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Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.

“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”

In other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
ch0ccyra1n :she_her::neocat_floof_cute:
I think the most convincing way to disprove the idea is to have the person volunteer to help at a nature preserve. It is very much so in my view, the closest modern accessible equivalent to how people shaped the environment all those millennia ago, and how many indigenous people still do so today
Ten wpis został zedytowany (4 miesiące temu)
HeavenlyPossum
The Amazon River basin is covered with rain forest that many people mistake for a primordial sort of natural reserve, lightly peopled and untouched until recent deforestation.

On the contrary, we now know that the Amazon was once densely peopled as archeologists continue to discover the remains of city after sprawling city. The Amazon forest we see today is the remains of what was once a vast garden, cultivated to supply food to those cities.

Indigenous land use was once so pervasive and intensive that the forest’s soils, normally fairly poor, are pockmarked with patches of terra preta de Índio—“black earth of the Indians”—which are particularly fertile and self-sustaining soils produced by human activity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31064-2

Evidence confirms an anthropic origin of Amazonian Dark Earths - Nature Communications

Nature Communications - Evidence confirms an anthropic origin of Amazonian Dark Earths
Nature
Steven Bodzin bike & subscribe
the first study I saw on this, in the early 90s, excited me no end, for its demolition of the racist myth of "untouched wilderness." Now it excites me for a new reason. If the forest could be managed once, maybe we can do it again. It offers hope for the areas now converted to relatively bereft savannah, and even to places like the Sahara, which with enough management maybe could be another Amazon.
HeavenlyPossum
It’s a common belief that our modern environmental destruction is simply an expression of a deeply-rooted impulse to over-consume to the point of self-destruction. I’ve been told, for example, that everywhere ancient humans migrated to, large animals were driven to extinction—correlation presenting clear evidence of over-hunting by our ancestors. We haven’t changed at all, we’re doomed by our nature, etc etc.

Except that in the classic example—the peopling of the Americas—the timing for over-hunting is all off:

“Nevertheless, our findings make it clear that overkill by rapidly expanding human populations is not supported by the available data. Using the largest assembled database of directly dated North American megafauna, and accounting for chronological uncertainty in the radiocarbon and climate records, our results demonstrate that there is currently no evidence for a persistent through-time relationship between human and megafauna population levels in North America.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8

Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America - Nature Communications

There are a number of competing explanations for the late Pleistocene extinction of many North American megafauna species.
Nature
HeavenlyPossum
A similar argument, that humans drove hominid cousins such as the Neanderthals to extinction, has been demolished by DNA evidence.

Rather than arriving in Europe and swiftly driving the Neanderthals to extinction over a few thousand years, it turns out that humans had interacted and interbred with Neanderthals over a span of *200,000 years.* Most modern humans inherited a few percent of their genome from Neanderthal ancestors, while Neanderthals apparently inherited up to ten percent of their genome from their human ancestors.

Like the megafauna of the Americas, the timing doesn’t line up. Rather than violent replacement, Neanderthals and humans look like two communities that had been on the path to hybridization.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1768
HeavenlyPossum
This process—of successfully and sustainably managing ecosystems to enhance biodiversity—was hardly the product of scarce humans living with a light touch in an empty landscape, as someone just suggested to me.

From Charles Mann’s “1491”:

“Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both. Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive carriages through the trees. Fifteen miles from shore in Rhode Island, Giovanni da Verrazzano found trees so widely spaced that the forest ‘could be penetrated even by a large army.’ John Smith claimed to have ridden through the Virginia forest at a gallop.

Incredible to imagine today, bison roamed from New York to Georgia. A creature of the prairie, Bison bison was imported to the East by Native Americans along a path of indigenous fire, as they changed enough forest into fallows for it to survive far outside its original range.”
Violet Madder
The impulse to trap things behind fences and say this is MY HERD AND JUST MINE and not letting anything migrate, killing all the predators wrecking the soil blah blah blah, is so bizarre when you think about the amount of food that just develops on its own when we just help out and share instead of trying to hoard and control.
Bargearse
>This process—of successfully and sustainably managing ecosystems to enhance biodiversity—was hardly the product of scarce humans living with a light touch in an empty landscape, as someone just suggested to me.

---

Every living has an impact on the environment. I'd suggest the metric is sustainably, in the true sense ? And how to show it can. Taking as a given that every living thing expands to the sustainable limit.

