Dear HCN,
We had the
fantastic “theories” of Columbus “finding”
North America when as many as 140 million North Americans had not
“lost” it. And the “stories” of Pilgrims
encountering “wilderness” when indigenous people
cultivated a wide variety of crops the colonizers’ pigs
wreaked havoc upon.
Now in the May 13, 2002,
HCN, we have repeated the “theory”
of mass extinctions of vast herds of animals by a tiny group of,
supposedly, newly arrived people. This is yet another bogus, racist
theory easily undermined.
Vine Deloria
(Red Earth, White Lies) and Wade Churchill
(A Little Matter of Genocide) are two academic
authors who have punched mastodon-sized holes into the theories of
Bering Strait migrations into the Western Hemisphere and that these
same humans killed every big animal in sight almost overnight.
Sure, it is obvious that any new condition
changes a habitat. But the book review by Ed Marston, article by
Dan Flores, and interview of Michael Soulé in the May 13 issue
all appeared obligated to pull out this tired extinctive smear.
They didn’t need to do this to point out that managing
habitat for diversity and collective (generational) good is
historically more successful than fattening up “50,000 cattle
and sheep” for individual, short-term profit.
Kali Kaliche
Williams, Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline HCN offers bogus theories.
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