Kasz216 said:
Buffalo a sign of Native American's superiority in dealing with nature only existed everywhere because the native americans burned the shit out of the forests on the east coast on fire making the forrests fallow enough for the Bison to be everywhere on the continent. As for Native Americans not believing in land ownership... that's also totally false and essentially based on semantics. If you belonged to a Native Aerican tribe you damn well better believe you couldn't enter another tribe's land without getting their permission. |
While you might be right on a few accounts you are also not looking at the grand picture. You know why Bison roamed the USA? Because a lot of USA is grassland territory. What keeps a grassland a grassland? Fire
I suggest you come to Texas where it is supposed to be short grass prairie and see what the fire policies of the past 100 years has done to the land. Now there are many shrubs taking over most ranches in Texas (Juniper, Mesquite, etc). So instead of a just a few bushes you have a shitload due to putting fires out. A grassland is supposed to burn every 5-15 years. If you let some shrubs grow too high even fire or top killing the tree/shrub won't work (some can sprout from the "dead" trunk). So the fire is only effective against these species when the plants are young and very small. Why do you think we are now finally going back to controlled burnings? Probably because physically removing the trees/shrubs is such a pain in the ass and very costly. Seems like your mindset on fire is dated back to the early 1900s. Why do you think California has such problems with fires? Because they live in a chaparral that is supposed to burn every 10 or so years. They keep putting out the small fires and let all the dead material build up. Then you have an out of control fire that has tons of fuel.
Bottom two pics are original bison range and later reduction in range. They have suffered the same fate as Prairie Dogs which should be an endangered species or at least protected (but many ranchers don't want that and when there was talk about adding them many ranchers killed them off of their property so they wouldn't have to worry, most don't like them because cattle can break their legs in their holes)... There used to be bears in Texas but not anymore... There also used to be a decent wolf population in USA. I wonder why there are so many damn white tailed deer (overpopulation)... Hmm.. maybe it is the reduction in predators. I can go down the list of animals that have been affected greatly since Europeans have came to settle, and don't get me started on feral pigs introduced by Europeans.
About the land ownership... Sure there were plenty of tribes that had their own territory. I was mainly referring the tribes that followed the bison around. They might of viewed it as their territory but they knew it was really Gods. Just like Christians believe God created nature. However, most of them don't respect nature that much even when they believe it was a gift from God.
Were the Native Americans perfect? No, but they treated the land (for the most part) a lot better than most races. The ones that did totally mistreat nature paid their own price (aka the Mayans with their mass deforestation to build monuments) or the Indians that lived in New Mexico area (at the time during Middle Ages was one of the highest concentration of people) farmed an area that eventually turned to desert (probably accelerated due to their farming) into oblivion.
I could have worded my stance better but I was in a very dark mood that day.