Population of the "US" prior to colonisation. 1-12 million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171896/pre-colonization-population-americas/

Taking the high estimate of 12 million, I'd suggest that's a reasonable indication of a sustainable population. Surley thats a defintion of scarce humans ?

Possibly the best example )because of it's isolation) , the population of the Australian continent prior to colonisation was about 3 million, and was estimated to be that way for many 10s of thousands of years.

https://theconversation.com/the-first-australians-grew-to-a-population-of-millions-much-more-than-previous-estimates-142371

That has to be an example of the sustainable population.

That humans have an impact is undeniable but then so does any species introduced into a new environment. That's surely not the issue though. Is it sustainable ?

Thats ignorong all the ethical issues, if we introduce say cats to Australia or Possums to NZ, and they send 100s of species extinct ... what do ? What of humans doing the same thing ? What of Gazenas you can buy here in Australia ?

Pre-colonization populations of the Americas ~1492 | Statista

Prior to the arrival of European explorers in the Americas in 1492, it is estimated that the population of the continent was around sixty million people.
Statista
HeavenlyPossum
@largess

Some efforts to calculate the pre-Colombian population of the Americas suggest upwards of 100 million people across North and South America.
@Bargearse
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ
@largess Yeah, the statista link gives the high estimate for both continents at around 116 million, and the land currently occupied by the US at 12,5.
With current medicine and science, and a decrease in unnecessary resource extraction I'd believe it could be made sustainable for the current population and then some.
@Bargearse
hwps 🍄 🌱
Yes! Large scale enough there's evidence that it ending caused the "Little Ice Age", see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004

Similar practices existed among Australian Aborigines and others as well.

The fact that we have this historical and archeological evidence of a way for human societies to provide for themselves long term while increasing soil fertility and biodiversity is my greatest source of hope! Even though the specifics are largely lost and it's a long way from here to there.
FinalOverdrive
Which is what is happening on a cultural level with migrants and immigrants. Not replacement or assimilation, but hybridization.
FelisCatus
"A similar argument, that humans drove hominid cousins such as the Neanderthals to extinction" <- Neanderthals were humans.
FelisCatus
ok. The phrasing seemed ambiguous.
HeavenlyPossum
@FelisCatus

In every toot, we are faced with the challenge of being succinct vs being precise
@FelisCatus
FelisCatus
I solve this by being neither succint nor precise.
Timo Tiuraniemi
There seems to be ongoing dispute about this result. I'm however not qualified to evaluate how good this is. The study you linked was in Nature, so of course carries more weight than this "Anthropocene" article (the journal by its name alone seems to be skewed).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330542300036X
Ten wpis został zedytowany (4 miesiące temu)
Bishop Whitewind
I mean have you tried the last 200 years? I'm not going to bother to go be your little gopher, but trust me we did this.
scott f
@B_Whitewind That's exactly the point: history shows us it's not inevitable that humans will damage the environment in the way that the world economic order that has reigned for the last 200 years has done.
@Bishop Whitewind
HeavenlyPossum
@scott @B_Whitewind

Yes. The last 200 years are not indicative of the first 300,000 years.
@scott f @Bishop Whitewind
HeavenlyPossum
@B_Whitewind @scott

Apparently “the dumbest fucking thing he’s ever heard” was a link to a paper in a scientific journal about the role of climate change in megafauna extinctions because Bishop Whitewind very angrily blocked me after that.
@scott f @Bishop Whitewind
RD
@B_Whitewind @scott

Dude should stick to his tarot cards.
@scott f @Bishop Whitewind
HeavenlyPossum
@B_Whitewind @scott @RD4Anarchy

I get blocked by a lot of people but this one felt particularly nonsensical
@RD @scott f @Bishop Whitewind
BrambleBearGrrrauling
Well, I made an account on here specifically to follow you and a couple other Kolektiva accounts. I appreciate all your analysis, thought and references, and the discussions you prompt. Blockers gonna block I guess.
@B_Whitewind @scott @RD4Anarchy
@RD @scott f @Bishop Whitewind

RDudostępnił to.

HeavenlyPossum
@B_Whitewind

You’re anachronistically back-casting your modern experience onto a past that does not resemble the present. The data do not support your conclusion.
@Bishop Whitewind
Wim Owe
tangential, but Ed Barnhart has a hypothesis that indigenous groups in the upper Amazon basin would run something like religious seminaries that would train the “priests” of various Andean nations - it sounds like it’s one of those things that has support in the orature, but would require either translating the quipu and/or archaeological excavations of the upper Amazon that would probably be both needlessly invasive and probably not very fruitful to confirm.
Newde
I once met an Mexican ecologist. He called the Yucatan the largest overgrown garden in the world.

