Reply #12: Just finished it tonight

[Yupster]

A sad story for sure.

It reminded me of the "Ghost Dance" religion that many Plains Indians had in the late 1880's. A Paiute named Wovoka had a vision that if the Indians (almost all by then on reservations and doing badly) would do a certain dance, then all the Whites would disappear, all the dead Indians would come back to life, and the buffalo would return in their millions.

Many Indians danced, Whites got nervous and the Massacre at Wounded Knee resulted.

It's kind of a desperate last hope that magically the world will go back to being right again. Sadly, just like the Whites didn't disappear, neither will the people from the earth.

Birds will continue to break their necks crashing into cell-phone towers in their millions and turtles will continue to choke on plastic grocery bags, and Albatross chicks will continue to starve because their stomachs are full of bic lighters and bottle caps. Maybe we can do better than we're doing today, but it's far too late for much of the earth's environments and its species.

And somehow we must get population growth under control for anything else to work, but no one even seems willing to even talk about that idea.

If you liked this book, I'd recommend "Collapse," and "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. On similar subjects and better written IMO.

PS - I didn't realize there were camels, horses and lions in North America when the first Native Americans came in 13,000 years ago, along with so much other species of megafauna, which all disappeared within a thousand years of humans arriving.