The good news, however, is that we don’t need to go “backward” to anything, because humans and their immediate evolutionary predecessors lived sustainably for at least a million years (cut off the word immediate and we can go back billions). It is not “human nature” to destroy one’s habitat. If it were, we would have done so long before now, and long-since disappeared. Nor is it the case that stupidity kept (and keeps) noncivilized peoples from ordering their lives in such a manner as to destroy their habitat, nor from developing technologies (for example, oil refineries, electrical grids, and factories) that facilitate this process. Indeed, were we to attempt a cross-cultural comparison of intelligence, maintenance of one’s habitat would seem to me a first-rate measure with which to begin. In any case, when civilized people arrived in North America, the continent was rich with humans and nonhumans alike, living in relative equilibrium and sustainability. I’ve shown this elsewhere, as have many others,37 most especially the Indians themselves.
Because we as a species haven’t fundamentally changed in the last several thousand years, since well before the dawn of civilization, each new child is still a human being, with the potential to become the sort of adult who can live sustainably on a particular piece of ground, if only the child is allowed to grow up within a culture that values sustainability, that lives by sustainability, that rewards sustainability, that tells itself stories reinforcing sustainability, and strictly disallows the sort of exploitation that would lead to unsustainability. This is natural. This is who we are.
In order to continue moving “forward,” each child must be made to forget what it means to be human and to learn instead what it means to be civilized. As psychiatrist and philosopher R. D. Laing put it, “From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subject to these forces of violence . . . as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.”38
Another problem with the idea that we cannot abandon or eliminate civilization, because to do so would be to go backwards, is that the idea emerges from a belief that history is natural—like water flowing downhill, like spring following winter—and that social (including technological) “progress” is as inevitable as personal aging. But history is a product of a specific way of looking at the world, a way that is, in fact, influenced by, among other things, environmental degradation.
I used to be offended by the World History classes I took in school, which seemed almost Biblical in the pretension that the world began six thousand years ago. Oh, sure, teachers and writers of books made vague allowances for the Age of the Dinosaurs, and moved quickly—literally in a sentence or two—through the tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human existence constituting “prehistory,” preferring to avert their eyes from such obviously dead subjects. These few moments were always the briefest prelude to the only human tale that has ever really mattered: Western Civilization. Similarly short shrift was always given to cultures that have existed (or for now still exist) coterminous with Western Civilization, as other civilizations such as the Aztec, Incan, Chinese, and so on were given nothing more than a cousinly nod, and ahistorical cultures were mentioned only when it was time for their members to be enslaved or exterminated. It was always clear that the real action started in the Middle East with the “rise” of civilization, shifted its locus to the Mediterranean, to northern and western Europe, sailed across the ocean blue with Christopher Columbus and the boys, and now shimmers between the two towns struck by the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and DC (and to a lesser extent, Tinseltown). Everything, everyone, and everywhere else matters only in relation to this primary story.
I was bothered not only by the obvious narcissism and arrogance of relegating all of these other stories to the periphery (I’d like to call it racism as well as arrogance, but the white-skinned indigenous of Europe were ignored in these histories as steadfastly as everyone else), and by the just-as-obvious stupidity and unsustainability of not making one’s habitat the central figure of one’s stories, but also by the language itself. History, I was told time and again, in classes and in books, began six thousand years ago. Before that, there was no history. It was prehistory. Nothing much happened in this long dark time of people grunting in caves (never mind that extant indigenous languages are often richer, more subtle, more complex than English).
But the truth is that history did begin six thousand years ago. Before then there were personal histories, but there were no significant social histories of the type we’re used to thinking about, in part because the cultures were cyclical (based on cycles of nature) instead of linear (based on the changes brought about by this social group on the world surrounding them).
I have to admit that I still don’t like the word prehistory, because it imputes to history an inaccurate inevitability. For the truth is that history didn’t have to happen. I’m not merely saying that any particular history isn’t inevitable,39 but instead that history itself—the existence of any social history whatsoever—was not always inevitable. It is inevitable for now, but at one point it did not exist, and at some point it will again cease to be.
History is predicated on at least two things, the first physical, the second perceptual. As always, the physical and the perceptual are intertwined. So far as the former, history is marked by change. An individual’s history can be seen as a series of welcomings and leavetakings, a growth in physical stature and abilities followed by a tailing off, a gradual exchange of these abilities for memories, experiences, and wisdom. Fragments of my history. I went to college. I was a high jumper. I remember the eerie, erotic smoothness of laying out over the bar, higher than my head. I lost my springs in my late twenties. I was still a fast runner, chopping the softball toward short and beating out the throw every time. In my thirties arthritis stole my speed, until now I run like a pitching coach, or like an extra in an Akira Kurasawa movie. Twenty years ago I was an engineer. Eighteen years ago a beekeeper. Sixteen years ago I became an environmental activist. Now I’m writing a book about the problem of civilization. I do not know what my future history will look like.
