This year, the Idle No More movement called for Earth Day rallies to focus attention on the links between Indigenous issues and the environmental movement
( Read more... )
I'm not saying humans and human expansion aren't destructive or problematic. I'm saying your examples are shit. The demon duck went extinct millions of years ago, long before apes walked upright, let alone before humans went hunting. The giant lemurs went extinct 9,000 years before people arrived on Madagascar. Humans may have contributed to the extinction of American lion, but as it was adapted for a glacial environment closer to Siberia of today than the temperate grasslands North America became, it's a stretch to point to people only or even as the main cause.
There is also something extremely troubling about painting morality over survival hunting.
The humans that hunted 11,000 years ago were no less human or intelligent than you or I or anyone else today. They were capable of abstract thought, incredible tool making it would take you years to master, complex strategy, and everything we think of as human. There is NOTHING easy about hunting megafauna. Saying so just shows either how little you know about them or how little thought you've given to what you've written.
I didn't say hunting them was easy, I said that the process of rendering them extinct was. Early modern humans did that to the dodo and the Stellar's Sea Cow in historic times, and it's extremely hard to attribute the extinction of the Moa to anything but the Maori. I admit to forgetting when the demon ducks of doom lived, so I concede that point.
Wherever humans have spread from Africa, the existing ecosystems were rapidly rendered unrecognizable, including the extinction of our closest evolutionary relatives in Europe, Asia, and Flores Island. That indicates that it's the scale and devastating power of extinctions that's changed, not the capability of humanity to induce them.
There is also something extremely troubling about painting morality over survival hunting.
The humans that hunted 11,000 years ago were no less human or intelligent than you or I or anyone else today. They were capable of abstract thought, incredible tool making it would take you years to master, complex strategy, and everything we think of as human. There is NOTHING easy about hunting megafauna. Saying so just shows either how little you know about them or how little thought you've given to what you've written.
Reply
Wherever humans have spread from Africa, the existing ecosystems were rapidly rendered unrecognizable, including the extinction of our closest evolutionary relatives in Europe, Asia, and Flores Island. That indicates that it's the scale and devastating power of extinctions that's changed, not the capability of humanity to induce them.
Reply
Leave a comment