Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem.
dumples@piefed.social 1 day agoExcept the fact we have lots of evidence that native population (which also includes pre-industrial European culture) built sustainable systems which includes altering the environment. Throughout North America there tons of evidence of the use of fire was used. The classic prairie environment of the Oak Savana is only possible through burns and supports a large buffalo population. There’s tons of evidence of strategic cultivation of trees and other plants within the Amazon rainforest that allow people to get food and medicine close by that to the untrained eye looks identical to the rest of the forest.
That being said some of those same people them destroy the same forest via slash and burn agriculture in order to earn a living for cash crops and more traditional agriculture. So profits is a main driver
95% of people can sing kumbaya in their little eco friendly circle jerk but if that 5% is over it and ready to fight over that belief the 95% better buck the fuck up and rise to the obvious existential threat in front of their fucking face or else they lose.
Oh look, that’s what happened.
What do you consider pre-industrial?
Agriculture directly led to the destruction of native biomes in any country that practiced it.
More people = more agriculture = more land cleared.
So long as most people who live die from avoidable famines, war and disease, then yes, it’s sustainable. But “in check” is probably the better term.
Altered doesn’t have to mean destruction. A human touched ecosystem can be different but doesn’t have to be a monoculture. There are a huge number of human specific plants, most of which we call weeds now, that only exist around people that can provide food and medicine to us. Looking at how modern permaculture farming works there’s a huge amount of diversity within their food forests which are directly human touched while leaving more wild sections. These wild sections are more native specific and their value is acknowledged instead of called wasted space. Humans are part of an ecosystem so we alter it but don’t have to destroy it
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
This is exactly what I’m getting at. If these groups of humans were placed in the same scenarios that Europeans or other westerners were placed in, would they not be susceptible to the same greed that motivated them?
I do not deny that many native societies appear to live in more harmony with the environment than your average westerner. There is certainly a lot to learn there, and I believe we would do better if we emulated some of those characteristics. However, I think that we’re all susceptible to the same flaws, as we are all human.
Ultimately what I’m saying is I don’t think that natives have some superpower where they have figured out how to escape the flaws that have plagued humanity for thousands of years.
SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
So, there were indigenous societies that were highly class stratified, or did bad things to the environment. No one is denying that.
But generally speaking, indigenous peoples in say, the Americas, developed methods of agriculture and other forms of production that were more economically sustainable than the European methods that settlers brought, and then revised to be more extractive.
The dust bowl, for example, didn’t just happen. It was a product of Colonialism. A region which was relatively recently colonized, had its forests and grasslands ripped up, in favor of shallow rooted monocultures that couldn’t sustain drought conditions.
There weren’t dustbowls for the millennia prior to colonization, but a sudden shift in the mode of production, to a highly extractive one, artificially produced an ecological disaster
Arctic_monkey@leminal.space 13 hours ago
I mean, the main sustainable feature of indigenous food systems is their small population size relative to the environment’s carrying capacity. Trying to feed a large city on hunted game would be far less sustainable than modern agriculture…
SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
Sure, in some instances that was the case, but it’s wrong to assume that indigenous north Americans didn’t have cities or large scale agriculture.
[Agricultural practices in Cahokia],(www.uapress.ua.edu/…/feeding-cahokia/) for instance, wasn’t a European style monocrop. Rather, “Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture” ^(see link above)^
And Cahokia was, for a time, the political and economic center of much of indigenous north American, with the city itself being of comparable size to many European cities in the same period.
dumples@piefed.social 14 hours ago
While I agree that people are fundamentally the same the cultural values can alter their behavior. A culture that says Human are separate and above nature who should submit to it’s will acts differently than one who thinks humans are the youngest sibling to plants and animals who have lots to teach us. So by understanding cultural values, mindsets and techniques we can alter how we interact with the rest of the world.