Interesting Old photos of early orchid harvests

[AnonYMouse]

Originally Posted by NYCorchidman

That's how Bisons and beavers got all wiped out in North America (I mean they are still around but under strict protection). lol
People knew what they were doing. It was greed. taking much more than needed or only for the gain and fame. bad bad bad

I respectfully, partially disagree. Yes, greed is often a component but the issue of habitat loss is much more complicated and conflicted.

[NYCorchidman]

I was not talking about species going (near) extinct due to habitat loss necessarily.
"Collecting" taking, killing (or whatever fits) too many of anything usually is to blame for the start of the dwindling population of plants or animals.
And the reason for "over collecting" or sampling is usually clear and that's what I was talking about.

[Andrew]

Thanks for posting the additional photo's Steve. Given they're from the state archives, I assume these photo's were taken in Florida. Do you know if the plants were being harvested locally from Florida or whether they were on route from Central/South America.

[RosieC]

Thanks for posting really interesting.

[Stray59]

As far as the origin of the plants, I don't know that exactly, but the same collection of photos, the J. Kunkel Small collection, was pretty extensively from the Florida Everglades area so I am guessing that these were of harvesters in that area. There are other pics in the archive at the website I listed that show various scenes from the everglades at that time.
As far as the "collecting from the wild" aspect of it, I am not in agreement with such at all. But then I am looking through the eyes of a person living in 2013. At the time, I believe the people were exploiting the area, no doubt about it, but I am sure in their mind they were "just making a living" which was not easy during that time period. And if you look, the wagons and vehicles are hardly "high class vehicles" and they were probably paid very low wages for such. This is the bottom rung of the profit ladder I would guess. This in no way excuses them, but I don't know that we can see things in the way that they saw them at the time.
But have we learned? - the examples I used earlier, the rhino and elephant slaughters, along with many others, say "no" we haven't. But today we see the repercussions alittle better than they could so I think we have more responsibility to preserve, as we DO know better, but the killing and abuse of resources continue. I just read that the oil exploration companies are now focusing on some of the most unspoiled beauty in my home state that has been untouched for centuries. They see profit there and will go after it, regardless of the natural cypress stands that are thousands of years old and the fact that otherwise, that part of my state has gone unfunded and basically unnoticed until now. Today, such pillaging of natural resources IS driven by mostly by greed, and we DO know the results, so I think today's abuse is so much worse. This does not say "it's okay they did this" but again, I don't know that they were aware of the impact such harvests had on what they saw as "unlimited resources". Sad - but then it is my opinion only.
Glad some of you found these an interesting reference topic for discussion.
Steve

[AnonYMouse]

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a boom in amateur scientists without the rigor we expect in science today. Habitat destruction was acceptable if a species made it back to Europe or the US. Collecting specimens from the wild was as accepted then as ordering online is now. That is history.

Today, we are losing species at an alarming rate (for me at least), some that haven't even been discovered (if an orchid goes extinct in a forest and no one was there to discover it first, did it really exist?). I can't condemn the subsistence farmer for clear cutting an acre or a hundred of a South American forest so we can have quinoa pasta. I can just hope that some scholar went in first and catalogued the flora and fauna.

We called it progress 100 years ago here when we diverted rivers to green up a desert. $$ is still progress for depressed economies where crude oil can be squeezed out of the ground.

Sorry, don't mean to be preachy but I could go on and on and still be on both sides of the fence (not on it).

[Stray59]

AnonyMouse
I am like you - I see both pros and cons in such behavior. Years ago I was on a "save the Amazon Rainforest" march and my father listened to me going on and on about clear-cutting and such. Then he said "well, it's obvious you have never had a starving family to supply for. When it comes to saving plants and animals and watching your children starve to death, you would probably clear a few acres of your own." Since then, I have never forgotten that I have the privilege to go get a job pretty easily and make money to eat with, whereas someone in other countries may not. I do think that there is a lot to be gained by educating other nations in farming the existing indigenous plants and animals, preserving the forests and selling the produce to foreign markets in order to both survive and allow the area flora and fauna to survive with us. We can learn to live together, but it takes investments of time and education to make such arrangements work.
Thanks for the input everyone!
Steve