Climate impact of Europeans killing native Americans

[Anomalocaris]

apparently the little ice age, a period of abnormal global climate cooling that occurred from around 1600-1800, has been traced to reversion of vast areas of formerly cultivated lands in the America back to forests, which resulted in sufficient increase in total plant mass and plant uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere to appreciably reduce atmosphere green house effect.

The drastic loss of area under cultivation in America was traced to well over half of all pre-Colombian Native American population dying in the aftermath of European rediscovery and conquest of the americas.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...18307261#!

So perhaps an effective way to combat current anthropogenic global warming would be to find ways to dramatically expand global forest cover.

[Peebothuhlu]

apparently the little ice age, a period of abnormal global climate cooling that occurred from around 1600-1800, has been traced to reversion of vast areas of formerly cultivated lands in the America back to forests, which resulted in sufficient increase in total plant mass and plant uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere to appreciably reduce atmosphere green house effect.

The drastic loss of area under cultivation in America was traced to well over half of all pre-Colombian Native American population dying in the aftermath of European rediscovery and conquest of the americas.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...18307261#!

So perhaps an effective way to combat current anthropogenic global warming would be to find ways to dramatically expand global forest cover.

So.... kind'a 'Save the planet. Kill the cheerleaders.' sort of thing?

[The Grand Nudger]

Pre-columbian production methodologies were (and still are) highly effective at carbon sequestration.  They were typically engaged in low (or no) till labor intensive companion planted cropping with a nitrogen fixing cover.  In temperate latitudinal bands of north and south america "three sisters" was a dominant paradigm.  Corn serves as a vertical support for pole beans while an undercropped layer of long season squash suppressed weeds.  The entire field was then tamped down or turned under to provide both the tilth and fertility for the next seasons planting. In the sub and tropical bands of n, central, and south america an integrated methodology called "champas" was widely deployed; where masses of floating vegetation provide support and irrigation for dense cropping (even by today's standards).. supported by nitrifying bacteria which lived on the effluent of cultivated fish below.  Higher elevations relied on rhizome mounds.  Arid regions by extensive irrigation networks and thick monoculture.

There were notable outliers, like the slash and burn campaign of interior south america..where no other methodology was (or even could be) feasible given their technological and site restrictions.

(just as additional info - lest a person think that the natives were destroying their environment with the wild abandon that we currently are, lol - they likely would have if they could have...but they didn't because they couldn't)

[Yonadav]

It has been obvious for quite a long time that deforestation and desertification are two enormous drivers of global warming. Regenerating the carbon sink is obviously necessary.

I am skeptical about the impact on global warming caused by the mass death of American Natives. The Native Americans did not deforest to the same extent that their European, Levantian, and Asian counterparts did. For example, the little ice age happened during a period in which England was almost completely denuded of trees for ship building. American Natives didn't keep livestock. Europeans cleared massive amounts of land for livestock. European and Asian populations were considerably larger and deforested more aggressively.

I remember reading something several years ago about the little ice age being exacerbated by fewer forest fires. One of the bigger sources of carbon in the atmosphere is forest fires. The huge California fires put more carbon into the atmosphere than all of our vehicles do. During the little ice age, drought prone areas were wetter. That caused a double whammy in which not only was carbon not being released into the atmosphere, but was also being extracted by the growing carbon sink. So that exacerbated the little ice age.

[The Grand Nudger]

They did keep livestock, but not the sorts of livestock that necessitated deforestation...and the cultures with the most dedicated livestock operations occupied lightly forested regions from the outset.  

Dogs, turkeys (and other assorted fowl), guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and, ofc, fish.

Pre-columbian ag was massively sophisticated. They actually had a greater variety of cultivars under crop than europe did (alot of the veggies we eat today are native to the americas and were unknown to europe pre-contact)....
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...what they didn't have were plows, cattle and horses.

[Yonadav]

They did keep livestock, but not the sorts of livestock that necessitated deforestation...and the cultures with the most dedicated livestock operations occupied lightly forested regions from the outset.  

Dogs, turkeys (and other assorted fowl), guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and, ofc, fish.

Pre-columbian ag was massively sophisticated.  They actually had a greater variety of cultivars under crop than europe did (alot of the veggies we eat today are native to the americas and were unknown to europe pre-contact)....
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...what they didn't have were plows, cattle and horses.

Yeah, I knew that someone was going to correct me about the livestock thing. I was hoping to be understood within the context of their livestock not being the sort that you clear a bunch of land for. Silly me.

And yeah, I can't imagine life without potatoes. I've read that the population of Ireland tripled in just one generation after the potato was introduced.
When I lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, I found feral sweet potato patches all over the place. I've heard that the Hawaiians already had the sweet potato before Cook's arrival. That seems incredible, and I really wish we knew how that came to be.

