Stupid contest

A great response:

The great plains used to be a giant forest.

I'm dumb as a fucking brick, and even I know that's not true.

Even the bricks in Madison have more brains than Goldberg...

Oy... I shouldn't mention this, but he was here in Minneapolis last Tuesday talking about the same thing.

I desperately wanted to attend and ask him (paraphrasing) why he is such a wanker, but I have night class on Tuesdays. A good fact-based liberal-indoctrination type class, but still...

Which reminds me: aren't you paying us TC-campus folk a visit sometime soon, PZ? And on a non-Tuesday?

New favourite quote:

"Well past the Event Horizon of stupid"

Hmmm... my impression is that it's true that significant parts of the U.S. were deforested or desertified in prehistoric times, by humans---or at least that it's a valid scientific theory. As is the theory that large native mammals like the mammoths were killed off by prehistoric humans. I'm no expert on this stuff, but...

Pre-Columbus population densities now appear to have been several times higher than was thought until a few decades ago. White people brought diseases that spread quickly and killed off most of the Native Americans in advance of most of the European explorers.

When the explorers explored a sparsely-populated continent, they didn't realize it had relatively recently been considerably more densely populated. (E.g., they didn't realize that the Mound People in Illinois had only recently died off, when they encountered their ghost towns.)

There is a myth of the Noble Savage that should be debunked. Prehistoric people were just people, and they did have a significant negative impact on their environments. (Jared Diamond writes a lot about this.)

What you shouldn't do is to then conclude that prehistoric/precolumbian people "were just as bad" ecologically, or we don't have new ecological problems, or any of the other conservative non-sequiturs.

For example, Rush Limbaugh makes a lot of hay about cow farts. Turns out cow farts are a signficant source of methane, and that even in premodern times they may have contributed to global warming. Rush would like you to believe that since we've had farting cows for a long time, nothing has changed---we've always had cows, so the liberal ecologists are just making stuff up, and there's no urgent problem. That does not follow.

The fact that cows may have contributed to very minor global warming 200 years ago doesn't mean that cows are not now a much bigger problem now; population densities and meat-eating are way up, so there's a big quantitative difference. And the fact that cows may be a significant source of greenhouse gas does not mean that burning lots of fossil fuels is any more acceptable---if anything, it reduces our carbon-sink slack so that we can afford less burning of fossil fuels without risking serious global warming. (And feeding lots of cows is an ecological problem; we eliminate better carbon sinks and a lot of diverse environments to make space to grow crops to feed cows, which are inefficient producers of meat; we also burn a fair bit of fossil fuel in farming and in processing the cow food and the cows.)

Goldberg may be wrong about the Great Plains being burned by Buffalo hunters, but he's not wrong about some left/green people's tendency to romanticize the Native Americans in a Disneyesque way. They weren't harmless Noble Savages who were profoundly in touch with Nature; they were people making a living, and sometimes oppressing each other, as people do---and their numbers were not tiny.

Nothing much should hinge on that, e.g., if you demystify the Native Americans, or recognize that they had significant effects on their environment, it shouldn't make you any less ecology-minded. Concern about ecological issues shouldn't depend on that and, if anything, it should make people aware that even before white people got here---with even denser populations, and the technology to change things a whole lot more---the environment was vulnerable to stresses caused by humans. That is "the way it's always been," but it's a whole lot worse now.

I feel a new nickname is long overdue.

Ouch, it always sucks to find uncool people in a cool place. The Rathskeller is about as it cool as it gets (as far as I'm concerned) and seeing it makes me want to be in Madison - after Jonah leaves.

Hmmm... my impression is that it's true that significant parts of the U.S. were deforested or desertified in prehistoric times, by humans---or at least that it's a valid scientific theory. As is the theory that large native mammals like the mammoths were killed off by prehistoric humans. I'm no expert on this stuff, but...

Actually, it's a hypothesis, and one that is vigorously challenged.

Pre-Columbus population densities now appear to have been several times higher than was thought until a few decades ago.

But that has nothing to do with the population densities during the first waves of settlement, which were much lower. That's one of the challenges to the "humans killed off the megafauna" meme. The other one is climate. The megafauna die-off corresponds to massive climate change. While human hunting was certainly a pressure, it doesn't make sense as the proximal cause of the megafauna extinction.

I agree with Paul. Romanticizing anyone is stupid. And romanticizing first nations / native americans is one of my pet peeves. The whole noble savage in-tune with the balance of nature / spiritual understanding of ecosystems garbage is racist. It's racist like movies and television that make black people always a source earthy, soulful wisdom (but boy do they know how to shake their booties!), or the sexism of depicting women as having a deeper bond with nature because they are life-giving godesses or some such shit.

The worst part is, people base their revulsion to the ongoing genocide of native americans on this phony mystical idea. "How could we do that to such lovely, simple, innocent people?" Why do they need to be special nature lovers for us to empathize or be disturbed by the cold brutality of history?

Since the whole thing is so easy to debunk, apologists and revisionists can seize on this: see, they weren't so nice after all, so we have nothing to regret, no responsibility as languages and cultures vanish from the world.

They were and are just people, and the primary determinants of their lives and fates were environmental and ecological, not whatever we imagine their precolombian cultural philosophy to have been. As my high school history teacher used to say (long before Jared Diamond wrote any books), Geography Is Destiny.

"The megafauna die-off corresponds to massive climate change. While human hunting was certainly a pressure, it doesn't make sense as the proximal cause of the megafauna extinction."
======================================

But haven't there been a good number of advances and retreats of the ice in the last several hundred thousand years? Massive climate changes time and again. Yet the megafauna only became extinct* when men came in with the most recent retreat.

Or am I mistaken?

*judging by the average weight of American adults these days, I'd say a new megafauna is being evolved.

