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capitalism is killing the planet (quokk.au)
submitted 2 days ago by Deceptichum@quokk.au to c/mop@quokk.au
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[-] hide@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 15 hours ago

For fifteen thousand years or more before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, passenger pigeons and Native Americans coexisted in the forests of what would later become the eastern part of the continental United States.

A 2017 study of passenger-pigeon DNA found that the passenger-pigeon population size was stable for 20,000 years prior to its 19th-century decline and subsequent extinction, while a 2016 study of ancient Native American DNA found that the Native American population went through a period of rapid expansion, increasing 60-fold, starting about 13–16 thousand years ago. If both of these studies are correct, then a great change in the size of the Native American population had no apparent impact on the size of the passenger-pigeon population. This suggests that the net effect of Native American activities on passenger-pigeon population size was neutral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

[-] cheesybuddha@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

And there are many more cows alive today than there have ever been before.

Cows are absolutely thriving.

Because they are useful to humans. Yet all the pigeons living in the rain forests that we cleared to give cows more room are dead.

[-] hide@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

The Native Americans ate the Passenger Pigeon.

The passenger pigeon was an important source of food for the people of North America.

Archaeological evidence supports the idea that Native Americans ate the pigeons frequently prior to colonization.

They were not killed by deforestation, the European colonists killed them all.

What may be the earliest account of Europeans hunting passenger pigeons dates to January 1565, when the French explorer René Laudonnière wrote of killing close to 10,000 of them around Fort Caroline in a matter of weeks.

After European colonization, the passenger pigeon was hunted with more intensive methods than the more sustainable methods practiced by the natives.

Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale.

By the 1870s, the decrease in birds was noticeable, especially after the last large-scale nestings and subsequent slaughters of millions of birds in 1874 and 1878.

this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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