thinking of starting one of those pseudonymous twitter accounts with an ancient Greek statue for a profile picture who tweets fascist dogwhistles, but the Greek statue is polychrome and instead of fascist dogwhistles I tweet about how we should RETVRN to ancient traditions that were inexplicably weird and don’t neatly analogize onto modern fault lines in the culture war
There's posts like this on Twitter and Tumblr a lot. It's common, wanting to explain Shifting Baseline Syndrome (how we forget what the world used to look like over successive generations). The problem is the pretense, it's not a common, let alone universal human experience.
The way to know is there were tribes living in the Americas in 1620. They didn't forget, they were attacked and systematically erased from the record.
One might be tempted to respond, "but the post expressly says 'European settlers' arrived..." Yes it does, but the map it's using (and the tweet itself) also talk about virgin forest. It can't be virgin if there's giant cities in them. Tens of thousands of Natives, in some cases, for hundreds of years. Cities like -Etzanoa, -Cahokia, -Coosa, -Great Mound, -Poverty Point, -Lawunkhannek...
They had tons of tech to avoid destroying their surroundings: terra preta, companion planting, contour farming... Literally millions of humans lived in the regions that forest map shows as 'pristine' and they were regularly engaging in agriculture. In fact that's what anthropologists call it, "The Pristine Wilderness Myth". Historians call it "Terra Incognita" / "Tabula Rasa". It's so common there's multiple versions of it depending on which part one discusses.
This is exactly what happens when they do those "Population of the Americas" maps. If pressed they will genuinely say they just guessed Native populations based on their own entirely uninformed intuition. Like this guy, who had to admit he simply had no idea so he left it blank, "empty":
Notice further no slaves were included either. Who are "people" to this guy? And the weird little pocket of people in what's now California, but in 1849 before CA was a state. That's because the census guessed how many US citizens moved there for the gold rush. An assumption, based on an assumption, based on an estimate.
This is where the lie "humans are the virus" originates. This is where the primitivists, and their false assertions about returning to cave-men status will restore the balance, comes from. Thousands of cultures worked just fine with the environment that surrounds them.
This is a narrative that won't just die it must be killed. Other cultures were not failed attempts at being Industrial England. Many of them were doing quite well. Western Europe is not all humanity. In fact, indigenous populations treated forests themselves as a cultivar, in a way. They witnessed the power of an uncontrolled fire so they developed traditions that used smaller controlled burns to alleviate the pressure. This is not obscure information:
Indigenous people routinely burned land to drive prey, clear underbrush and provide pastures.
What reinforces the premise of Noble Savages, however, is the repeated use of "virgin forest" and "wild spaces". Even a follow-up thread where HogGroomer claims there's still hope diffuses Landback as the indigenous populations somehow needing "direction". Directed by whomst? Them what did the destroying?
And it's good to recognize that sort of language when you come across it because it's used to cover up some much more heinous nonsense. See, if one follows through the links HogGroomer provided whoa doggies does it go off the rails. The subtext in the tweets just becomes text. "Remove the humans." Who's gonna run that program? How'd it go last time? Nope. No sir.
This isn't about having an 'ecological mind', it's about not seeing the entire planet as a buffet to consume, leaving empty pans and dirty plates for "the staff" to clean. Which is ultimately what "let the earth heal" means: we fucked up, you fix it. And not for nothing, it isn't the European Governments protecting the Amazon Rainforest, and it sure as hell isn't the self appointed eco-friendly companies, it's the people who live there doing it.
How did a huge island of green in the Amazon become a fortress against ranchers, loggers, and miners? Answer: indigenous tribes.
Cultures with markets that worship The New are destined to erase their own past constantly. The result is memories even shorter than having short lifespans could justify. "Tech" alone, cannot save us, "progress" cannot save us, because they are not independent creatures they are things we do. If we are selfish, our technology will be selfish. If we are destructive, our progress will destroy.
And as a parting shot: what is with the use of the term "Virgin Forest" as a synonym for "untouched" or "as should be"?! Like, can we not. In the year of our cat meme two-thousand and twenty-three, "virginity" needs to stop being a positive value judgement, and we definitely need to stop talking about land and people like they come in clean and unclean versions based on their having not met us personally yet. It's the ghost of the days of women and children being commodities, being property, and it's gross. Stop it.
