This may be a long post.
Smurf said:
Please don't present your opinion as fact. There are many theories on the subject.
You got me there, yes it has not been proven, it is only one of the three major theories. Like Global Warming.
Townsend said:
How much methane gas is put into the air by commercial farms?
Decomposition of organic wastes from natural sources, mostly marshes adds up to 23%.
From mineral fuel extraction: 20%
From digestion by animals: 17%
From bacteria on rice fields: 12%
During the past 200 years, the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere doubled, passing from 0.8 to 1.7 ppm.
[PLAIN]http://www.niwa.cri.nz/pubs/wa/09-1/ice-graph.jpg
At exhibit one, I show a rather interesting graph, taken from the New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, showing the strong correlation between CO
2 and CH
4 atmospheric concentrations, and solar insolation, over the last 400,000 years derived from Antarctic ice cores from Lake Vostok. "The parallel changes in CO2 and CH4 are believed to have caused about half the amplitude of the temperature changes, with the other half probably due to changes in solar insolation."
Echo 6 Sierra said:
This is the first I've heard of this. I would like to know more about it. Could you point me to a reference?
Gladly. I didn't either, and found it rather interesting.
From: The Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park website (http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ZooGoer/2002/6/firetime.cfm )
The control of fire, anthropologists surmise, likely hastened human evolution and dispersal. In North America, indigenous tribes revered this life-force as “our Grandfather Fire.” Native Americans ignited flames to flush bears from dens; to thin out forests in order to better spot deer; to drive away mosquitoes and bees; to stimulate grassland growth; to communicate with friends; to encircle enemies. So crucial was fire that the Narragansett Indians assumed the English had come to America in search of firewood.
Thanks in part to Native Americans using fire to turn forests into grassland, bison were able to expand their range as far east as Massachusetts by the 17th century. Following the forced removal of Native Americans from much of the continent by European colonists and, later, by the U.S. government, prairie gave way again to pine forests in the South, to pinyon and juniper forests in the Southwest, and to sagebrush in the Great Basin. “The transformation of grasslands, prairies, and savannahs to forests is one of the most fundamental and widespread outcomes of European colonization,” writes Stephen Pyne in Fire in America.
Native Americans passed on many of their forest-burning techniques to white farmers.
From
Science magazine (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/287/5453/573?rbfvrToken=d966391bdd955642f5e79addb1fa062d1fa34276):
As scores of projects to save North American forests get under way, new data on how those forests looked centuries ago are fueling a debate on what ecologists should aim for when restoring ailing ecosystems. In trying to reconstruct how ecosystems looked centuries ago, researchers hope to offer a handle on how much change is natural and how much is caused by human activity. Further dogging the debate is the issue of whether restoring a forest to its pre-European settlement state is even a legitimate goal, considering that Native Americans were shaping the land long before European settlers arrived.
From the Forestry Research Community in Corvallis (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/coops/ama/ncama/guidch2.htm)
How much did Native American burning contribute to past wildfires? Sauter and Johnson (1974) noted that large areas of brush and small trees were burned away each year by local tribes to clear the land for easier hunting and travel. This cleared land also provided new browse each spring to attract deer and elk.
Townsend said:
How much habitat is used for growing crops that could be used support
wildlife?
On the flip side, as you say, tell me how much habitat for wildlife is NOT used for crops?
The CIA puts it at about 99% actually. (http://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/xx.html)
arable land: 10.73%
permanent crops: 1%
other: 88.27% (2001)
That's quite a bit, I don't think animals need much more. And that's just land, Earth's seven oceans are much more highly populated than the land is, and you can't grow crops over the oceans very well can you?
On the flip side, tell me what negative impact is there on the environment from hunters and fisherman who actually care about wildlife
and the environment?
I think everyone cares about the environment, simply because we live in it. Some people care for it on a higher level. The environment is the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors that act upon an organism and all organisms, and ultimately determines its form and survival. We owe our lives to the environment, we came from it, and will recede into it.
On the flip side, tell me what negative impact is there on the environment from hunters and fisherman who actually care about wildlife
and the environment?
To look at it a different way, the hunters and fisherman happen to change the environment, which is apparently "bad," at least by your standards. They kill things, they reap, and I guess humankind can never live successfully if they still live to reap...
