Review gives only one view
While I thought Dan Flores' thoughts in the lead article "Beyond Ecology: Restoring a Cultural Landscape" (HCN, 5/13/02: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape) were right on, I found it bothersome in Ed Marston's review of Flores' book, The Natural West, to see the wiping out of the large mammals from North America's grasslands attributed to "the forebears of the American Indians who crossed the Bering Strait 10,000 years ago."
This is only one interpretation of the record, and Iowa professors Henry Howe and Lynn Westley in their 1988 textbook, Ecological Relationship of Plants and Animals, state that Pleistocene hunters may have only exterminated some survivors of previous episodes of extinction. And that ample evidence of ecological disruption and the near absence of the remains of extinct species in the campfire sites of early hunters argue against a crucial human role. They feel the Asian immigrants witnessed the demise of the megafauna, but they probably did not cause it.
Linda Driskill
John Day, Oregon
