Dear HCN,
While I thought Dan
Flores’ thoughts in the lead article “Beyond Ecology: Restoring a
Cultural Landscape” (HCN, 5/13/02: Beyond ecology: Restoring a
cultural landscape) were right on, I found it bothersome in Ed
Marston’s review of Flores’ book, The Natural
West, to see the wiping out of the large mammals from
North America’s grasslands attributed to “the forebears of the
American Indians who crossed the Bering Strait 10,000 years
ago.”
This is only one interpretation of the
record, and Iowa professors Henry Howe and Lynn Westley in their
1988 textbook, Ecological Relationship of Plants and
Animals, state that Pleistocene hunters may have only
exterminated some survivors of previous episodes of extinction. And
that ample evidence of ecological disruption and the near absence
of the remains of extinct species in the campfire sites of early
hunters argue against a crucial human role. They feel the Asian
immigrants witnessed the demise of the megafauna, but they probably
did not cause it.
Linda
Driskill
John Day,
Oregon
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Review gives only one view.
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