I wish that those who romanticize the relationships between those who inhabited the Americas prior to Columbus’s arrival and nature would pay more attention to articles like Jules Bernstein’s at the UC Riverside’s News:
Though some believe prehistoric humans lived in harmony with nature, a new analysis of fossils shows human arrival in the Bahamas caused some birds to be lost from the islands and other species to be completely wiped out.
The researchers examined more than 7,600 fossils over a decade and concluded that human arrival in the Bahamas about 1,000 years ago was the main factor in the birds’ extinction and displacement in recent millennia, although habitat fluctuations caused by increased storm severity and sea level rise could have played a role.
Human beings have been disrupting the environment as long as there have been human beings. It isn’t just Christians of European descent. To attempt to control is to disrupt.
Those particular romantics aren’t the only ones romanticizing. Strong states are necessary to conserve natural resources. Those who point to private property rights as the only way to prevent “tragedies of the commons” ignore that strong states are necessary to enforce private property rights, too.
That sad reality is that a balance is required, is difficult to maintain and that balance requires ongoing adjustments.
This brings up an article from Propublica about forest management.
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen
“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.”
(And yes, the article also states that climate change makes the problems worse).
The quote put into perspective that many things we think as “natural’ is anything but. Even “pristine wilderness” are the result of centuries of manipulation of the environment.
Change is eternal.