Social histories are similarly marked by change. The deforestation of the Middle East to build the first cities. The first written laws of civilization, which had to do with the ownership of human and nonhuman slaves. The fabrication of bronze, then iron, the ores mined by slaves, the metals used to conquer. The first empires. Greece and its attempts to take over the world. Rome and its attempts. The conquest of Europe. The conquest of Africa. The conquest of the Americas. The conquest of Australia, India, much of Asia. The deforestation of the planet.
Just as with my own future history, I do not know what the future history of our society will be, nor of the land that lies beneath it. I do not know when the Grand Coulee Dam will come down, nor whether there will still be salmon to reinhabit the Upper Columbia. I do not know when the Colorado will again reach the sea, nor do I know whether civilization will collapse before grizzly bears go extinct, or prairie dogs, gorillas, tuna, great white sharks, sea turtles, chimpanzees, orangutans, spotted owls, California red-legged frogs, tiger salamanders, tigers, pandas, koalas, abalones, and so many others on the brink.
The point is that history is marked by change. No change, no history.
And some day history will come to an end. When the last bit of iron from the last skyscraper rusts into nothingness, when eventually the earth, and humans on the earth, presuming we still survive, find some sort of new dynamic equilibrium, there will no longer be any history. People will live once again in the cycles of the earth, the cycles of the sun and moon, the seasons. And longer cycles, too, of fish who slip into seas then return to
rivers full of new life, of insects who sleep for years to awaken on hot summer afternoons, of martens who make massive migrations once every several human generations, of the rise and fall of populations of snowshoe hare and the lynx who eat them. And longer cycles still, the birth, growth, death, and decay of great trees, the swaying of rivers in their courses, the rise and fall of mountains. All these cycles, these circles great and small.
That’s looking at history from an ecological level. From a social or perceptual level, history started when certain groups or classes of people for whatever reason gained the ability to tell the story of what was going on. Monopolizing the story allowed them to set up a worldview to which they could then get other people to subscribe. History is always told by the people in control. The lower classes—and other species—may or may not subscribe to an academic or upper class description of events, but to some degree most of us do buy into it.
And buying into it carries a series of perceptual consequences, not the least of which is the inability to envision living ahistorically, which means living sustainably, because a sustainable way of living would not be marked, obviously, by changes in the larger landscape. Another way to say all of this is that to perceive history as inevitable or natural is to render impossible the belief that we can go “back” to being nonindustrialized, indeed noncivilized, and to create the notion that to do either of these isn’t, in a larger sense, backwards at all. To perceive history as inevitable is to make sustainability impossible. The opposite is true as well. To the degree that we can liberate ourselves from the historical perspective that holds us captive and fall again into the cyclical patterns that characterize the natural world—including natural human communities—we’ll find that the notions of forward and backward will likewise lose their primacy. At that point we will once again simply be living. We will learn to not make those markers on the earth that cause history, markers of environmental degradation, and both we and the rest of the world will at long last be able to heave a huge sigh of relief.
A few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with George Draffan. We were talking about civilization, power, history, discourse, propaganda, and how and why we all buy into the current unsustainable system. George said he really likes the social and political model called “the three faces of power.” He said, “The first face is the myth of American democracy, that everyone has equal power, and society or politics is just the give and take of different interest groups that come together and participate, with the best ideas and most active participants winning. This face says that the losers are basically lazy. The second face says it’s more complex than that, that some groups have more power than others, and actually control the agenda, so that some things, like the distribution of property, never get discussed. The third face of power is operating when we stop noticing that some things aren’t on the agenda, and start believing that unequal power and starvation and certain economic and social decisions aren’t actually decisions, they’re ‘just the way things are.’ At this point even the powerless perceive unjust social relations as the natural order.” He paused before he said something that has haunted me ever since: “Conspiracy’s unnecessary when everyone thinks the same.”
George also said, “The three faces of power were developed as conflicting descriptions of reality but I’m starting to see them as a progression over time, as the story of history.
