Doctor Copper retweetledi
Before 1800, somewhere between thirty and sixty million bison moved across North America.
Add the elk. Add the deer and the pronghorn, tens of millions more. A whole continent carpeted in wild ruminants, every one of them belching methane into the same sky we are now told the cow is wrecking.
By the best estimates going, all those wild herds put out about as much methane as every cow, feedlot and dairy in America does today.
And here is the part the panic cannot survive. The land under them did not wear out. It became the richest farmland on earth. The deepest, blackest topsoil humans have ever dug was built up over thousands of years by exactly this: enormous herds grazing, trampling, dunging, moving on, and letting the grass come roaring back.
The herbivores did not wreck that country.
They are the reason it was worth ploughing at all.
Then we ploughed up what they built, and started blaming their replacements.
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