But you would never know it from this show. They had their agenda and they pushed it.
I saw a slide show some years ago that used a particular photographic technique where they take pictures from the exact spot and angle that was used before, and compared the pictures. Some of those pictures were taken by George Armstrong Custer's expeditions. They ALL showed more trees and vegetation now than was present 150 years ago.
People talk about clearcutting. If you look at the record, the entire East half of America was clearcut at least once, principally to clear farm land and to provide feed for horses which in the nineteenth century were the principal means of locomotion. In other words, there were a LOT of horses that had to be fed, and grass doesn't grow under trees.
Before Columbus arrived and traded small pox for syphilis with the Native Americans, the Native population was huge, maybe as maybe as a hundred million (I can't remember the actual estimate, but it was way higher than most people think.) Most of these people were agriculturists, not the idyllic nomads depicted in "Dances With Wolves." They had been farming and burning off woods for thousands of years, ever since they came over from Siberia.
Heck, barely over 200 years ago in Idaho, the Nez Perce were torching off the crowns of trees just for the hell of it, for fireworks. This is recorded in the Journals of Lewis and Clark.
Ever wonder why we have Halloween? It's because people LIKE being scared. Al Gore is making a bundle off of it. |
