. Had the world remained Pagan, we wouldn't have the ecology problems we are having now.
Hmmm.... well, I think there's some truth in what you say Vereya, but I don't think it's as simple as that either. North American aboriginals were not, for instance, the almost instinctive ecologists popular mythology makes them out to be, there's plenty of evidence of extraordinary wastefulness in some of their activities. The plains Indians used to stampede herds of bison over cliffs, for instance, killing and maiming far more animals than they could use before the meat rotted. They didn't leave much of an ecological footprint only because there were too few of them and they didn't have a technology that would enable them to do the permanent damage we can do now. There's also evidence that many groups of them died out because they outstripped the carrying capacity of their environment. Much of this is documented in a very interesting book called
1491, a survey of what North and South America were like before their discovery by Europeans. And there's evidence from all over the world of similar things. Much of what used to be called the Fertile Crescent, around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is now thought to be desert because of human activities. Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book called
Collapse, about how human societies self-destruct by damaging the ecology that sustains them. Paganism's no guarantee of environmental sensitivity.
