the question that haunts me

[dust]

Dream on: Britain was deforested rapidly once Bronze Age axes became available. Fires were used extensively and often got out of hand, destroying hundreds of acres and the animals that inhabited those woodlands. Scientists have concluded that it was man that hunted the Mammoth to extinction and it was the American Indians that began the destruction of the Bison. Ancient man had midden heaps which would pollute water courses and kill off the life in the waterways for many miles.

 

 

I will concede that not every ancient person in every ancient culture had a deep respect for wildlife and a keen instinct for protecting their habitat.

 

During the Bronze Age, they did indeed cut down a lot of trees here. (Well, a lot by their standards.) But as I have said, such behaviour was all on a much smaller scale than now. It was not, at that time, ever going to become threatening to the island, let alone the environment beyond. Nowadays, the extent of deforestation in many places is unimaginable by Bronze Age standards.

 

As far as mammoths -- any scientific consensus does not blame humans alone but also natural climate change and perhaps meteorites. Yes, things other than humans may wreak havoc and kill blindly. As far as midden heaps... well, I can imagine that wherever there were middens, there was a nasty area and some fish probably died... but is this something to look at with nostalgia, or with disgust?

 

Anyway, your comments only serve to help my case, however they're taken.

 

If you're right, and man has always polluted, the only reasonable conclusion is to decide to actually start learning from history, (as I continually hear people talking about doing but rarely actually doing). Apparently, we haven't learned anything and we're happy to expand our pollutive behaviour exponentially until everything is dead.

 

If you're wrong, and man has not always polluted, then we have a time at some point in history during which humans did indeed respect their habitat. Which is nice.

 

The truth is somewhere in between. Not every culture has been respectful, but it's become worse as time has gone on. The bigger our brains became, the more we learned to do, the more we produced, the more we farmed, the more we were likely to damage things around us. But as we do now have these big brains and have learned a lot of stuff and have greatly exceeded necessity in our production, we might start to look around and think "Oh, shit... look at all this shit. It's horrible."

[Karl]

Part of converting raw nature into products which serve man. Define pollution. From the moment man discovered fire there was smoke. Are you a promethean ?

[Nungali]

I think there might have been a little bit of smoke around before Man discovered fire Karl 

 

... or are you going to blame all that on Man too ? 

 

[Nungali]

and sometimes .... even before Man 'discovered'  fire  ... fires could even start themselves !