Except, of course, that it's completely natural and normal, or would be if we hadn't managed to impoverish most of the continent. Steve Nicholls, in this fine new book, "Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery," makes an essential point: We should measure the damage to our natural heritage less by counting extinctions, and more by understanding that it is abundance itself that has been drained away. Because there's absolutely nothing special about Alaska except that its remoteness means we haven't completely wrecked it (yet). The Charles River's delta was every bit as fecund. (Ever ask yourself why they call that subway station "Alewife?" Try to imagine a fish run on an Alaskan scale up into the creeks of Arlington.) So was Chesapeake Bay, and the mouth of the Hudson, and everyplace else - the forest that greeted the Pilgrims when they landed in Massachusetts was nearly as stunning as those remnant old-growth forests of the West.
It's hard to imagine, and it's painful to imagine - what did we do? But it's necessary to recall that abundance too, for it should spur us to save what we have left and to restore what we still can. In some cases, it's impossible. Take the sacred cod, for instance. Arriving off Newfoundland and the Grand Banks, John Cabot and his men found so many of the fish that they merely lowered baskets into the water then pulled them up, brimming with the catch. Some fish were five feet long, and weighed in around 200 pounds. And now, in Newfoundland, the government has shut down the fishery for nearly two decades, in the hope that they might someday recover from overfishing. If you can find a cod today, it weighs a twentieth of what it once might have.
