British geologist Anthony Hallam (with a somewhat unseemly triumphalism) cites this record of precolonial ecological ruin to “dispel once and for all the romantic idea of the superior ecological wisdom of non-western and pre-colonial societies. The notion of the noble savage living in harmony with Nature should be dispatched to the realm of mythology where it belongs. Human beings have never lived in harmony with nature.” That the human project since its birth, and human flourishing in general, seems to have played out at the expense of the rest of the natural world is one of the stark and
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