I know that hunts and fishes takes great care to obey laws
Sorry to ruin your fantasy world, but here in Guam, and many many other places worldwide, some participate in various illegal fishing techniques. The first one that comes to mind is one that was featured in the popular movie
Crocodile Dundee II, where the protagonist starts off the movie by throwing a stick of dynamite into the water, and a load of fish falls into his boat (if my memory isn't failing me).
Actually it is a very effective way of fishing, but it is outlawed pretty much everywhere in Western civilization for obvious reasons.
Another illegal fishing practice that is more common, is to add a cyanide solution into the sea-water, and scoop up the deceased, floating fish.
and buys expensive licenses that are used to maintain wildlife habitat it would seem to me that at least the law abiding hunters only do good for nature and wildlife.
Yellowstone Park, the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world, was called a National Park in 1872, by Ulysses Grant. No one had ever tried to preserve wilderness before, they assumed it would be much easier than it proved to be.
When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game. There were thousands of elk, buffalo, black bear, deer, mountain lions, grizzlies, coyotes, wolves, and bighorn sheep. By that time there were rules in place to keep things the way they were. The Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole purpose was the maintain the park in its original condition.
Within 10 years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever. The reason for this was because of the Park rangers, they were supposed to be keeping the park in pristine condition, and had taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of preserving the park.
The Park Service mistankenly believed that elk were becoming extinct, they tried to increase the elk herds within the park by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park, of course not intending to kill all of them. They also prohibited local Native Americans from hunting there, even though Yellowstone was a traditional hunting ground.
Totally protected now, the elk herd population exploded and they ate so much of certain trees and grasses, that the ecology of the park began to change. The elk ate defoliated trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers vanished. That was when manages found out that beavers were vital to the overall management of the region. When the beavers vanished, meadows dried up, trout and otter populations receded, soil erosion increased, park ecology changed even further.
By the 1920s, it was clear there were way too many elk, os the rangers shot them by the thousands. The change in plant ecology seemed permanent; the old mix of trees and grasses did not return.
It also became clear that Native American hunters had exerted a valueable ecological influence on the park lands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison. This recognition came as a part of a general understanding that the Native Americans strongly shaped the untouched wilderness white men thought they saw.
North American humans had exerted a huge influencee on the environment for thousands of years, by burning palins grasses, modifying forests, thinning out specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction - capitulation to a superior species.
The rule forbidding Native Americans from hunting was seen as a mistake, but it was just one of many that continued to be made by the Park Service. Grizzlies were protected, then killed off, Wolves were killed off, then brought back. Radio collars research was halted, then resumed. Fire prevention policies were instituted, with no understanding of the regenerative effects of fire. When the policy was reversed, thousands of acres were burned so hotly to the ground that it was sterilized, and forests did not grow back without reseeding. Rainbow trout were introduced in the 70s, that species killed off the native cutthroat species. And on and on and on and on.
It is a history of ignorant, incompetent, intrusive interveintion, followed by disastrous attempts to repair, followed by attempts to repair damage caused by repairs. Just as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic waste dump, but in these ones there are no evil awful big corporations, or fossil fuel economy to blame. These are disasters caused by environmentalists, the very people who wanted to protect the environement, who made one mistake after another.
Passive protection, leaving things alone, doesn't preserve the status quo within a wilderness any more than it does in your backyard. The world is alive, things are constantly in flux. Species are winning, losing, rising, falling, exploding, bottlenecking, taking over, being pushed back. Merely leaving it alone doesn't put it in a state of supsended animation. Its like locking your son or daughter in their bedroom and expecting them not to grow up.
Humans do care what happens to the environment in the future, and try hard. Humans just don't know what they are doing. And it keeps happening, banning DDT, Solar panels, abolishing CFCs.
Why are we interferring with the course of nature? Why do some try to keep it the way it is? Why do some blame humans for changing it? It will change for better or for worse, if we are here are not here. If humans were in this state of development before the last ice age, we would blame each other for causing it.
that pisses me off to no end. What kind of heartless loathsome person would want to keep a chicken locked up in tiny cage during the chickens short forsaken life? Just plain pisses me off...
(What a dolt) 
and visited relatives (in rural Kentucky) who still lived on what they grew and canned and slaughtered and milked daily. Those animals had a great existence until their death, which was always mercifully quick.
