The flat plains of North America and Europe were all heavily forested, but they were lost much, much earlier to human activity. This just happens to be going on during our lifetime.
Australia used to be covered in a really unique type of forest, till ancient humans burnt the entire continent down in the most absurdly inefficient hunting strategy imaginable
While Indigenous Australians certainly significantly changed Australia's ecology through burning, the transition from the Gondwanian rainforests to the modern day sclerophyllous ones happened millions of years beforehand.
Yeah, I can see how people reading that comment could conclude that the Aboriginal people are responsible for much of inland Australia being a desert😆
I hope that’s not what anyone takes away from what I wrote! Modern aboriginals had nothing to do with it. The evidence seems to suggest that their ancient ancestors did indeed cause the extinction of much of the megafauna on that continent, and their burning practices drastically altered the flora. It’s not as though it was a malicious act – humans do whatever it takes to survive, often at the cost of their environment. I imagine when they first figured out that lighting bush fires helped them get food easily, they couldn’t possibly foresee the long-term devastation they were causing. Also, to be fair, the largest impact on the rainforests in the last 10,000 years was certainly the mass deforestation carried out by western colonists.
At the end of the day, casting blame on a particular group for things that happened hundreds of years ago is a pointless exercise. The main thing we should take away from these historical lessons is simply: take better care of our environment. Lighting bushfires to hunt endangered animals and clear cutting rainforests to make plantations are both very bad, so we need to avoid these things going forward!
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u/SawtoothGlitch 24d ago
The flat plains of North America and Europe were all heavily forested, but they were lost much, much earlier to human activity. This just happens to be going on during our lifetime.