Green History

A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics

Derek Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415079242
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134896875
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Green History traces the development of ecological writing through history and forms a broad critical review of green ideas and movements reinforcing the importance of environmental concern and action in our own time. Animal rights, ecology as science, feminism, green fascism/socialism/anarchism, land reform, peaceful protest, industrialization, ancient ecology, evolution, grassroots activism, philosophical holism, recycling, Taoism, demographics, utopias, sustainability, spiritualism ...all these issues and many more are discussed. Authors include Alice Walker on massacre in the City of Brotherly Love, Aldous Huxley on progress, Lewis Mumford on the organic outlook, Engels on natural dialectics, Thoreau on the fontier life, the Shelleys on vegetarianism and playing God, Bacon on the New Atlantis, Hildegard of Bingen on green vigour, the unknown writer of the Bodhisattva and the Hungry Tigress and Plato on soil erosion. Each article is set within its historical and thematic context. A full introduction and a guide to further reading are also provided.

CHAPTER 1

Ancient wisdom

P.S. Martin, The discovery of America
M.Sahlins, The original affluent society
W.Pennington, The elm decline
J.G.Frazer, The worship of trees

Introduction

Those are the greater complexities. The eco-system of Salisbury Plain and in the Nile Valley was simpler and easier to manage. The ecology was balanced, the demands on natural resources minimal. There was an awareness, an awe and respect for the environment, and in those prehistoric times there was no doubt a sufficiently satisfying account of the place of man in the universe. In that ancient stable framework, man had achieved the essence of those goals that are now being set for civilization today.

(Hawkins 1977:264)

In the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau the Green movement has tended towards the latter’s faith in a state of primitive harmony and nobility rather than the former’s belief in brutality and misery. Greens and fellow travellers have used existing hunter-gatherer groups and their ancient ancestors as an example of ecological good conduct. Social and economic lessons are often also drawn. Conservatively inclined Greens argue that the natural social order of modern peoples, studied by anthropologists, provides a critique of the social practices of unnatural urban civilization. For Goldsmith et al. (1988) questions concerning the status of women, child-rearing, diet, economics and war can be answered best by looking at so-called ‘primitive’ societies. Such peoples lived in a state of nature and were therefore part of a natural order in a social sense. Such an essentialist view that uses biological ‘laws’ to determine social practice has long been a staple of conservative political philosophies. From the left, Marx and Engels, whilst celebrating industrial progress and scientific advance, noting the work of the anthropologist Lewis Morgan, looked back to a state of pre-agricultural ‘Primitive Communism’ (Krader 1979:153–71). Both eco-socialists and Green conservatives note that prehistoric and existing hunter-gather groups developed economies based on sharing rather than competitive exchange. A close knowledge of local eco-systems, many modern anthropologists have argued, allows such groups to live in a state of prosperity in the harshest of environments such as the Australian or Kalahari deserts. Finally eco-feminists have claimed that archaeological research reveals that such early societies were ecological, equal and matriarchal (Gimbutas 1991). Whether by matriarchal, Marxist or conservative constructions most members of the modern Green movement argue that socalled primitive peoples lived in balance with their environment.

A history of the origins of Green ideas can, it seems, be constructed solely from the retelling of attitudes towards this supposed ecological Eden. The Romantic poets, with their more than occasional ecological sensibilities, were morally encouraged by Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ at the turn of the nineteenth century. Ernest Thompson Seton’s (1860–1946) experiences amongst the Cree Blackfoot inspired him to set up the Woodcraft Folk, in its original guise a leftist-oriented Green movement in 1920 Britain, later a youth movement that exists to this day (Prynn 1983). Horkheimer and Adorno sought to inject Marxism with transcendentalist nature reverence during the 1940s, in an ambitious and contradictory project, with reference to primitive mythology. Goldsmith, who founded The Ecologist magazine and helped create the first modern ecology party, People in the early 1970s, was directly influenced by his own travels in Africa and the work of Jean Leidloff, who had lived with Amazonian natives before publishing her book The Continuum Concept (1975).

Paradoxically, Green politics often ignores its historical roots whilst perpetuating a myth of primitive and prehistoric pre-existence. On occasion it ignores concrete research in favour of comforting romantic myth. It has been known to make startling mistakes. The famous Chief Seattle speech, reprinted by the former UK Ecology Party, Friends of the Earth International, and used by the organisers of Earth Day in 1992, for example, has proved to be a fabrication. The speech, supposedly addressed to the US President in 1854, and including the statement that ‘The Earth is our mother…I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man, who shot them from a passing train’, was in fact written as part of a film script by a Texan author in 1971 (Lichfield 1992). Our first extract, by the US geo-scientist P.S.Martin, argues that Seattle’s ancestors, the Pleistocene inhabitants of North America, exterminated species of large mammals, including the mammoth and mastodon. Giant kill sites found since the publication of his original article show that buffalo and other large mammals were stampeded over cliffs, killing many more creatures than could possibly have been consumed. Some prehistoric peoples damaged their local eco-systems, and species were hunted to extinction, not just in the Americas but also in New Zealand, Madagascar and possibly Europe (Black 1970:12).

