Bend the facts

[Kenelm Philip]

> Kentucky was mostly all hardwood forest 200 years ago and plows and saws
> probably created the clearings where you found good butterflying in years'
> past.

	And that hardwood forest appears to have been the result of the
diseases introduced by the first Europeans to arrive in North America, which
catastrophically reduced the populations of the Amerindians. The first
Europeans noted that the forests in North America resembled an English
park--with widely spaced trees standing in grassland. They also noted that
the land was filled with smoke from the fires that the inhabitants set to
keep the land free from underbrush. It was estimated that one could have
driven a coach through the 'forest' from the Atlantic coast to where St.
Louis now stands. The forest that the pioneers hacked their way through
was a recent artifact produced by the ancestors of those same pioneers.

	North America has not had an ecosystem unaffected by humans since
the first humans arrived many thousands of years ago--and the effects
were _not_ trivial.

							Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu




 
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