Surely you acknowledge that forests in California predated human habitation thereof? (I could see a pedantic point in that they would not then be part of “recorded history,” if that were the point intended.)

I acknowledge that the forests of California are more than 12000 years old, yes. We have very little information on what those looked like [and some of that was systematically suppressed by the people who wrote the history books]. What we have is documentation of forests that were already under active but low-intensity cultivation for almost 10,000 years before someone with pen and paper saw them [and decided that a superior race would put them to much better use].

ETA: some unspoken colonialism that is the puppetmaster in this play. I am a systems thinker. You cannot address systemic problems without at least acknowledging how they started and propagated. False histories of false histories just make the problem worse by trivializing the scope, leading people to half measures.

Because races aren't genetically distinct in any substantial way, and Eurasian and African climates match North and South American ones, indigenous societies in the Americas would presumably follow the same trajectory as the indigenous societies elsewhere.

This is not to absolve colonialists of guilt for the horrific consequences of their actions. 'If I didn't, someone else would' is not a moral justification. But if it is the forests that we are concerned about, they would have the same fate one way or another, maybe lasting a few more millenia- not significant on the geological scales they exist in.

I'm not an anthropologist but the ideology mismatch was more than just race. Colonialism is, to me, a gumbo of nationalism, classism, religion, seasoned with a generous helping of some other ideologies, like our flavor of mastery over nature.

I will challenge your conclusion though, at least in a qualified manner. We do preserve things that we understand better before the option to exploit them arises. But. We do tend to understand things by taking them apart like children. And like children, we often lack the sophistication to put them back together again for a long time. But the clocks, radios and wind-up cars we disassembled as children were inanimate objects. Vivisecting living things/systems has a little bit different moral gravity.

But we are where we are. The best we can do is say "we fucked up, how do we fix it?" and start trying to listen, even if much of that listening now has to be through historical anthropologists.

It is my view that our flavor of mastery over nature is a deterministic consequence of the advantage that it gives. I think that is unlikely that European society just decided to make that a value because they liked doing it, or had less knowledge than indigenous peoples.

To clarify, I don't think this is a good process, but I think it is an inevitable one. If there had been no colonialism, societies in the Americas would have reached their own equillibrium, and competition would have driven them to 'progress' as we know it. There would have been much less death, but civilisation would run its course all the same.

And additional clarification because I phrased my position on the current situation poorly: I think we can still save things. I just think there is no way for us to have skirted the initial destruction, and we would eventually have reached this point regardless.

> Because races aren't genetically distinct in any substantial way, and Eurasian and African climates match North and South American ones, indigenous societies in the Americas would presumably follow the same trajectory as the indigenous societies elsewhere.

Why? Culture is a big factor.

Firstly, I worry that I am coming across as overconfident. I haven't researched these topics in great depth, and if someone could correct my broad model of history, I'd appreciate it- there's no better feeling than updating a mental model and letting things click into place in a clearer way.

10,000 years ago, Europe, Asia, and Africa were hunter-gatherer populations. Such cultures succeed by taking care of their environment so that the things they depend on remain. Cultural evolution isn't necessary there; biological evolution already optimizes for hunter-gatherer humans.

When you develop agriculture, circumstances change. The most profitable move for society at large is to eradicate nature in favor of farms. The wealth and abundance that results from that makes room for selfish individuals to fight for power. Societies develop kings and slaves at this point. The wealth can be grown by further replacing nature with roads, cities, and infrastructure. With selfish people in power, this is inevitable.

In the Americas, the Mayans had reached this point and had fallen, likely due to overindulgance in those benefits.

Incas had no slaves and no currency, so theirs was a unique culture that fits the opposing viewpoint. But they also had no writing system, had only really been around for 60 years before Columbus arrived, and still had an elite class, so my view is that they would have become homogenous with other societies that were successful. As far as I know, they weren't conservationists anyway.

Cultures move to positions that are resistant to change, easy to fall into, and that provide an advantage over competing cultures. That means centralized power, military dominance, and some benefits for those in charge. Cultures that don't meet these criteria either become those that do, or are conquered by those that do.

American Indians (I am told this is the preferred nomenclature) were increasingly competing between tribes, and the agricultural tribes were growing. Either they would have soon walked the path that everyone else in history has, or they would have been wiped out by the larger southern civilisations.

I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious. You’re telling me that the nomadic tribes of the Native Americans, who never built a single city nor developed any appreciable technology somehow tended to the vast millions of acres of California’s forests?

Tending the Wilds answers this.

The nomadic tribes mostly had an exclusive zone from the mountains to the sea, and moved back and forth seasonally, doing maintenance work to guarantee a good harvest of food and crafting materials the following year. Quite a bit of selection of fire resistant food species (eg, Cammas bulbs, which require meadows)

Specifically in the case of cammas bulbs, the harvesting method was quite precise in its imprecision. The tool for gathering bulbs was basically a polished stick, which means that digging up a cluster of bulbs misses all of the offsets and a few of the larger bulbs. But the act of levering them out pushes the remaining bulbs outward from the center of mass, giving them more room to divide.

They also apparently gathered at flowering time, something you don't usually see in conventional agriculture. TtW suggests that this is because of Death Cammas - a hepatotoxic doppelganger with a completely different flower, that would be in the public interests to irradicate from your fields.

Cammas experts claim only an idiot would confuse the two, but harvest is a group activity. Some of those 'idiots' would be your kids or elders with failing eyesight.

I knew a guy who is trying to re-establish cammas from remnant native meadows who thinks the real reason is metabolic. That the fraction of inulin (one of the starches that make you fart) during flowering is lower, and hence they require less intensive food prep. Lewis and Clark apparently sampled underprepared cammas during their journey and spent a very unpleasant night because of it.

I assume you mean specifically native Californians right? Because native Americans built spectacular cities in Mexico and Central America.