Brian Griffith's Blog - Posts Tagged "ecology"

In sum, it was the greatest case of multi-species ethnic cleansing in world history. In the wake of that ecocide frontier, Henry David Thoreau surveyed his New England landscape and confessed, “When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear … I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.” In watching the forests vanish around Walden Pond, he added, “Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds.”

War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

Obviously, Europe’s colonists wanted far more than freedom to hunt and grow food on the Natives’ land. They were also bent on transforming the country into the likeness of the world they left behind. In “New Spain,” “New England,” etc., the foods, plants, animals, and landscapes of the Americas had to be systematically replaced with those of the old country. People wanted familiar things, and hoped to make the surrounding environment match their preferences. All this was a matter of taste, but thinkers like William Goldsmith made it a matter of religion as well. In his eight-volume "History of the Earth and Animated Nature" (published 1774), Goldsmith presumed that his tastes were those of the Lord: “God beholds with pleasure that being which he has made, converting the wretchedness of his natural situation into a theatre of triumph; bringing all the headlong tribes of nature into subjugation to his will; and producing … order and uniformity upon earth.”
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

The plains used to hold over a billion prairie dogs, who lived in concentrated “cities.” These cities, or dog towns, took up about 12% of the whole central prairie, and these were the places of best grazing. Rather than eliminating the grass, the dog towns aerated the soil and made passageways for rain to run into the ground. The buffalo and antelope herds used to spend much of their time eating at one “gopher garden” after the next. Wherever the prairie dogs are no longer exterminated like rats, the range tends to support more plant life.
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals