Doing it All Wrong

When European people settled Ohio in the late 18th and early 19th century, they converted its landscape, minerals and fauna to shiny bits of money and luxury goods through farming and small industry. It seems pretty clear that the traditional methods of farming and food production are destructive compared to the natural systems that were present before european settlers arrived. The settler method of farming was basically like mining. It's extracting the value that was already present rather than maintaining the systems that were already extant. It's hard to imagine a way to organize human activity, today, that would be in accord with natural systems.