The old man.

Indiana, like its adjoining neighbors, consumed 20 million acres of forestland before 1870 with only axes, grubbing hoes, horses, and oxen. Men carried the fallen trees on handspikes or rolled them into heaps in ravines, where they were set ablaze. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of fires burned night and day for months on end, turning the skies sallow. Before the conflagration, these forests had provided an unsurpassed hunting area that had drawn the Iroquois south and eastern villagers like the Delaware and Abenaki west to the Ohio River valley. The original 20 million acres of primeval forest that once covered Indiana was nearly enough to encircle the globe one and a quarter times in a mile-wide band. Today, scarcely enough old-growth forest remains to cover the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at the same one- mile width. Early Anglo-Americans did to this region what is presently occurring in the tropical forests of Brazil, Borneo, Sumatra, New Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”