Plantagenet wrote:Sadly the only reason that low-tech native groups seem to be living in harmony with their environment is that they have already killed off every species that couldn't run fast enough to get away from them.
Some explanation required here because Plantagent is using partial truths to make a racist claim. Native cultures did not practice wholesale destruction of their environments and in fact lived in most places quite harmoniously and in balance with large prey species as well as sharing their habitats with other keystone top predators.
There is an important distinction that has to be made between when humans caused the extinction of some Pleistocene mega fauna and Plantagent's claim that native people were as destructive as our current culture. We should try to stay focused on the topic of taboos and if they can ever once again become embedded in our culture but I will spend a couple of paragraphs here to refute Plantagent's comments because it is important.
First of all where Plantagent is correct. I think it is accurate what Plantagent states and the evidence is there that slow moving mega fauna that could not easily out run humans were easy prey and that humans caused significant extinctions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary ... tion_eventHumans are a keystone predator species and have a huge impact on their environments, they always have. So far so good. So let's compare humans to say Mountain Lions, another keystone top predator. I choose Mountain Lions for a reason.
There was a land bridge that was established 3 million years ago that for the first time connected North America with South America when the Isthmus of Panama was formed. There was quite a faunal exchange at that time. Most significant was the movement of mountain lions (probably sabre toothed tigers as well) , a large placental top predator mammal from North America that migrated into South America. The predominant marsupial (generally slower metabolisms) mammal population in South America was not able to compete and there were significant extinctions following the mountain lions invasion into South America.
Mountain lions where a keystone predator which by definition means they play a big role on the environment and on the distribution of species.
So humans and mountain lions share this role. When humans migrated to areas with easy prey that could not defend themselves they usually went extinct. So far this is the part of Plantagents claim that is correct. But it only goes that far. His claim that native hunter gatherers were therefore the same as current human culture is the part that is totally and absolutely false and this point must be disputed because there is a motivation behind Plantagent's claim which I will get to later on in this post.
After humans arrived in North America and the absolute normal ecological adjustments were made that happens with the introduction of a keystone top predator, human culture then evolved and persevered in relative stasis with a healthy prey population maintained for thousands of years and sharing their habitats with other keystone predators like Grizzly Bears, black and polar bears, Timber wolves, mountain lions etc. It is also accurate from anthropological studies that there were indeed taboos and rituals established within native cultures that helped maintain a sustainable harmony with their environments. These were sophisticated cultural taboos and rules that H2 made reference to that were born out of a relationship with the natural world that was intimate and that did indeed have spiritual components that saw earth as the mother and thanked the deer and moose as their brothers when they took their lives for food etc. There is no disputing this and Plantagent’s claim otherwise does indeed come from cultural and racial arrogance and somewhat from trying to rationalize away our current cultures moral failure as somehow older and deeper than the industrial revolution. I welcome Plantagents rebuttal but I stand by that for the moment.
More important that Plantagent’s motivated reasoning we should really stay focused on the taboos themselves and if these taboos that were historically present in past sustainable cultures are compatible in anyway with the current dominate taker culture of treating our ecosystems and natural resources as commodities.
And if not what is the deficit in our current culture and what is needed to change this?
Who cares to offer a rebuttal on the cynic of my previous post.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
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