Gem of the ocean

By all reports, North America was a pretty nice place to live before 1492. People had figured out how to grow maize and beans and squash, and how to groom forests to make harvesting venison more convenient. They built mounds and buried golden plates for Joseph Smith to find. Then a (literal) plague of Europeans arrived. In a historical blink of an eye the forests where stripped away, the mountaintops removed, the rivers dammed, the grasslands desertified. A time-lapse movie of the last five centuries would look like maggots on roadkill. It’s a shame we can’t make immigration reform retroactive.