Welcome to the Anthropocene

"Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature" is a book edited by Charles E Kay and Randy T Simmons. I haven´t (yet) read all of it, so this blog post is mostly based on William L Preston´s contribution "Post-Colombian Wildlife Irruptions in California". Yes, folks, it´s time to bash the myth of the noble savage again!

California´s so-called Colonial Period streches from 1769 to 1848. Before 1769, no permanent White European settlement existed in the area. However, European expeditions did reach the area several times. For a long time, the established view of pre-colonial and colonial California was...well, very strange indeed. The future US state was depicted as a virtual Eden, in which a large population of Native Americans (American Indians) lived peacefully and spiritually alongside an abundance of deer, elk, antelope, fish, fowl, sea lions, bears, cougars and bob cats. The game animals were tame, huge and fat. The Natives weren´t the apex predators, that role instead being taken by grizzlies, which (strangely enough) were extremely aggressive, roamed the land in large packs, and hunted humans. Indeed, the Natives were so fearful of the bears that they initially felt nothing but gratitude to the Spanish colonialists, who helped them kill the murderous beasts! (I wonder what John Muir would have said about this.) 

Of course it´s too good to be true. Indeed, it strikes me as strange that anyone could have believed this Edenic vision in the first place!

The author doesn´t doubt the eye witness accounts of the European explorers, per se. There are several problems with the accounts, however. One is that they don´t reflect the situation in the rest of North America, where research has shown that the Natives had considerable impact on their living environments, including by over-hunting animals and burning the forests. Another is the archeological evidence, which seem to indicate large-scale Native hunting and foraging before the 16th century (when the Spanish conquered Mexico). It also indicates over-exploitation of the "resources". The size of mussels and abalone (marine snails) found at Native sites progressively diminishes with time, suggesting that the large-sized specimens had been nearly exterminated. There are also indications at certain sites that the large game species had been depleted, at which point the Native hunters started exploiting more abundant smaller game instead. 

Sheer common sense also militates against the idea of Native-animal harmony, since we now know that the Native settlements in California were larger than in the rest of North America. We also know where they were situated - at the exact same places where Colonial eye witnesses saw an enormous abundance of game animals. The idea of Natives and game animals somehow dancing around each other in such circumstances is simply too hard to believe. (The Natives would also have to dance around a huge amount of carnivorous animals preying on the herbivores.) 

Preston and the other contributors to this book believes in the so-called optimal-foraging model of hunter behavior, which in turn is supposedly rooted in our evolutionary past as explained by sociobiology. I happen to be skeptical to sociobiology sensu stricto, but in this case, a rather common sensical "biological" model does seem to fit the format. In plain English, if forced to chose between ideology and eating, most people chose eating, and there is no particular reason to think that Native Californians were any different. Hunters and foragers will pick the most nutritious animals first (often the largest ones), even if they are pregnant females or have become scarce, and when these resources are depleted, they will continue further down the food chain with smaller, less nutritious but more abudant species. Indeed, hunters are even more motivated in killing large game in rich environments where they can easily switch to smaller game if necessary. In other words, nutritional needs rather than cultural or religious ideas about "sacred animals" control Native foraging behavior. Indeed, what makes us think that it would be otherwise? While American Indians do have religious ideas about hunting, these usually don´t constrain it. If hunting becomes less succesful, the explanation given is usually the lack of moral purity of the hunter, rather than in the prey animals actually being less abundant due to overkill. 

So what actually happened in California? The answer is: more or less the same thing that happened in the rest of North America. A variety of exotic diseases reached California centuries before the first White settlers entered the area in 1769, diseases first introduced to Mexico by the 16th century Spanish conquistadors. During the "proto-historic" period between first contact and actual settlement, these diseases (smallpox, malaria and so on) would have reduced California´s Native population. At first, this didn´t lead to an increased number of herbivores such as elk, deer or antelope. Rather, the number of carnivores such as bears or cougars increased sharply, since they no longer competed with so many human hunters. The herbivores were still kept in check. After 1769, during the Colonial Period, the Native population crashed due to epidemics spread by the Europeans, who had now settled permanently. The remaining Natives increasingly turned to breeding domesticated animals and growing new kinds of crops, both introduced by the settlers. The carnivores preyed on Native-owned livestock, rather than on the wild herbivores, which therefore could increase their numbers considerably. Also, the herbivores opportunistically started feeding on Native agricultural land, increasing their numbers even more. This created the situation described by Colonial-era writers, who were baffled by the abundance of both ungulates and carnivores, and the seeming inability of the Natives to do something about the latter. What seems to have happened, in other words, is that European diseases crashed the Native American populations below carrying capacity. This - and this only - created an "Eden" with abundant wildlife. The "Edenic" conditions are really irruptions of prey species which are no longer kept in check by predators (neither human nor beastly ones). In other parts of the North American continent, the well-known super-abundance of bisons and passanger pigeons is believed to have come about in the same way. One Colonial eye witness account from California cited by the author actually describes how animal life becomes almost absurdly abundant after a malaria epidemic has wiped out the Native tribe in a certain area. 

Before the White settlers reached America, animal numbers were kept in check by Native hunting, fishing and gathering. As already indicated, research suggests that resources were overexploited. (Another article in this book describes how coastal tribes built large boats to hunt sea lions at offshore islands, the boats apparently being owned by Native chiefs and thus leading to increased stratification - hardly an Edenic classless idyll.) Nature became supposedly paradisiacal (really fundamentally unbalanced) only after a massive die off of Natives caused by Old World germs. 

Another myth laid to rest. Welcome to the Anthropocene.