| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.1 | The History Cooperative

*Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature.* Edited by Charles E. Kay and Randy T. Simmons. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. xix + 342 pp. Illustrations, tables, charts, notes, bibliography. $45.00.)
The contributors to this collection participated in a course taught in 1998 by Charles Kay, who, with his co-editor, subsequently assembled this volume (which unfortunately lacks an index). The authors all dispute the idea that North American indigenous people were preservationists and complicate the notion that they were conservationists. With one exception, their conclusions parallel the ones I reached in The Ecological Indian (New York, 1999), despite the very different assumptions underlying our research. Many authors in this volume endorse a mechanical, acultural optimal foraging theory.	1
The exception is Paul Martin, who again—his has been a four-decade long effort—insists that man caused the Pleistocene extinctions and again fails to engage critically or at length with climatic evidence. In contrast, in a far-ranging contribution on the impact of Indians on fish, shellfish, and mammals in California, Jack Broughton more fully and satisfactorily considers such issues as the complicating nature of climatic and ecological change, the absence of archaeological evidence, and the timing of extinctions.	. . .

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