But generally speaking, indigenous peoples in say, the Americas, developed methods of agriculture and other forms of production that were more ecologically sustainable for their respective continent, than the European methods that settlers brought, and then revised to be more extractive.

The dust bowl, for example, didn't just happen. It was a product of Colonialism. A region which was relatively recently colonized, had its forests and grasslands ripped up, in favor of shallow rooted monocultures that couldn't sustain drought conditions.

There weren't dustbowls for the millennia prior to colonization, but a sudden shift in the mode of production, to a highly extractive one, artificially produced an ecological disaster

[–] Arctic_monkey@leminal.space 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean, the main sustainable feature of indigenous food systems is their small population size relative to the environment's carrying capacity. Trying to feed a large city on hunted game would be far less sustainable than modern agriculture...

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Sure, in some instances that was the case, but it's wrong to assume that indigenous north Americans didn't have cities or large scale agriculture.

Agricultural practices in Cahokia for instance, wasn't a European style monocrop. Rather, "Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture" ^(see link above)^

And Cahokia was, for a time, the political and economic center of much of indigenous north American, with the city itself being of comparable size to many European cities in the same period.