sethnintendo said:
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 exterminations 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. |
My point is they didn't respect nature, because they burned the shit out of it... including the forests... so there would be more bison. Because they loved bison.
Bison all the way to Georgia.
Burning forests down for Bison is actually probably worse treatment of the land then burning down forests for Cattle. Afterall Cattle needs much less room then free range bison. I think your mistake is you are comparing Western cultures treatment of the land TODAY vs Native American Treatment of the land back then. (Which again, argueably worse.)
