

We are STILL uncovering major advances in these cultures today.

I'm sure Europeans would have adopted any advances of great value to them, just like they adopted a lot of crops from the new world.

In fact, Europeans did - eventually - catch up with the Australian FNP's innate knowledge of healing. They had a form of resilient Hippocratic oath for literally thousands of years before us, for example. An understanding of antiseptics in a European age of miasma theory. And so on ..

> … the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

Other thank some claims about land management and herbal medicine, what were that not only more advanced in but FAR more advanced?

Ship building, metallurgy, literature, maths, chemistry, conflict management, law?

I am genuinely curious.

Oldest continually running mining operation of mankind. Longest running school. A Hippocratic oath before Europeans genocided them. Forms of agriculture which literally guaranteed a well-fed populace. An understanding of antiseptic materials, and even micro-biology, in an age of European miasma theory and blood-letting.

There is much to learn about oneself once you drop the prejudice.

I'm not suggesting we haven't "advanced" beyond them now, but I am suggesting that we may have overlooked something in our race to the moon, and their 40,000 year old tradition of unbroken oral tradition ..

Surely its easier to tell us all what the advancements were than downvote me?

I am genuinely curious. [after all propagandists have prevented me from imagining, let alone knowing.]

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. Flamewar dross and empty complaints about downvoting are both off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

   Native Americans who lived in an 
   ecological balance with wildlife.

One of the competing explanations for the disappearance of the woolly mammoth in North America about 10k years ago is that they were hunted to extinction. Other explanations make hunting a co-factor.

It's possible that there was a temporary bloom in bison and/or a few other species during the formative period of American inland exploration. The populations were hunted out so quick after this that it's hard to know how temporary this was.. if it happened at all.

But those quotes are about a lot more than one iconic species. Overall, the picture is accurate.

Native Americans arrived less than 80,000 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. They were not the natural predators.

I think the phrase natural predator just means the predator in the environment that keeps some other species in check.

80,000 years may be a blink in an eye in evolutionary terms but it does not take that long for a predator to come into an environment and become entrenched as the natural check on some other species.

I would say https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1111 for example of introduction of species

something like this https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285705 for how dominance of predator works.

However not sure how well the Native Americans were actually keeping animals in check given the many species they have been shown to have helped bring to extinction.

That said not sure how long it would take from being a natural predator to being a keystone species.

@nroets, Humans (the Europeans in this case) made the Dodo bird extinct quite fast, closer to 80 years than 80 000.

One doesn't need to be someone's long time natural predator to have an impact

I believe the accepted period is around 15,000 years ago, possibly slightly earlier.

Those dates are in flux recently. As is the pattern in discoveries of our very ancient history... the story gets more complicated as we go.

The fallacy that, IMO, we are falling into is (ironically) caused by scientific reductionism... the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. This doesn't work as well for the evidence types paleoanthropology has to work with.

With the advent of ancient DNA, we now have a second, relatively precise type of evidence also pointing at, IIRC, 15-20k years ago as when the initial peopling of the Americas took place.

Initial peopling, or oldest known genetic ancestors of current individuals.

Take Israel or Morocco as a comparative example. There were sapiens there before Neanderthals, but they are not thought to be ancestral to any modern people. The majority are not. This makes intuitive sense when thinking of species or subspecies (eg Neanderthals), but it works the same with populations.

Also, it's easy to think of ourselves in permanent "infinite growth" mide, where we colonise and dominate. But, recent years aside, humans bloomed and receded just like other species. Range expanding and contracting.

Just because a population is in the same place does not mean that it's ancestral. The first, second or eighteenth population may have no current ancestors... or none in that area.

As Dawkins puts it "descendants are common, ancestors are rare."

perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but humans are believed to have hunted many, many animals to extinction on the American content millennia before the Europeans got here. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010608081621.h...

I find the state of the environment so shockingly depressing, it's incredible. What would I give to see the world like that?

Well, you’d have to give billions of lives.

This is an npr article on the size of fish caught by tour boats. You can see the size reduce over the years.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

Unblocked: https://archive.ph/mVxhG

Also, the amount of fish a ship caught decreased tremendously once steam powered ships were introduced https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1013 (scroll down to figure 2)

What amazed me was after reading Unbroken (WWII novel set in the pacific) was the incredible amount of sharks in hawaii and the surrounding islands. A family member who was in the pacific theatre backed this up. Shark schools so dense that sailors would be attacked after they fell in. This was barely 70 years ago so alot has changed in terms of animal population.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attac...

Thank you. Despite being in the midst of a pandemic, that is the worst thing I've read all week. It looks well cited, although I don't have the heart to check the sources...

Quint, the old shark hunter from the movie Jaws was said to have survived the USS Indianapolis (the character not the actor)

“Black eyes... dolls eyes”

There's a Hardcore History episode about the event:

https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapol...

Passenger pigeons, bison, wolves, etc.

Here is an interesting map of the historic and current grizzly bear ranges.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/historical-and-current-gri...

It is truly amazing how nearly completely we wiped the continent of wildlife. Many of our teams are named after the animals we wiped out. Florida Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, California Golden Bears, Michigan Wolverines, etc.

> Whales as far as the eye could see all day long.

The near extermination of whales along our shores changed geopolitics. One of the reasons why commodore perry "visited" japan was to open japanese ports to our whalers.

Oh, wow! For anyone that can't see the picture - the historical range shows grizzly bears past Texas and well into Mexico

And Jaguars were one time to be found with in territory that is presently USA.

I hear they are starting to come back in southern Texas.

If you put a 20 mile perimeter around every point of North America that had continued human activity, what percentage of North America would be covered? Is it more than we'd expect? At a first glance, it seems like there are still vast reached of North America that remain completely untouched by humans.

Nevertheless, is so sad that humans have effectively pushed animals outside of their habitats. Animals are smart enough to avoid humans, just as a deer is smart enough to avoid a wolf, but at some point the world is only so big.

Wildlife encounters by Lewis And Clark

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987

One foggy morning I walked out to the rock at Morro Bay and as I got out on this spit of land, I realized that what I thought was a big sand dune was actually all birds, a huge see of birds. They started taking off and obscured the sky.

There are places still.

As a counter, overpopulation isn’t necessarily a good thing. The waste alone can create issues on land and water.

Population was balancing itself for millions of year. We call overpopulation a population big enough to annoy us.

Do you think that halting our activities for a few months will have a significant effect on wildlife growth?

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