GE Morton wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 11:27 pm
Robert66 wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 7:15 pm
To which I reply that national government, and international governance, could and should be responsible for ensuring sufficient cohesion among communities relying upon common resources. These levels of government would try to enable sustainable management of resources, recognising local, intrinsic rights along with external demands.
That's all very well, except that achieving that degree of consensus among disjoint communities is all but impossible.
This notion - 'if the supply of a resource and natural rate of replenishment is greater than the demand and its growth rate, as it was for pre-colonial forests and fisheries in the Americas, no management is necessary at all' - is indicative of the outdated thinking which has plagued modern man's relationship with nature. Pre-colonial environments were managed. They were managed according to the correct assumptions that:) -man is part of nature, and that - all species require consideration.
Methinks you're mistaking a romanticized "noble savage" fantasy for reality. Hunter-gatherer communities didn't manage anything; they exploited an environment until the plants and animals they preferred were exhausted, and then moved on. But their populations were small enough so that when, perhaps a generation or two later, they returned to a previously occupied valley the resources there had recovered. Within a millennium or so of the arrival of the first humans in the Americas all of the megafauna had become extinct.
Resource management only developed with the advent of permanent communities --- civilization --- whose inhabitants could not move on and which had higher rates of population growth, and thus a greater need for conservation.
Good management, not merely abundance, ensured the biodiversity squandered since colonial times. And the devastating impact of relatively small populations of European settlers, in Australia and the Americas, shows how quickly natural abundance and diversity can be destroyed.
Natural abundance has hardly been destroyed in the Americas. Forest acreage in the western US at present is only slightly less than in 1760, despite a population increase from perhaps 500,000 (natives) to 330 million today. Total forest acreage for the country (as of 2000) was about 75% of the primordial total of 1 billion acres, all of the loss occurring in the East between about 1750 and 1850. Over the last 50 years forest growth in the US has been increasing, most of it in privately-owned forests:
forest2.jpg
forest1.jpg
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-fac ... nd-1343034
Civilization has done a far better job of resource conservation than pre-civilized societies.
The mistake being made is equating 'forest acreage' with environmental health. Forests are but one type of environment, and a forest may be healthy or not. A healthy forest contains a diversity of tree species, and supports myriad other species. A monoculture, such as the ubiquitous Pinus radiata plantations of Australia could loosely be described as forest, but most accurately described as an environmental blight.
Your second chart indicates that more than 40% of forest in the US North and South have been destroyed in about 200 years.
And if you were to substitute prairie for forest as your "yardstick", the results would be even worse.
'Only half of the Great Plains’ original grasslands remains intact today, the report states. Between 2009 and 2015, 53 million acres were converted to cropland every year, a two percent annual rate of loss.
...despite popular belief to the contrary, grassy biomes such as grasslands and savannas harbor just as much biodiversity as rainforests — and they’re being destroyed at an even quicker pace.
This trend is especially pronounced in the Great Plains of the United States, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which found that in 2014 alone the region lost more acres of grassland than the Brazilian Amazon lost rainforest.'
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/grass ... ming-rate/
'Methinks you're mistaking a romanticized "noble savage" fantasy for reality. Hunter-gatherer communities didn't manage anything; they exploited an environment until the plants and animals they preferred were exhausted, and then moved on.'
That is more of the white mansplaining I have previously complained about. It certainly contradicts what I have learnt of the first nations of Australia, nations of people residing on their lands for 20,000 to 60,000 years.