“At some point we were all equal. The social structures of many indigenous cultures were set up to guarantee that power remained fluid. But then within some cultures as power began to be centralized, the powerful created a discourse—in religion, philosophy, science, economics—that rationalized injustice and institutionalized it into a group projection. At first the powerless might not have believed in this discourse, but by now, many thousands of years later, we’re all deluded to some extent and believe that these differentials in power are natural. Some of us may want to change the agenda a little bit, but there’s no seeing through the whole matrix. Power, like property, like land and water, has become privatized and concentrated. And it’s been that way for so long and we believe it to such an extent that we think that’s the natural order of things.”
It’s not.
Just today I came across an article in Nature magazine with the title “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.” Conventional scientific thought, it seems, has generally held that ecosystems—natural communities like lakes, oceans, coral reefs, forests, deserts, and so on—respond slowly and steadily to climate change, nutrient pollution, habitat degradation, and the many other environmental impacts of industrial civilization. A new study suggests that instead, stressors like these can cause natural communities to shift almost overnight from apparently stable conditions to very different, diminished conditions. The lead author of the study, Marten Scheffer, an ecologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, said, “Models have predicted this, but only in recent years has enough evidence accumulated to tell us that resilience of many important ecosystems has become undermined to the point that even the slightest disturbance can make them collapse.”
It’s pretty scary. A co-author of the study, Jonathan Foley, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, added, “In approaching questions about deforestation or endangered species or global climate change, we work on the premise that an ounce of pollution equals an ounce of damage. It turns out that assumption is entirely incorrect. Ecosystems may go on for years exposed to pollution or climate changes without showing any change at all and then suddenly they may flip into an entirely different condition, with little warning or none at all.”
For example, six thousand years ago, great parts of what is now the Sahara Desert were wet, featuring lakes and swamps that teemed with crocodiles, hippos, and fish. Foley said: “The lines of geologic evidence and evidence from computer models shows that it suddenly went from a pretty wet place to a pretty dry place. Nature isn’t linear. Sometimes you can push on a system and push on a system and, finally, you have the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Once the camel’s back is broken, it often cannot or will not heal the way it was before.
Another co-author, limnologist Stephen Carpenter, past president of the Ecological Society of America, said that this understanding—of the discontinuous nature of ecological change—is beginning to suffuse the scientific community, and then he continued, “We realize that there is a common pattern we’re seeing in ecosystems around the world. Gradual changes in vulnerability accumulate and eventually you get a shock to the system, a flood or a drought, and boom, you’re over into another regime. It becomes a self-sustaining collapse.”40
After I read the article, I received a call from a friend, Roianne Ahn, a woman smart and persistent enough that even a Ph.D. in psychology hasn’t clouded her insight into how people think and act. “It never ceases to amaze me,” she said, “that it takes experts to convince us of what we already know.”
That wasn’t the response I’d been expecting.
She continued, “That’s one of my roles as a therapist. I just listen and reflect back to clients things they know, but don’t have the confidence to believe until they hear an outside expert say them.”
“Do you think people will listen to these scientists?”
“It depends on how much denial they’re in. But the bottom line is that what they’re describing is no big surprise. It’s what happens when a person is under stress: she can only take so much before she falls apart. This is what happens in relationships. It happens in families. It happens in communities. Naturally it will be true on this larger scale, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“We work as hard as we can, even overextend ourselves, to maintain our stability, and when the pressure gets too much, something’s got to give. We collapse. Sometimes that’s bad, sometimes it’s good.”
There was silence while I thought about the fact that some collapses are unnecessary—the breaking down of prisoners unde
r torture, the systematic dismantling of self-esteem under the grinding regime of an abusive parent or partner, ongoing ecological apocalypse—while others can be healing.
She continued, “It’s obvious why people try to maintain healthy structures that make them happy. It’s not always quite so obvious why we, and I include myself, seem to work just as hard to maintain structures and systems that make them miserable. We’re all familiar with the notion that many addicts have to hit rock bottom before they change, even when their addiction is killing them.”
I asked, “When do you think the culture will change?”
“This culture is clearly addicted to civilization,” she said. “So I think the answer to that question is another one: how far down does it have to go before it hits bottom?”
I talked to another friend about all of this. It was late at night. The wind blew outside. The computer was off. We heard the wind. This friend, an excellent thinker and writer, used to live in New York City, and carries with her a certain loyalty not only to that great city, but to cities in general. She was simultaneously sympathetic to and exasperated by me and what I said. After we’d been talking for hours, she asked, reasonably enough, “What right do you have to tell people they can’t live in cities?”
“None at all. I couldn’t care less where people live. But people who live in cities have no right to demand—much less steal—resources from everybody else.”
Endgame Vol.1 Page 5
