 One book that had an influence on my thinking is called Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson that says that this pristine wilderness that the Europeans supposedly discovered where the native people were just kind of living off the land, this is a myth. In fact, the land was formed through a long relationship between the indigenous people and the places where they lived that altered the environment in ways that increased its production of food and its suitability for humans to live there. So in California, a lot of our work was in California studying the oak savannas that were maintained through controlled burning and management of water and all kinds of other things that allowed this cornucopia of wild, so-called wild foods to be sustained, to be produced and sustained. So the division between hunting and gathering on the one hand and agriculture on the other hand is not so clear cut as one might think. And in fact, this continent wasn't really a wilderness in the sense of being untouched by human beings as if these people hadn't the wits to co-evolve with their environment. That said, there's another ideology that upholds indigenous people as being uniformly perfect in their sustainable practices. And there's questions about that. I've read historical accounts from native people in Eastern United States talking about the disappearing game because they're hunting it too much and population growth and so forth. And really, even in North America, also in South America, all over the world, hunting and gathering societies eventually gave way to agricultural societies which committed the same kinds of ecocide in most places on earth. So it happened in North and South America as well. So I don't wanna idealize indigenous people. However, I think that we have a tremendous amount to learn from their deep close relationship to nature, the things that they were able to see and recognize are sometimes at a level far beyond what science can see and recognize. And we can respect that knowledge and gain from it and allow it to inform our practices without having to idealize it.