Denying native people's the agency and ability to alter their environment is exactly the type of thing the institutionalized racists in academia push for.

The obvious conclusion that native people are no more the stewards of the land than the British during the industrial revolution then collapses the whole 'blood and soil' ideology of modern academia and the push for race based land rights.

To keep this from happening the historical fiction of the noble savage must be defended as strongly as all previously discredited pseudo science that the universities have pushed to wider society. In 50 years everyone will pretend that they didn't support it just like phrenology.

The mountains of evidence that the arrival of humans lead to mass extinctions of mega fauna, drastic changes in the flora and even climate change before circa 1500 are conveniently ignored and downplayed.