Extractos:
So many ecologists set the historical baseline as the condition of ecosystems before Europeans arrived. Why? The fact is that primitive peoples killed off the largest species in North and South America, Australia and Pacific Islands thousands of years ago. For example, after people showed up about 14,000 years ago, North America lost 60 or so species of tasty mammals that weighed over 100 pounds, including giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, camels, and glyptodonts.
In fact, Marris reports that there is precious little scientific support for the ideology that pristine nature is somehow “better” than the mélange that humanity has created by moving species around the globe. For example, she visits Hawaii where half of the plant species now living on the islands are non-native. One brave younger ecologist, Joe Mascaro, studies novel ecosystems that are developing on Hawaii that incorporate both native and non-native species. Among other things, Mascaro “found that the novel forests, on average, had just as many species as native forests” and “that in many measures of forest productivity, such as nutrient cycling and biomass, novel forests matched or outproduced the native forests.”
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