Chapter 24, Ecology of Eden (class reading 3)

One quote that I really liked from this chapter is: "the Indians had no history, or if they did it was 'natural history.' Their skeletons and arrowheads belonged in the same museum as the taxidermied buffalo." This surprised me because I have never thought about this before. I definitely noticed that this is true, that Native American history artifacts in natural history museums, but it never seemed out of place to me. I guess this is because this notion has become commonplace in the history we tell. It's incredible how present these prejudiced and what turned out to be false views of the Native Americans are today.
The section "Gardening the Amazon" explains a misconception about the "slash and burn" technique in agriculture. I learned about the Kayapo in an anthropology class, and reading this section reminded me of what I thought of then. Wilderness and nature is partly a cultural construct because we think of a certain thing, a certain landscape, when we think of "wilderness." The way we think of wilderness can be useful to protect certain pieces of nature, but not all things in nature. It's similar to how people feel about killing certain animals. In the United States, we can't imagine someone killing a dog or cat because we keep them as pets, and it's generally not something we do in our culture. However, pigeons and other birds tat can be found in a city are such a nuisance that we don't care much about what happens to them. In big cities like Chicago, traffic signals, buildings signs, sometimes even rooftops have spikes sticking out to keep birds from landing on them. I'm not saying either of these practices should be changed, though I don't like the idea of injuring a bird just because we don't like them. My point is that culture and society have a lot to do with how we perceive nature, and what we perceive as useful or acceptable practices.