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341 C HA PT E R T E N The Great Basin Today and Tomorrow It has become routine to end regional natural histories of the Americas with discussions of all the disastrous things that have happened since the arrival of Europeans, and of the dire consequences that will emerge if we do not change our ways. The warnings are warranted. The nature of the human world is driven, for good and bad, by population increase. Technological advances and environmental degradation follow as a result. The technological advances follow in part from the greater number of innovators found in larger populations. They also follow from the increasing specialization that is made possible by greater numbers of people working in a context in which knowledge has been made rapidly cumulative by the printing press. Environmental degradation follows both from the technological advances and from the sheer impact that so many people have on the landscape. It is also true, however, that many of the concerns expressed by those worried about the fate of natural landscapes in the Americas tend to forget that it is not always easy to know what a “natural” landscape really is. Many Americans—natural history writers included—have a highly romanticized view of Native Americans, one in which Indians are presumed to have lived in peace and harmony with the natural world. In this view, North America prior to the arrival of Europeans was pristine; North America after that arrival, increasingly despoiled. That view is wrong in many ways. The prehistoric peoples of the Americas are, after all, people, and had significant impact on their environment. The hunters and gatherers of the Great Basin were no exception. As I mention in Chapter 2, a communal pronghorn hunt in a Great Basin valley might not be repeated for a decade, since it took that long for the animals to recover. In many places, people set the landscape on fire to increase the efficiency of hunting and the productivity of seed plants. In the White Mountains, the importance of mountain sheep in the diet fell steadily from the earliest occupations some 4,500 years ago to the latest use of the small villages that I describe in chapter 9. This steady decrease cannot be explained by climate change but instead appears to reflect the impact of human hunting on local mountain sheep populations. The landscape that Europeans encountered when they first arrived in the Great Basin was not pristine, if by “pristine” we mean “devoid of significant human influence.” Nonetheless, when Europeans arrived in the Great Basin, a vast portion of this region would have met the definition of wilderness provided in the Wilderness Protection Act of 1964, as an area that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature.” That, of course, was not to last long. Some of the subsequent impact is obvious . Elko, Reno, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City provide examples ; the Newlands Project in the Truckee and Carson river basins and the diversion of the waters of Mono Lake and Owens Valley are others. Indeed, if the Southern Nevada Water Authority has its way and gains permission to draw down groundwater from a broad swath of Nevada, from Railroad Valley on the east to Snake Valley on the west, we might quickly learn what a severe version of middle Holocene aridity looks like. In comparison to these proposals , the damage done to Owens Valley by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power may come to look benign. However, many changes have occurred in Great Basin ecosystems as a result of the European arrival that are far less evident than these. I give one example here, chosen for the simplicity of its complexity. Deer, Cougars, Porcupines, and Cattle Early European explorers and settlers routinely noted the scarcity of deer across much of the Great Basin. As James Moffit (1934:53) noted for the area surrounding Lower 342 CONCLUSIONS were rarely taken prehistorically in any number. The implication is that these animals were uncommon long before the European arrival and that their rarity has little or nothing to do with Native American hunting. As a result, their increase in historic times can have nothing to do with the removal of Native American hunting pressure. It is far more likely that the modern abundance of these animals in the Great Basin has resulted from complex interactions between plants, domestic livestock, and the deer themselves. Berger and Wehausen, among others, note that the...

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