For those say in their 60s or 70s here. When you were in your 30’s or 40’s did you have the feeling that the world was a fucked up place? So much has been going on since I entered adulthood in the early 2000s and I feel like it’s getting more and more intense. It’s never ending.
Is it unique? Or has it always been this way?
At least in the US there are more trees now than when the settlers landed at Plymouth Rock.
I don’t think that’s true, we have more trees than we did 100 years ago but I couldn’t see anything about more trees than pre-European settlement. I am inclined to doubt that.
I find this hard to believe.
It certainly is, but it makes sense if you know about logging practices.
Generally, logging companies will cycle through parcels of land and replant parcels that have been clear cut so they can have guaranteed lumber in the future without having to negotiate new leases and such.
And with the massive amount of protected forests, the places they’re allowed to cut is way less than it used to be.
I mean maybe. If you count little seedlings or such. there was this thing about how a squirrel could go from one ocean to the other without ever touching the ground. I mean the logging practices prior to the settlers landing on plymouth rock were pretty anemic. I mean the natives had few buildings. All our towns and cities and buildings in general were for the most part forest or prarie and even prarie had trees especially long water sources like lakes and rivers.
You’ve been told a racist lie. Native Americans – especially ones in the forested parts of the country – had plenty of agriculture, and at its peak in the 12th Century, Cahokia (the largest city we know about north of Mesoamerica) may have had a larger population than London or Paris did at the time.
What actually happened was that the natives caught old-world diseases from the earliest explorers and colonists, which set off a continent-wide pandemic so virulent that, by a few decades later when the European settlers really started showing up in earnest, something like 90-99% of them were dead and their towns had been reclaimed by nature.
Two things:
Native peoples very much built buildings.
Lots of where towns are now in the south and in the plains weren’t prairie as is commonly thought, they were lowlands populated with bamboo.
TIL not all bamboo is from Asia. Is there a good/easy way to tell Arundinaria apart from invasive bamboo? There’s a vacant lot near my house with a ton of bamboo on it, and your comment gives me a slim hope that it might be something other than a noxious weed that needs remediation.
ok. So just to be clear we just care about if there are technically more trees like saplings in tree farms than any type of environmental thing yeah?
No? I care about accurate representations of Native American environments. My comment was specifically directed at your comment, not the entire thread.
I honestly think there’s no way to know if there’s really more trees now than there was. But I kind of doubt it, unless like you said, we’re specifically counting saplings on farms versus old growth forests.
Sorry I thought you were followup by the initial starter of the comment chain.