11 ms·
I've been thinking a bit about this lately. I've read estimates of ~30 million Bison before European settlement, ~35 million pronghorn, and ~3 trillion oysters
by mhardcastle 4y ago
I've been thinking a bit about this lately.
I've read estimates of ~30 million Bison before European settlement, ~35 million pronghorn, and ~3 trillion oysters in beds on the east coast, in addition to all of the other natural abundance. It's amazing to think of what nature provides - supplemented with chicken and pork, it seems those wild populations would be relatively close sustaining modern levels of meat-eating on their own.
Edited to add some math. TL:DR is that bison alone couldn't get to US beef consumption. Wikipedia says 60 million Bison, so let's use that.
Say you can take a managed 10% of Bison a year on average and sustain a population. Median weight seems to be about 1,600 lbs for males and 1,000 lbs for females, average of 1,300 (assuming harvest is even, but management for population might mean taking more males). Carcass weight to meat seems to be about 57% in cows, so that's:
60 million individuals * 10% harvest * 1,300 lbs each * 57% of standing weight in meat = 2.2 billion pounds, or 13.4 pounds per person. Average beef intake per person in the US is around 60 lbs, so this has a decent distance to go - assuming annual harvest of 20% would only get you about half-way there, and there's still Canada to account for (since a lot of bison range is there). I doubt elk, pronghorn, and deer could bridge that gap as the individuals (sans elk) are much smaller.
- pard68 4y agoI live in a national forest in the Ozarks. I read about the trappers and explorers and weep, thinking what I have missed by being born two hundred years too late.
- hammock 4y agoYou could pull fish out of the water with your bare hands
- chadlavi 4y agoOn the other hand, you're a lot less likely to die of a minor cut or tooth ache
- zip1234 4y agoJust curious--what did your national forest look like 200 years ago? In many cases, we are on 2nd or 3rd growth forests in the eastern part of the US, with much of it clear cut multiple times.
- pard68 4y agoLikely all but untouched. 200 years ago Missouri was still wild. Where my land is has been clear cut. But about 10 miles up the road is a portion of the forest that they claim has never been logged. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Wilderness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Wilderness
- technothrasher 4y agoThere are approximately 90 million heads of domestic cattle in the US. That right there will tell you that wild bison herds wouldn't even be close to enough to replace modern beef production, even at 60 million.
- chrisco255 4y agoNo one really knows how many bison there were in pre-Columbian times. 50% more than estimated, is not a big difference, especially since our confidence intervals are very, very wide about historical numbers. That being said, there's no going back to the 1400s. Farming and ranching are here to stay.
- maherbeg 4y agoA lot of these are dairy cows too which changes the calculation
- stevenwoo 4y agoAlmost all dairy cows get turned into meat for humans after their milk production drops.
- philwelch 4y agoMost food sources are more efficiently produced through deliberate agriculture rather than just letting them grow wild.
- frankfrankfrank 4y agoThere are arguments for the fact that the large bison populations you are referring to are actually an anomaly due to the diseases that decimated the pre-Columbus people, leading to an explosion of the bison population. There was a huge collapse of the population between first contact with hispanics and the roughly 100 year later attempts at second contacts, where the explorers relying on Spanish descriptions that ended up being called lies, because the second explorers could not find any of the people described by the Spanish. The assumption for which there is increasing evidence is that as the existing human populations that were the top predator of bison collapsed, there was no other large natural predatory species to take their place after humans had also pressured the natural predatory species like bears and wolves.
- eru 4y agoI believe your story about population collapse. But what I find confusing: if the bison population had time to explode, why didn't bears and wolves also explode in number?
- jjtheblunt 4y agoAnd pumas
- Maursault 4y agoWhich? Cougars or Mountain Lions?
- jjtheblunt 4y agocougar = mountain lion = puma = catamount = puma concolor, in north american english anyway
- Maursault 4y agoThat's just crazy. What other large cat has more than one name in English? This one has... 5?!
- jononomo 4y agoIn my view, we should use nuclear power to desalinate seawater at scale, turn the Sahara Desert into a massive prairie, and raise a billion cattle there to help feed the world. We really need to move away from agriculture for environmental reasons, and red meat is also the most nutritious food humans can consume. We should also do the same thing in the Australian desert.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI read an article in a pop-sci magazine making the case that the jungles in South America would basically collapse if one removed Sahara Desert. (Something about the sand storms.)
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoOr let the Guarani and other natives have their way. Which in pre-columbian times was nomadic, treading very lightly from one place to another, making small amounts of 'terra preta' while camping in one place for a short while.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoNASA Satellite Reveals How Much Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...
- myshpa 4y agoI seriously doubt that amazonian rainforest would die off without saharan dust. Trees & mycorhizae are very capable of extracting the needed nutrients from below.
