Eradicating Montbretia

recedite wrote: »

The default ecosystem in Ireland is probably thick forest for most areas, and people lived as a part of this kind of ecosystem in Europe for tens of thousands of years before the major deforestation started.

If major deforestation didn't occur immediately in Europe, that was because there simply wasn't the technology or the numbers of people to make it happen and, perhaps more importantly, because there was no point, as the agriculture that would later replace the trees hadn't yet been discovered.

However, that does not mean that those early people lived in 'harmony' with those forests, or any other ecosystems, for that matter. They drove to extinction countless lifeforms, starting with the megafauna and working their way down in order of amount of meat to be gained, easiness to hunt and so on.

People have never lived in harmony with any of the ecosystems they found upon leaving Africa: that is a myth. It is now established beyond any doubt that the arrival of humans anywhere for the first time provoked nothing less than a biological collapse. This has been well documented all over the world, from Europe and Asia to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands to North America. Once all of the more vulnerable - often keystone - species of animals have been removed from the ecosystem, things generally kind of 'settle down' to some form of stability, but that should not be confused with 'harmony', as you are talking about a radically impoverished, artificial, environment. Then, with the advent of agriculture and other technological advances, that destruction was carried to further and further extremes, to the point we're at now where only remnants of the natural world remain, often pretty hollow ones.

Humans have been described as 'The Planetary Killer' (Edward O. Wilson). But that doesn't mean that we are somehow 'evil', just that we are incredibly adaptable and skilled at exploiting any environment to our own ends. All other species are regulated by natural balances - if they become too numerous, for example, food becomes scarce and the population declines. With us, once we have removed one food source through extinction, we are opportunistic enough to be able to turn to alternatives, and ditto once they're gone. And then on to agriculture and other more efficient ways of exploiting our environment.

This is what makes us so successful as a species, and yet so tragic, both for the rest of life and for ourselves. The challenge now is to try to find ways of altering that behaviour, which I believe to be both possible and essential.

recedite wrote: »

But you are like an Amish leader, thinking that our role is to stop time at some arbitrary and halcyon point in early modern history, as if that was somehow the best of all possible times.

Not going to reply to this, as it's too nutty.