Prehistory is a big place and cannot be judged crudely as an era either of imagined harmony or of generalized destruction. An attitude that all contemporary hunter-gatherers are ‘primitive’ and awaiting progress must, surely be rejected. The idea that such groups, together with our Neolithic, Mesolithic and Palaeolithic forebears, were purely and simply Green is equally naive and ill informed. Case studies, however, provide some evidence that hunter-gatherers lived in greater harmony with their environment than other societies (Clarke 1976; Diamond 1974). Our second extract argues the case for an ‘original affluent society’ based on observation of Kalahari bush people and Australian aborigines. The third looks at the deforestation caused in Britain and Ireland by the first Neolithic farmers. The fourth extract, from Frazer’s (1854–1941) monumental study of mythology The Golden Bough, records instances of tree worship. Anthropology and environmental archaeology will no doubt furnish evidence of the ecological realities of hunter-gatherer life.

The discovery of America

P.S.Martin

At some time toward the end of the last ice age, big game hunters in Siberia approached the Arctic Circle, moved eastward across the Bering platform into Alaska, and threaded a narrow passage between the stagnant Cordilleran and Laurentian ice sheets. I propose that they spread southward explosively, briefly attaining a density sufficiently large to overkill much of their prey.

Overkill without kill sites. Pleistocene biologists wish to determine to within 1,000 years at most the time of the last occurrence of the dominant Late Pleistocene extinct mammals. If one recognizes certain hazards of ‘push-button’ radiocarbon dating,¹ especially dates on bone itself, it appears that the disappearance of native American mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, and camels coincided very closely with the first appearance of Stone Age hunters around 11,200 years ago.²

Not all investigators accept this circumstance as decisive or even as adequately established. No predator-prey model like Budyko’s³ on mammoth extinction has been developed to show how the American megafauna might have been removed by hunters.⁴ Above all, prehistorians have been troubled by the following paradox.

In temperate parts of Eurasia, large numbers of Paleolithic artifacts have been found in many associations with bones of large mammals. Although the evidence associating Stone Age hunters and their prey is overwhelming, not much extinction occurred there. Only four late-glacial genera of large animals were lost, namely the mammoth (Mammuthus), woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta), giant deer (Megaloceros), and musk-ox (Ovibos).

In contrast, the megafauna of the New World, very rarely found associated with human artifacts in kill or camp sites⁵ was decimated. Of the thirty-one genera of large mammals⁶ that disappeared in North America at the end of the last ice age, only the mammoth (Mammuthus) is found in unmistakable kill sites. The seven kill sites listed by Haynes⁷ lack the wealth of cultural material, including art objects, associated with the Old World mammoth in eastern Europe and the Ukraine. It is not surprising that some investigators discount overkill as a major cause of the extinctions in America.

But if the new human predators found inexperienced prey, the scarcity of kill sites may be explained. A rapid rate of killing would wipe out the more vulnerable prey before there was time for the animals to learn defensive behavior, and thus the hunters would not have needed to plan elaborate cliff drives or to build clever traps. Extinction would have occurred before there was opportunity for the burial of much evidence by normal geological processes. Poor paleontological visibility would be inevitable. In these terms, the scarcity of kill sites on a land mass which suffered major megafaunal losses becomes a predictable condition of the special circumstances which distinguish a sudden invasion from more gradual prehistoric cultural changes in situ. Perhaps the only remarkable aspect of New World archaeology is that any kill sites have been found….⁸

Unless one insists on believing that Paleolithic invaders lost enthusiasm for the hunt and rapidly became vegetarians by choice as they moved south from Beringia, or that they knew and practiced a sophisticated, sustained yield harvest of their prey, one would have no difficulty in predicting the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large mammals. I do not discount the possibility of disruptive side effects, perhaps caused by the introduction of dogs and the destruction of habitat by man-made fires. But a very large biomass, even the 2.3×108 metric tonnes of domestic animals now ranging the continent, could be overkilled within 1,000 years by a human population never exceeding 106. We need only assume that a relatively innocent prey was suddenly exposed to a new and thoroughly superior predator, a hunter who preferred killing and persisted in killing animals as long as they were available.⁹

With the extinction of all but the smaller, solitary, and cryptic species, such as most cervids, it seems likely that a more normal predator-prey relationship would be established. Major cultural changes would begin. Not until the prey populations were extinct would the hunters be forced, by necessity, to learn more botany. Not until then would they need to readapt to the distribution of biomes in America in the manner Fitting¹⁰ has proposed.

