We recently read Luther Standing Bear’s essay “Nature,” at once a description of the Native American relationship to land and an indictment of the Westerner’s destructive behavior. Though written in the 1930s, his words nevertheless ring true today. Take this passage: “Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings…In sharing, in loving, one people naturally found a measure of the thing they sought; while, in fearing, the other found a need of conquest.”
Conquest and domination…
“Yes,” I found myself nodding in sad resignation. “That’s what we do.”
Of course, that’s not all we do. The cult of Nature-Worship is alive and well in this country, and many of us run for the mountains - or the beach, or the woods, or the lake- as often as our tight schedules will allow.
And I thought, how ironic, that we live such disastrously consumptive lives in our cities and suburbs- driving around in cars that belch out pollution and gobble up fossil fuels, for example- yet when on rare occasion (if we’re lucky) we do find time to go “out to nature,” we strive to embrace the ideals that Luther Standing Bear described. We step as if in a church, or in a gallery full of precious and fragile artifacts, careful to “take only pictures, leave nothing but footprints.” We hope to leave things exactly as we found them, at least in the few places we’ve chosen to preserve. After all, that’s what the Native Americans would have done, right?
Well, not exactly.
Over the summer I read a remarkable book called 1491. Written by Charles C. Mann, this book describes the people, civilizations and landscape of the Americas before European arrival. And while Mann shatters a number of myths about pre-Columbian life, the book hinges on two major premises;
The Americas were much more densely populated than we thought, and the native inhabitants had much more impact on the land than we ever imagined.
Experts quibble over exact numbers, but according to Mann between 90 and 112 million people lived in the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact, ten times as many as textbooks proclaim. The reason for the disparity? Until recently, archaeologists and anthropologists severely underestimated the utterly devastating effects of European diseases on native peoples. Successive waves of these diseases- smallpox among them- killed off 80 to 90% of the native populations. By the time European settlement really got going, the damage had already been done, which also helps explain why settlers so easily subdued the remnants of tribes that survived.
In order to grasp Mann’s second premise, I had to realize that most native peoples were primarily farmers who supplemented their diet with foraging and hunting, not the other way around. For example, tribes in what is now the eastern United States planted vast fields of maize around their villages (along with beans, squashes and native grasses), and wielded fire as a tool to manage the land. Not only did they use fire to stave off the encroaching forest, they also used it in the forest, maintaining open, “park-like” tracts that pleased newly-arrived Europeans. As tribes retreated before the wave of settlers, so too the memory of native-set fires faded, until people assumed that eastern forests were the way they were, naturally. They forgot that, in fact, people had helped shape them.
1491 unearths the richness and diversity of pre-Columbian societies, and inevitably reveals the full extent of the tragedy- what we’ve lost. But the book also points to an opportunity.
What if we were to take a new look at the original inhabitants of this land, and learn from them- not by seeing them as passive recipients of the land’s bounty, but as active managers of its resources?
You could argue that this is already happening. The Forest Service, for example, finally saw the folly of a century of fire suppression and now regularly conducts “controlled burns” to clean up cluttered forests and reduce the likelihood of devastating wildfires.
The newly emerging picture of native peoples should give us hope. At one time this land supported large, healthy and successful populations, who used resources without destroying them, not by cordoning some chunks of land off in preserves and radically exploiting others, but by acting as knowledgeable stewards.
Are pesticides racist?
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As a general rule, every environmental conflict has exploitation at its
center.
4 years ago
2 comments:
I agree with the fact that we are polluting our world by driving cars and doing other bad things. But our society has taught us that we need to live in our cities, and consume all of these things and work, and only go out into nature on occasion, as a special event. We have not shaped our lives around nature, and that is why maybe we abuse our environment, because it was never emphasized. To us, nature is a foreign world, one most of us could not live in on a day to day basis. If we were more closer to nature, and not material things, we would do things to save it. I don't think anybody would say they don't care about the environment, they do, but not to an extent that they would change their lifestyle.
Esther, I agree: we have unconsciously adopted the prevailing paradigm, which we're learning is deeply rooted in western, industrialized culture. The hopeful reality, though, is that paradigms can and do change--and along with that change come new behaviors and practices, new legislation and new ideas about how to live. As Michael Pollan has been arguing in 'Second Nature,' the choice between nature and culture is a false choice. The model of respectful stewardship, which Juliet has touched on in her blog, seems promising. And living in cities doesn't have to mean being environmentally irresponsible; you might take a look at www.sustainable-city.org, San Francisco's own 5-year plan for becoming sustainable.
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