Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

Five-hundred years ago in North America, at about the time of Columbus' arrival, the flora and fauna was very different from today. Using reports from early European explorers and colonizers, Steve Nicholls has been able to piece together a picture of former wealth that is almost unbelievable in abundance. Maybe you've heard of stories of buffalo herds that stretch as far as the eye can see, pigeon flocks that blotted out the sun for hours, or cod fish schools so thick they stopped boats from sailing. These stories and many others Nicholls describes with cinematic quality. This vision of past natural abundance is both amazing and sad, sad because it's now mostly all gone. Whatever natural world that still exists in North America, show more seemingly rich and abundant, is really a mere scrap of a former paradise. Our perspective in time, limited by short lifespans, gives a false sense of abundance compared to actual historical levels. The United States once had great natural wealth, but most people don't even it's now mostly gone. Nicholls shows what is was once like. Paradise Found is a long book and I found it somewhat emotionally hard going at times, in the way holocaust books are difficult, but I am glad to have read it and now understand how things used to be. Ignorance of the past is a sort of false paradise.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2010 cc-by-nd show less