Th new megafauna (adults, beef and pigs) and the new megaflora (pumpkins, corns) are coincident with global warming. So what would be the theory here?

I would like to see some more substantiated theories on megafauna dieoffs. And I believe the question is still open.

The only himan dumber than Jonah is his mother -- Lucianne --- a.k.a. the Wicked Witch from the West....

I would like to see some more substantiated theories on megafauna dieoffs. And I believe the question is still open.

Yep. For what it's worth, Paul Martin has leveled some rather devastating criticism at the climate change hypothesis for the North American megafaunal dieoff. The timing just doesn't seem to work. And with large animals such as proboscideans, it doesn't take a whole lot of killed babies to cause a population to plummet.

Admittedly, Martin has a stone ax to grind. But his case is quite compelling. And the only real evidence against his overkill hypothesis - the Monte Verde site - seems to be an especially sloppy piece of work.

There is a reasonable debate there about megafauna extinctions -- but there is also evidence of vegetation, climate, etc. over the last few tens of thousands of years that says Goldberg's specific claim about the flora of the midwest is just bunk.

...but there is also evidence of vegetation, climate, etc. over the last few tens of thousands of years that says Goldberg's specific claim about the flora of the midwest is just bunk.

I'm almost positive Goldberg's source for this claim is Charles Mann's recent book, 1491 - I certainly can't imagine he has sufficient interest in the subject or the ability to examine the primary literature and is relying on a second-hand popularization. The sources Mann cites for the use of fire as a form of environmental control on the plains are all at least 15-20 years old, which may suggest that this particular hypothesis is not currently in favor, though the one name I did recognize from this part of his bibliography (William Cronon) is hardly a crackpot or fringe figure.

In any case, Goldberg is misrepresenting the claim made by Mann's sources. The point is not that Plains Indians engaged in continent-wide arson but that controlled burns were used to create or maintain grasslands that functioned esentially as pastures for buffalo herds. As Paul W. said, this misinterpretation fuels the conservative talking point that Indians messed up the environment at least as badly as we do, so why should we do anything about it?

But haven't there been a good number of advances and retreats of the ice in the last several hundred thousand years? Massive climate changes time and again. Yet the megafauna only became extinct* when men came in with the most recent retreat.

Or am I mistaken?

The end of the last glaciation phase was more severe, IIRC, than any of the other ones that these creatures had previously survived. Many of the same or similar creatures became extinct at the same time in Eurasia, where they had been hunted for many, many thousands of years without going extinct. Not to mention that a large number of these extinctions were species that weren't food.

Meanwhile, the later, denser populations of the New World (with more efficient technologies) were unable to drive a single species into extinction.

"Hunting" is too simple an answer, but the hypothesis also fails to explain a great many things, and that is the sign of a failed hypothesis. Ecological collapse (with hunting pressure perhaps contributing) explains things a lot better.

Isn't it the megafauna themselves that create the plains, much like what happens today in the savannah? That is why that guy wrote the paper suggesting that we re-introduce megafauna to the Great Plains:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/08/wild_animal_rel.html

Re: megafuanal extinctions during end of Pliestocene:

The overkill or climate hypothesis relies upon which megafauna you examine. The Clovis sites have butcher bones, and remains with in context projectile points, there are remains of Mammoth caches in lake sediments; but examination of the diet of Giant Ground Sloths suggest climate driven change in vegetation made for the population decline.

I suspect that survival of large populations of pronghorn and bison into the historic period suggest that other factors may have been at play since one would think either hypothesis would have applied, or that each is overgeneralized to not provide sufficient explanatory power. My opinion is that climate provided a bottleneck to megafaunal populations by a change in vegetation conposition, and the opportunity that the new atl-atl technology provided drove the populations further downward.

As to the Great Plains being a forest, that must be a heck of a short time between being a permafrost ridden interior and becoming a grassland in a period unlikely to allow from the development of more than one generation of mature trees.

Mike

I suspect that survival of large populations of pronghorn and bison into the historic period suggest that other factors may have been at play since one would think either hypothesis would have applied, or that each is overgeneralized to not provide sufficient explanatory power. My opinion is that climate provided a bottleneck to megafaunal populations by a change in vegetation conposition, and the opportunity that the new atl-atl technology provided drove the populations further downward.

I have a hard time believing that humans had nothing with the huge faunal dieoff in North America, since it did occur exactly at the same time as what was apparently a big rise in the human population of the Americas -- the time at which Clovis points suddenly start appearing everywhere. However, I always had difficulty seeing how all those incredibly cool animal species could have literally been hunted to extinction. I read an article a few years back (can't recall the author!) that gave a fairly satisfying explanation, tho: it wasn't necessary for the Clovis folks to hunt the animals to death, per se. All they would have had to do is to kill slightly more of them every year than they could replace. Then, over a span of several centuries (probably about as long as it took), the species that couldn't replace themselves fast enough would very slowly go extinct.

Also, some species went extinct as a result of other species going extinct: there used to be several species of very large eagles and vultures in North America. Presumably they weren't hunted, but if the prey they were dependent on slowly died out, they could have easily died out, especially given the very low reproductive rate of large raptors. This is pretty much exactly what's happened to the California Condor over the last 200 years.

Given that the Clovis period seems to have been the first time that there were really large numbers of efficient hunters in North America, the megafauna here wouldnt have had time to evolve around humans (unlike Eurasia & Africa), and so it's plausible to believe that they would have been very vulnerable when the first serious hunters came in. An extremely similar wave of extinctions is posited as having happened in Australia about 40,000 years ago.

However, Jonah's implied point here -- that since Indians made a big dent in their environment, the GOP's massively antienvironmental stance is nothing new, and in fact commendable -- is obviously a crock of shit.