- actionfromafar 4y agoThat NASA link said "The phosphorus that reaches Amazon soils from Saharan dust, an estimated 22,000 tons per year, is about the same amount as that lost from rain and flooding"
- BurningFrog 4y agoThat might be true in isolation, but I think it would mean losing 90+% of the wheat, corn, etc farming that uses that land now.
- Spooky23 4y agoLack of groundwater will take care of that soon enough.
- timeon 4y agoI understand wheat but is corn really important to farm?
- joeblubaugh 4y agoYes? Millions of people eat it, as do many of the meat animals you eat
- sethammons 4y agoWatch the documentary King Corn. Corn is in everything. They have lobbied it to be in our food, animal food, packaging, ethanol gas, batteries, plastics, crayons, whiskey, glue, and cough drops, hygiene products, matchsticks, and many medications and vitamins.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI like the theory that this is because Iowa is the most important state in the presidential primaries. Too cute a theory to be completely true, but I don't think it's completely untrue either.
- briga 4y agoThis isn't even considering the fact that most of the prime bison territory is now farm or ranch land. So unless you're replacing cattle farms with bison farms there's simply not enough room to sustain the sorts of populations that used to exist, with the possible exception being the huge swaths boreal forest of Canada. And it's debatable whether doing such a thing on a large scale even makes sense in the first place, because if you're just keeping the bison locked up in corrals they're probably going to be just as environmentally destructive as regular cattle.
- philwelch 4y agoIt just sounds to me like North America is well-suited to supporting large bovine populations, whether that's in the form of domesticated cattle or wild bison.
- moloch-hai 4y agoCattle would not thrive, but bison, horses, and camels did.
- thingsilearned 4y ago+1. Historically we’ve had to really bring order to nature in order to efficiently make food. In the future there’s an opportunity (with drones, ai, robots, etc) to instead harvest from the wild. It’d never be near as efficient but would definitely keep a balance. This is a great group already doing this with bison, and he’s got a great book as well https://wildideabuffalo.com/pages/regenerative-ranching https://wildideabuffalo.com/pages/regenerative-ranching
- ethbr0 4y agoThe idea of a nature preserve with automated killer robots is pretty ethically dystopian. Parent bison: "And then occasionally, son, a flying death machine comes and murders one of us."
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoBut it's a reoccuring theme in so many science fiction, no matter if print, comic, movie etc. since that genre exists. Masses of people living in walled cities, while the wild outsides are forbidden for the commoner, with variations like only the elites are allowed to go/hunt there, or more recently that autonomous robot gardener/harvester/hunter/killer thing.
- philwelch 4y agoThis is how every herbivore lives in the wild: they do their thing until they are eventually murdered for their meat by predatory death machines. It's just that most of the predatory death machines are falcons or owls or wolves or lions or tigers or bears (oh my!)
- kfarr 4y agoThat quote describes the entire life of a field mouse. Nature is dystopian
- ethbr0 4y agoThe difference is that the predator of the field mouse is a sentient being, killing for its own survival. In the hypothetical scenario, the predator would be an automaton, killing for our pleasure.
- drewcoo 4y ago> It's amazing to think of what nature provides Especially if the European first contact with their diseases kill off almost all the native population of humans, allowing "nature" to recover from all the human foibles for sometimes 500 years before we were there and recording information (again). The amount of bison (and yes, pronghorns) killed for the railroads was ridiculous. No, people did not "consume" all of them. Most were left to rot, and pushed off rail lines if needed. This is not some kind of retroactive conspiracy theory. We killed them willy-nilly. Because we're human.
- katbyte 4y agoAlso on purpose to remove a food source from native Americans https://youtu.be/zqXwiljEKVM https://youtu.be/zqXwiljEKVM (talks about buffalo but same deal)
- moloch-hai 4y agoNot because we are human. Because we are invaders displacing natives. It was policy to shoot bison from trains and leave them to rot, to depopulate the plains. It worked.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoNative Americans didn’t kill them so willy-nilly and are also humans, so I wouldn’t necessarily accept this as human nature
- cowmoo728 4y agoAren't bison relatively migratory animals? Western notions of private property and land are fundamentally incompatible with 1000kg animals that auction for $1000 and roam 1000km away throughout the season. To get the ecological benefits of bringing back a migratory bison herd they would have to be allowed free passage through thousands of private ranches and farms. It's a logistical and legal nightmare.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThere are bisons living in captivity. For example https://sfrecpark.org/facilities/facility/details/Bison-Paddock-224 https://sfrecpark.org/facilities/facility/details/Bison-Padd...
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThe problem is that due to a major fuckup many of the remaining bisons have brucellosis. Brucellosis causes abortion in pregnant cattle. https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/brucellosis.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/brucellosis.htm
- micromacrofoot 4y agoalso consider that average beef consumption in the US is much too high - cutting it in half would be great progress