Sustainability History

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Sustainability History

• Roughly Four Periods (The Americas)
• 1 Pre-human landscape (gt15,000ya)
• 2 Pre-colonial landscape (15,000-500ya)
• 3 Pre-Industrial landscape (before 1840)
• 4 Industrial landscape

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Pre-human Landscape
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Megalonyx jeffersonii  (extinct about 8,000ya)
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Columbian Mammoth (extinct 11,000ya) Woolly
Mammoth (extinct about 3,500ya)
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Pre-colonial Landscape
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• More than half of the large mammal biota of the
  Americas disappeared in a cataclysmic extinction
  wave at the very end of the Pleistocene," begins
  Alroy in the Science article. Some of the mammals
  that became extinct are
• woolly mammoths (until 3,500 yrs ago)
• Columbian mammoths
• American mastodons
• three types of ground sloths
• glyptodonts - giant armadillos
• several species of horses
• four species of pronghorn
• three species of camels
• giant deer
• several species of oxen
• giant bison

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• In 1528, Alvar Nunez Cabenza de Vaca noted that
  in the area that is now Texas
•   "The Indians of the interior...go with brands
  in the hand firing the plains and forests within
  their reach, that the mosquitos my fly away, and
  at the same time to drive out lizards and other
  things from the earth for them to eat.  In this
  way do they appease their hunger, two ot three
  times in the year..."

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• In 1630, Francis Higginson wrote about the
  country around Salem, Massachussetts, that
•   "there is much ground cleared by the Indians,
  and especially about (their agricultural fields)
  and I am told that about three miles from us a
  man may stand on a little hilly place and see
  thousands of acres of ground as good as    need
  be, and not a Tree on the same."

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• In surveying the boundary between the states of
  North Carolina and Georgia in 1811, Andrew
  Ellicott wrote that
•   "the greatest inconvenience we experienced
  arose from the smoke occasioned by the annual
  custom of the Indians in burning the woods. 
  Those fires scattered over a vast extent of
  country made a beautiful and brilliant appearance
  at night particularly when ascending the sides
  of the mountains."

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Pre-Industrial Landscape
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Coe, Snow and Benson, Atlas of Ancient America
(1986) Peru Pop. fell from 9M (1533) to
gt500,000 (early 17th C) Massimo Livi-Bacci,
Concise History of World Population History
2d (1996) Mexico Population fell from 6.3M
(1548) to 1.9M (1580) to 1M (1605) Peru Pop.
fell from 1.3M (1572) to 600,000 (1620) Canada
from 300,000 (ca. 1600) to lt 100,000 (ca. 1800)
USA from 5M (1500) to 600,000 (ca. 1800)
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Skidmore Smith, Modern Latin America (1997)
Mexico Population fell from 25M (1519) to 16.8M
(1523) to 1.9M (1580) to 1M (1605) Central
America Population fell from 25.0M (1519)
to 1.3M (1595) SE fell from 1,700,000 to
240,000 North fell from 2,500,000 to
320,000 Peru, 16th C. between 8.5M and 13.5M
people destroyed. Hispanola (1492-1550)
Trager, People's Chronology from 200-300,000
(1492) to 60,000 (1508) to 14,000 (1514) to lt500
(1548) Stannard from 8M (1492) to 4M or 5M
(1496) to less than 100,000 (1508) to less than
20,000 (1518) to extinction (1535)
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Causes of the Decline

• Disease small pox and measles
• Dislocation and Conflict
• Democide

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• John Muir
• The Mountains of California (1894)

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• George Perkins Marsh
• Man and Nature (1864)

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• Frederick Law Olmsted
• Central Park (1857)