Scott A. Elias

The title is a slight misnomer; author Scott Elias, a Quaternary insect specialist, actually discusses the period just after the last glacial advance: the “recovery” from the ice age, if you will. The national parks discussed are Canyonlands, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Big Bend.


It’s almost as if Elias and various “climate change” and “preservation” activists live on different planets. In a sense, they do; Elias on the actual Earth and the others on a sort of imaginary Garden of Eden. Using evidence from lake sediment, cave and rockshelter deposits, and especially packrat middens, Elias reconstructs the ecological and climate history of the southwest.


The results would probably come as a considerable surprise to a lot of environmentalists with no sense of Earth history. The Southwestern climate has been highly variable over the last 10 ky, with periods colder and damper than today and periods warmer and dryer. There’s no evidence for any sort of “climax ecosystem”; in fact there’s no evidence for any “ecosystem” at all - species interchange and associate without any particular pattern. In many cases, insect and plant species are found in “inappropriate” environments; i.e., in climatic or altitude zones they would not be found in today (of course, this tacitly assumes that the modern ecological zones are the “appropriate” ones. Elias also supports the Clovis overkill theory for megafauna extinction, commenting that the same animals had survived as many as 19 glacial cycles without extinction.


There are some intriguing mysteries: how did flightless, blind cave beetles now only known from Carlsbad Caverns turn up in packrat middens in Big Bend? Why did mammoths choose a particular rockshelter to use as a bathroom - elephants are pretty intelligent, but modern ones don’t show much inclination for toilet training.


Elias does enthusiastically support care and protection of the National Parks, but not for pseudoreligious environmentalist reasons. Interestingly, he doesn’t point out a logical conclusion from the rest of his work - change in the National Parks is to be expected, and it’s not necessarily “unnatural”. Recommended highly.… (plus d'informations)