An explosive model will account for the scarcity of extinct animals associated with Paleo-Indian artifacts in obvious kill sites. The big game hunters achieved high population density only during those few years when their prey was abundant. Elaborate drives or traps were unnecessary.

Sudden overkill may explain the absence of cave paintings of extinct animals in the New World and the lack of ivory carvings such as those found in the mammoth hunter camps of the Don Basin. The big game was wiped out before there was an opportunity to portray the extinct species.

Notes

1 P.S.Martin, in Pleistocene Extinctions: the Search for a Cause, P.S.Martin and H.E.Wright, Jr., eds. (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1967), pp. 87–9.

2 Over the past two decades radiocarbon dates have been published which, if taken at face value, appear to show that mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and other common members of the extinct American megafauna lasted into the postglacial… For a complete description of field and laboratory treatment of the samples and for laboratory designations, see Radiocarbon 9–13 (1967–1971).

3 M.I.Budyko, Sov. Geogr. Rev. Transl. 8 (No. 10), 783 (1967).

4 According to R.F.Flint (Glacial and Quaternary Geology, Wiley, New York, 1971, p. 778), ‘The argument most frequently advanced against the hypothesis of human agency is that in no territory was man sufficiently numerous to destroy the large numbers of animals that became extinct.’

5 Apart from postglacial records of extinct species of Bison, very few kill sites have been discovered. J.J.Hester (in Pleistocene Extinctions: the Search for a Cause, P.S.Martin and H.E. Wright, Jr., eds., Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., Ancient wisdom 23 1967, p. 169), A.J. Jellinek (ibid., p. 193), and G.S.Krantz (Amer. Sci. 58,164,1970) have all raised this point as a counterargument to overkill.

6 The North American megafauna that I believe disappeared at the time of the hunters includes the following general: Nothrotherium, Megalonyx, Eremotherium, and Paramylodon (ground sloths); Brachyostracon and Boreostracon (glyptodonts); Castorides (giant beaver); Hydrochoerus and Neochoerus (extinct capybaras); Arctodus and Tremarctos (bears); Smilodon and Dinobastis (saber-tooth cats); Mammut (mastodon); Mammuthus (mammoth); Equus (horse); Tapirus (tapir); Platygonus and Mylohyus (peccaries); Camelops and Tanupolama (camelids); Cervalces and Sangamona (cervids); Capromeryx and Tetrameryx (extinct pronghorns); Bos and Saiga (Asian antelope); and Bootherlum, Symbos, Euceratherium, and Preptoceras (bovids).

7 C.V.Haynes, in Pleistocene and Recent Environments of the Central Great Plains, W.Dort, Jr., and J. K.Jones, Jr., eds. (University of Kansas Department of Geology Special Publication No. 3, Lawrence, 1971), p. 77.

8 A.Dreimanis, Ohio J. Sci. 68, 257, (1968).

9 Even when most of their calories come from plants (see R.B.Lee, in Man the Hunter, R.B.Lee and I.Devore, eds., Aldine, Chicago, 1969), men of modern nonagricultural tribes devote much time to the hunt. The arctic invaders of America had come through a region notably deficient in edible plants. As long as large mammals were flourishing, there was no need to devise new techniques of harvesting, storing, and preparing less familiar food. None of their artifacts suggests that the first American hunters also stalked the wild herbs, and none of their midden refuse suggests that the succeeding gatherers knew the extinct mammals.

10 J.E.Fitting, Amer. Antiquity 33, 441. (1968).

‘The discovery of America’, Science 179 (1973), 969, 972.

The original affluent society

Marshall Sahlins

If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting and gathering economies must be its most advanced branch. Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the ‘leisure’ to ‘build culture’. Even so, for all his efforts, the hunter pulls the lowest grades in thermodynamics—less energy/capita/year than any other mode of production. And in treatises on economic development he is condemned to play the role of bad example; the so-called ‘subsistence economy’.

The traditional wisdom is always refractory. One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically: in fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means.

For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent goods’ become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living.

That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behavior: their ‘prodigality’, for example—the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters’ economic propensities may be more consistently predic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ancient wisdom
• Chapter 2: Ecology and early urban civilization
• Chapter 3: The origins of environmental danger
• Chapter 4: Theories of breakdown
• Chapter 5: Putting the Earth first
• Chapter 6: Gaia
• Chapter 7: Philosophical holism
• Chapter 8: The web of life
• Chapter 9: Against growth
• Chapter 10: Sustainable development
• Chapter 11: The Frankenstein factor
• Chapter 12: Peaceful protest
• Chapter 13: The city and the country
• Chapter 14: Eco-feminism
• Chapter 15: Spiritual awakenings
• Chapter 16: Literary roots
• Chapter 17: Green revolutionaries
• Chapter 18: Green politics
• Chapter 19: Utopia or else!
• Suggested further reading
• Bibliography