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Comment by trutannus | Hacker News Reader

I think this article misses an important aspect of conversationalist thinking: a lot of them want the land to be completely untouched. Had a legal battel with conservationists trying to close of a section of property at some point, and part of the objective from them was to prevent the land owners from using the land and somehow harming it as a result. They lost, however it was enlightening to see a different mindset.

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I worked in New Mexico in the 90s with a 'gravel' operation that was selling off the gravel left over from mining operations decades and decades before. Tall piles of just rock we loaded into trucks and sold.

At some point they discovered that the old timers left enough gold in the tailings piles that it made sense to use modern techniques to reclaim that already out of the ground gold before selling the gravel. That triggered a multi-year legal fight to 'stop them from raping the land through gold mining'. Not only did they want the 'mining operation' stopped, now they also wanted the current owners to 'properly' remediate ancient mines scattered through the property. Some of these mine were legitimately historical places where South American's were coming north to mine Turquoise and Silver several hundred years ago.

We ended up not only losing access to the tailings piles for gravel use, but were then required to clean up the mess left by mining operations that had not existed for a hundred years or more. It shaped the way I view most people that claim to want to save the environment to this day. There is rarely any middle ground anymore and has become and all or nothing platform.

In New England similar groups buy up land and just let it sit, maybe maintain a hiking trail through it.

New England went glaciers -> tundra -> grasslands -> forests managed by native peoples -> un-managed forests.

The ecological state theses environmentalists are promoting is basically the status quo of the early 1700s and late 1800s through present day. It's hard to define what the "natural" state is since it went from periods of rapid change to various states shaped by human activity with little in between. Generally speaking most people consider the forests as they would have existed as managed by the natives prior to European settlement as the state that is most worthy of reconstruction.

> they would have existed as managed by the natives prior to European settlement as the state that is most worthy of reconstruction

This is magical thinking; the First Nations are, and were, human. The Huron, for instance, would move their settlements once they had "used up" all the readily available resources (mostly game animals) in the area. The First Nations were only better "custodians" of the land because they lacked the means to abuse the land as thoroughly as European "settlers".

It's more complicated than that. Yes, not all the land was being actively maintained at any one time but the 200ft pines, abundance of fruit/nut bearing plants and game species that come with them is a direct result of native land management practices throughout the broader region despite any particular square not necessarily being actively managed at any particular point in time.

Relocating (and they didn't relocate far, remember this is inhabited land after all, you can't just set up shop on the neighbor gang's turf) is the native equivalent of leaving a field fallow. But because the natives were working with animal and plant species the feedback loop is potentially decades long (depending on local resources) vs farmers who will leave a field fallow every few years.

I agree that they would have left the place barren had they had the means but you have to consider that what they were doing was stable on a 500+yr timeline which is a pretty good run.

My point here is that the impenetrable thicket a lot of environmentalists want to maintain is not particularly representative of "peak forest". I'm sure they all want to see blueberries and 200ft pines but just doing nothing won't achieve that because that's not a state that new england forests can (and certainly not today since we've got all sorts of invasive species and pests) get themselves into without human intervention either directly on a particular parcel of land or on enough near proximity land to influence the ecology of the parcel in question.

It's far from clear that native Americans lacked the means of initial European settlers.

I agree that we should not indulge in "magical thinking", but non-American cultures display a wide variety of sensibilities with respect to defining "used up". There are traditions even within Europe that are relatively respectful of carrying capacity, but they have mostly been trampled on by industrialization and capitalism. It's entirely possible that native American resource management was closer to these older European traditions than those of the last 200 years.

Precolonial New England was mostly forest and was home to less than 100,000 people.

I don't know how concerned those people were with sustainability or with being custodians of the land. But, even if they cared nought about such things, that need not mean that the state of the forest during their reign is not a worthy target for modern-day conservationists.

You missed a step or two in your historical timeline

glaciers -> tundra -> grasslands -> forests managed by native peoples -> decimated forests due to settler activities -> depopulation and deindustrialization -> un-managed forests

Yeah, I specifically ended the timeline around 1650 or so. Basically once European diseases showed up there has been no stable state, just a bunch of 50yr states. Though what we do know is that the impenetrable forested thickets of the late 1600s and early 1700s are basically the same as what we have now (with less non-native species) to grow up after you cut down all the multi-hundred year old trees for lumber. The fact that we routinely clear cut any given parcel and the average parcel of land has not burnt in hundreds of years gives us very different forests that what would have grown up on un-managed land in say the year 1500 or would have grown up in the immediate absence of natives circa 1630.

Fair enough, so:

glaciers -> tundra -> grasslands -> forests managed by native peoples -> unmanaged forests -> decimated forests due to settler activities -> depopulation and deindustrialization -> un-managed forests

More or less but the level of resolution there doesn't really capture the rapid changes that happened after the natives were kicked out. Settlers would cut some lands while simultaneously ignoring others. Some areas that were historically grasslands thanks to continued native settlement reverted to forests. Some forests were clear cut for farm and pasture. But then they turned around and selectively logged some of the newly grown up forests, and repeated grazing/farming altered the substrates so when pastures were left and grown over in the 1850s different stuff grew back. And remember, basically any time you get a mature forest prior to 1980 or so someone comes along and logs it within a couple decades. And all of this is happening in a patchwork manner and the environment is inter-connected so (for example) decimating a bird species in most of its range will effect the plants it caries ability to show up on land left to grow over in its range. Then you have stuff like the chestnut blight, etc, etc. It's really hard to paint accurately with a broad brush after Europeans showed up.

Well, don't forget that the timeline for most forested areas would look more like "forests managed by native peoples -> land clear-cut by European settlers -> un-managed forests," though I'm sure "un-managed" is debatable here; humans never left.

Much of New England was clear-cut, either to harvest old-growth timber or for farmland. The forests we see today date to after the westward expansion, when farmers left the rocky New England soils for easier tilling in the Midwest and Great Plains states. So really, when people want to conserve the land in that state, they're saying "let's let the new-growth forests come back and maybe become old-growth forests again."

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