It’s hard to recall now that this environmental beacon was once a battlefield and that there was a time when people did not understand the important … - Pete Dunne

In the free-for-all age before conservation, scientists were not the only ones “collecting” birds. Great numbers of birds were killed for sport and for market, and the myth of America’s inexhaustible resources sustained the slaughter past the point of reason.

They were sport gunners, too—a class spawned by wealth and leisure who carried their “sport” to tasteless Victorian excess. Both professional and the sport hunter approached the killing of “game” with zeal and the conviction that North America’s wildlife was infinite. The faith was ill-founded. Not only is a continent’s wildlife finite, but, to the shock of many, by the turn of the century much of it was gone and a lot more was going fast.

Seasickness all comes down to a complicated and not terribly well thought-out balancing mechanism call the inner ear. Without a shred of supporting evidence, I believe that inner ears were eleventh-hour modifications installed in the human unit just before the model was released. It was faulty and we’re still waiting for the recall. (Knees fall into this category, too.)