as small as a world and as large as alone

4:53pm August 4, 2014

clatterbane:

birdandmoon:

Sometimes when I’m hiking in the woods I think “This place is so pristine and wild.” Then I remember some of the changes that have happened to wildlife in the past couple hundred years.

ISTR that the Eastern bison’s range also covered most of the Northeast, before settlers hunted them to extinction. The last known one was killed along the river system I grew up on. They’ve also had to reintroduce an elk subspecies from the Rockies, after totally wiping out the native ones.

Further down we’ve still got plenty of timber rattlers. But the canebrake rattlers almost got wiped out along with the rivercane (native bamboo, a popular material for all kinds of stuff) getting destroyed.

The number of species wiped out by settlers makes me want to cry sometimes. If as a society you can/even want to kill all the *parakeets*, FFS, there’s something bad wrong.

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