> It struck me at the time that maybe h/g's aren't
 > necessarily quite the stewards of nature we tend to think.

 >*IF* Aborigines
 > of the last couple of hundred years or so are representative of their
 > ancestral habits or of habits of paleo h/g's in general, then it's an
 > over-romanticization to believe that they (or anyone else) never took more
 > out of nature than what they could use.

it have never been a conscious choice of them to be in respect of nature's
overall well being .
they have been mostly in harmony with the natural regulating system that
allow earth as a living organism to maintain homeostasis. They did it
because of the limited technology they had .
yet there is many signs that the trend of developping more powerfull way of
doing things and the desastrous consequences the use of more and more
powerfull technology have on this homestasis , started way before the
neolithic revolution . yes paleo peoples allready compromised their well
being in the long run , neolithic revolution  might have become a necessity
because of that .

It took thousands of years to start to show some unbalances because with
stone tools upu are getting limited in your impact ,in comparaison with
modern tools

 >  While many cultures/societies are
 > noted for fervent worship of nature,  it doesn't necessarily follow that
 > they conserve it to the utmost.  I'm not making an indictment here, for it's
 > not really very logical to apply modern sensibilities to peoples of the
 > past.

they didn't have to develop a religion of gratefullness, because their
vulnerable situation led them to that feeling.

the scary thing for now is that we are still as inconscious of the impact in
the long run of our actions but the tools we have are so much more
impactfull than then .
also about modern sensibilities arise from the lack of connection with the
crude reality of the natural world , In some way we are becoming less aware
than ever .Basically we learned to live in our heads and are not in touch
with the necessity to feel all our feeling fully.
there is deep joy and deep sorrow in nature ,  now we try to go by evenly
okay .no wonder depression is so rampant .
jean-claude