as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years Can we please stop dehumanizing indigenous peoples by p

as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years Can we please stop dehumanizing indigenous peoples by pretending they have a mystical bond to the environment? Western culture is not a prerequisite for anthropological environmental devastation. Indigenous North Americans wiped out native woolly mammoths, horses, cave bears, lions, and cheetahs. Easter Islanders chopped down almost every single tree on the island, driving every native tree species extinct along with the animals who depended on them, ruining the soil quality, and devastating the ecosystem. The Mayans wiped themselves out by using slash and burn farming to bloat their population, which led to a huge drought that killed a huge fraction of biological diversity in the region. The Nazca systematically deforested large pieces of Peru and collapsed when those trees no longer held back the desert. Their land is still incredibly arid a thousand years later. Aboriginal Australians, the Anasazi, countless other indigenous peoples have utterly devastated their environment. It is humans who are dangerous. We have to learn to be better than anyone who came before.