The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 198

The incredible biological abundance of North America was also a
post-crash phenomenon. We've heard about the flocks of passenger
pigeons darkening the sky for days, the tens of millions of bison tram-
pling the great plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that
you could barely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep
forests on which a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Missis-
sippi without touching the ground. We don't know what North America
would have looked like with no humans at all, but we do know it didn't
look like that under the 'Indians'. Bone excavations show that passen-
ger pigeons were not even common in the 1400s. 'Indians' specifically
targeted pregnant deer and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to elim-
inate competition for maize and tree nuts. They routinely burned
forests to keep them convenient for human use. And they kept salmon
and shellfish populations down by eating them, and thereby suppressed
populations of other creatures that ate them. When human populations
crashed, nonhuman populations exploded. 11
Gruesome events - some accidental, others deliberately genocidal -
wiped out the great majority of the hemisphere's people and the rich
and remarkable societies they created. In many parts of the Americas
the only humans who remained were - like the survivors in a
post-holocaust novel - hunter-gatherers. Some belonged to tribes
which had long practised that art, others were forced to reacquire lost
skills as a result of civilizational collapse. Disease made cities lethal:
only dispersed populations had a chance of avoiding epidemics. Dis-
persal into small bands of hunter-gatherers made economic complexity
impossible. The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before.
Humanity's loss was nature's gain.
The impacts of the American genocides might have been felt
throughout the northern hemisphere. Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird
at Stanford University have speculated that the recovering forests
drew so much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere - about ten parts
per million - that they could have helped to trigger the cooling
between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries known as the Little
Ice Age. 12 The short summers and long cold winters, the ice fairs on
the Thames and the deep cold depicted by Pieter Brueghel might have
been caused partly as a result of the extermination of the Native