Even today’s depleted ecosystems will seem a cornucopia to biologically bereft future generations (Image: University of Chicago Press)
IMAGINE a land where forests are so rich in game they resemble zoo enclosures, and where, in season, rivers have more fish than water. Precise ecological and historical sleuthing by shows that such reports from colonists in North America, long dismissed as fantasy, were true: in the 16th century, the continent really was like this.
Modern disbelief that nature was far more abundant in the past, says Nicholls, comes not from ecological impossibility but from a mindset that insists…
