As I wrote recently, the ‘Good Old Days’ weren’t. Especially not where the environment was concerned. Contrary to the Rousseauian fantasies of the modern green-left, pretty much every society up until the modern industrialised West saw nature as a utilitarian source of food and fuel and other resources, at best. Many pre-industrial societies saw the natural world as inherently adversarial to humanity.
Especially wildlife. Especially the big ones. Large wild fauna either ate humans (wolves, lions, tigers, bears) or ate or destroyed the crops that kept humans alive.
The green-left, of course, have it back-arsewards. They fondly imagine that pre-industrial humans lived in ‘harmony’ with wildlife, while industrial humans are wildlife’s implacable enemy.
To an extent, this is somewhat true of early industrial society – though not entirely. Even such supposedly paradigmatic cases of Western industrialised slaughter, such as the buffalo of North America, ignores the fact that Native Americans joined in the free-for-all as soon as they got hold of guns, too. After all, these were a people who for millennia had hunted buffalo by driving entire herds over cliffs. According to Dr Andrew Isenberg, assistant professor of history at Princeton, before the 1840s, 60,000 Plains Indians were killing half a million bison a year for sustenance. After the robe trade began in the 1840s, that total went over 600,000 a year, “clearly into unsustainable range”.
While white hunters killed more buffalo overall, Indians concentrated their killing on buffalo cows, which had more tender meat and were much easier to skin and treat, which had a devastating affect on the animals’ ability to recover their population. At the same time, widespread drought at the end of the Little Ice Age sent the buffalo population crashing – right at the time Indians began ‘market hunting’.
Yet, almost as soon as industrial societies began to realise the impact they were having on wildlife, they began efforts to conserve suddenly vanishing species, as opposed to hunting them to extinction, as the Māori did to the moa or Aborigines did to Australia’s megafauna. Sometimes, they were too late: by the time, for instance, Australia realised that the thylacine (a marginal species even before the arrival of Europeans in Tasmania) was in trouble, its fate was already sealed.
Others, like the buffalo, have recovered thanks to intervention by wealthy, industrialised societies. Even today, around the world, endangered species are beginning to flourish. Blue whales have recovered from less than 2,000 in the 1960s, to as many as 25,000. In India, the Asiatic lion population is also increasing rapidly.
India’s Asiatic lion population has increased by over a third to 891, according to a five-yearly census released on Wednesday, boosting efforts to conserve the vulnerable species.
The Asiatic lion – which historically once roamed from the Middle East to India – is now reduced to an isolated population in a wildlife sanctuary in India’s western state of Gujarat.
“The Asiatic lion population, which was 304 in 1995, has increased steadily over the past three decades,” Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel told reporters. “In 2020 it was 674, which has now increased to 891.”
The majestic big cats are slightly smaller than their African cousins, and have a fold of skin along their bellies.
If nearly 900 lions doesn’t sound much, bear in mind that their numbers had crashed to just 20 lions in 1913. Even today, Asiatic lions are only found in Gujarat’s sprawling Gir wildlife sanctuary, where they prowl forests and open grasslands.
Priyavrat Gadhvi, a former member of the state wildlife board, said the increase indicated a successful conservation programme.
“Another important factor here is the political will and support of the local people living near the forest areas,” Gadhvi said. “They together have helped in conservation of the species.”
Once again, thanks to the sort of economic growth the green-left so despise. Put simply, India is becoming rich enough to care about its endangered wildlife and do something about it.
Polar bears, despite the unhinged propaganda of the climate cult, are also thriving.
2023 marked 50 years of international cooperation to protect polar bears across the Arctic. Those efforts have been a conservation success story: from a population estimated at about 12,000 bears in the late 1960s, numbers have almost tripled, to just over 32,000 in 2023.
You can almost hear the climate cult gnashing their collective teeth in impotent fury.