[Anomalocaris]

They did keep livestock, but not the sorts of livestock that necessitated deforestation...and the cultures with the most dedicated livestock operations occupied lightly forested regions from the outset.  

Dogs, turkeys (and other assorted fowl), guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and, ofc, fish.

Pre-columbian ag was massively sophisticated.  They actually had a greater variety of cultivars under crop than europe did (alot of the veggies we eat today are native to the americas and were unknown to europe pre-contact)....
.

...what they didn't have were plows, cattle and horses.

The land management practices of native Americans were dramatically different from those of the old world and their specific levels of carbon emission can not be compared.   It can be said that in the old world, agriculturalists as well as herders had narrow views of land they can exploit, and generally limited major ecological alteration to what they immediately can till or raise herds on.    There is increasing evidence that this was not so with North American natives.    

The view has gained increasing traction that North American Indians engaged in nothing short of full scale terraforming by fire starting around 5-6th century CE.  They burned out native forests across the plain states to artificially construct the midamerican grasslands.  They kept the area grassy for a thousand years by setting fire to huge tracts across the plain states each year.  The fabled bison herds of plain states were not part of primordial ecological condition in thebplain states but the artifact of Indian land management.   As a mirror image of the little ice age when disease and European predation so reduced the Indian population that this practice pestered out in the 17th century and little Ice age ensued,  when this practice is first believed to have begun during the 5-6th century atomsphere CO2 spiked and the whole world went into a warm spell, around the fall of western Roman Empire.

It is believed this practice of large scale land management by fire extended all the way to the east coast. On the east coast, the purpose of the artificially set fire wasn’t to open up pasture land for bison, but to clear undergrowth from forested land to create what first European mistook for a uniquely American type of virgin forest that was almost park like, with big trees but open land with little or no undergrowth under them. Part of the reason why reforestation efforts on the east coast could not restore the virgin forest seen by the first Europeans is those forests weren’t virgin. They were also the result of large scale Indian land management by fire.

[The Grand Nudger]

Really only two possibilities, right?  Either it floated there, or the polynesians boated it there.  Sort of interesting when you consider that one of those two possibilities accouints for seeming cultural transfer that led the likes of Heyerdahl to posit that the pacific had been colonized from s. america - obviously a mistake by reference to the same sorts of genetic analysis that now suggests transfer in the opposite direction.

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The view has gained increasing traction that North American Indians engaged in nothing short of full scale terraforming by fire starting around 5-6th century CE. 

-and not just by fire.  The earthworks and irrigation would have been wonders of the world had anyone been aware of them.  Entire mountain ranges terraced, deserts turned to grasslands, barren canyons to oasis of life.  Swamps to floating dryland farms.

Europe wouldn't see the heavy moldboard plow until 900, and it wouldn't be well deployed until 1300...a scant two centuries or so pre-contact....and that severely limited what land they could exploit.

[Anomalocaris]

Really only two possibilities, right?  Either it floated there, or the polynesians boated it there.  Sort of interesting when you consider that one of those two possibilities accouints for seeming cultural transfer that led the likes of Heyerdahl to posit that the pacific had been colonized from s. america - obviously a mistake by reference to the same sorts of genetic analysis that now suggests transfer in the opposite direction.

---

The view has gained increasing traction that North American Indians engaged in nothing short of full scale terraforming by fire starting around 5-6th century CE. 

-and not just by fire.  The earthworks and irrigation would have been wonders of the world had anyone been aware of them.  Entire mountain ranges terraced, deserts turned to grasslands, barren canyons to oasis of life.  

Europe wouldn't see the heavy moldboard plow until 900, and it wouldn't be well deployed until 1300...a scant two centuries or so pre-contact....and that severely limited what land they could exploit.

What seems to have been true is that, contrary to the popular image of most pre-Columbia’s Indians living outside the traditional civilizational centers in Central and western South American as living largely in primordial harmony with their environment since times immemorial, in fact their ways of life created per capita ecological impact at least rivaling and possibly far exceeding the Iron Age civilizations of the old world, as well as the urban civilizations of central and South America.

[The Grand Nudger]

There was a need/compulsion in early colonization and later expansion to assert that the indigenous and their ancestors (particularly outside of meso-america as you note) were complete savages, incapable of something like the mass deployment of organized generational labor to fundamentally alter the landscape and favor agricultural production associated with civilization.  This was reenforced by the perception (on part of the european colonists) that they'd stumbled onto some sort of primordial virgin land..which america most certainly was not by 1500.   More recently, that they were noble savages...unwilling to do so out of respect or concern for mother earth (or somesuch hippy shit, lol).  

Neither assertion was ever true.  A dispassionate comparison would probably land them, at contact, somewhere between late medieval and pre-war.  They were first rate permaculturalists..and we today...post chem rev, are finding that borrowing a few pages from their book could go a long way towards addressing some of our modern problems.  

The only difference between what I do and champas-culture..for example...is that I have a greenhouse and an airlift pump.