What also blew my mind: the Mayan cities, not just their environments but dense urban environments, were probably completely engulfed in forest during their height.
Andre
Interesting, does it say how many people existed in the "75-95%" of these areas? I don't think humans are a virus, per se. I do believe there are just too many of us.
HeavenlyPossum
@Pappy

People were intensively managing global resources for 12,000 years. I’m not really interested in dipping my toes into the “there are too many people” waters of eco-fascism.
@Andre
Andre
ok, I'd never read anything about ecofascism. Kind of wild.
HeavenlyPossum
@Pappy

“There are too many people” is heading in that direction.
@Andre
Andre
That thought doesn't immediately take me to "we should kill off a bunch of brown people." I guess that's just me though.
Sindy
This guy/gal/nonbinary pal just keeps being right. Every freaking toot for since I discovered this eloquent possum they never had a bad take.

My salutations.
Ten wpis został zedytowany (4 miesiące temu)

RDudostępnił to.

refraction :verified_transgender:
aren't we just learning that the Amazon basin likely had millions of inhabitants at some point well before the modern era?
HeavenlyPossum
@elexia

Not quite just learning—people have been finding evidence for and arguing this for decades. It has just been slow to catch on.
@refraction :verified_transgender:
Large Format Projectionist
“Humans are a virus” is the eugenecists meme.
Aviva Gary
Cool thread...

What I'm most interested in then is How?

Like we did it once, can do it again but how did they do it originally so we can do it but global... this could be a huge piece to solving Global Warming 🤔

(Excuse me for not knowing... I just learned all this just now... it's so cool!!!)
HeavenlyPossum
@Aviva_Gary

There’s no one easy answer, but a big one is learning from and supporting the land claims of the indigenous peoples who steward so much of our biodiversity.

Another key task is restoring common property and rebuilding the robust communities that can sustainably manage it.
@Aviva Gary
BrambleBearGrrrauling
@Aviva_Gary 2/?Some resources randomly plucked from my faves, can't promise some aren't precisely Indigenous land management but at least whole lot more helpful and effective than extractive degradation we have now. https://sadhanaforest.org/

Sadhana Forest - A Forest In The Making

Sadhana Forest is a volunteer based organization focused on reforestation and food security in arid areas. We work in India, Haiti and Kenya.
Sadhana Forest
@Aviva Gary
Old Fucking Punk
"Contra the 'humans are a virus' discourse" As this discourse isn't adequately described, I'm taking liberty to assume it's about expressions of overpopulation more than the inevitability of greed (and therefore, wasteful consumption). If my assumption is true, then the lines depicting population density contradict any belittling of the effect of overpopulation.
HeavenlyPossum
@lwriemen

I don’t know what your last sentence means, but one way you could rectify my inadequate description is by learning about this discourse yourself.
@Old Fucking Punk
HeavenlyPossum
@JustinDerrick

The paper isn’t about the human footprint 12,000 years ago.
@Justin Derrick
Michael Bishop ☕
@tlariv @hannu_ikonen have to be careful with saying humans are a virus. Only those that are white living in the northern hemisphere are the virus. The rest of the world isn't as virulent as them.
@tlariv @Hannu Ikonen
Zatytom
hmm yes but

Is this the same 12000 years ago where all the worlds land megafauna has a coincidental mass extinction?
HeavenlyPossum
@zaty

12,000 years is not the earliest date of population, but the earliest date that we can conclusively identify intensive human alteration of the environment for the majority of the world’s land surface.
@Zatytom
Óscar Morales Vivó
and I’d like to add the observation that this need not have to do anything with any intrinsic nobility or ingrained respect for nature (let’s also not fall into “noble savage” mythology).

This is what worked for them after generations of learning and adaptation. I’m sure at some point some tribe overhunted their favored prey. Then they either starved or moved or had to figure out another food source. They didn’t have the luxury of modern extractive economies of just leaving the place a dump and moving on to the next one. The ones that lasted were the ones that figured it out.
HeavenlyPossum
@MyLittleMetroid

Yes, we don’t need to ascribe any special qualities to these people to explain these results. They are just people like us.
@Óscar Morales Vivó
econads
Another reason to adopt this attitude is that you can avoid having to do anything about it. It's a form of doomerism.
@stevenbodzin
@Steven Bodzin bike & subscribe
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