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Keenan Weatherford Professor Aaron Sachs Hist 3150 mid-term paper 10-19-2009

Conservation Before Colonists With the innumerable angles from which to view environmental history its development and jurisdiction as a field of study as well as the different perspectives on the myriad topics within that field one thing remains clear: all humans interact with their environment. When browsing the ways different cultures interact with their environments, it is easy to be drawn to the most exaggerated case study: Europeans. They explored and colonized large portions of the globe, they brought their own environmental attitudes to those parts of the globe, and they influenced the ways native people interact with their environment. The fact that native people interact with their environment is forgettable. The intoxicating ideal of the noble savage, bred by ignorance and sustained by Disney, holds that all Native Americans lived isolated in time and space, in perfect harmony with the environment and free from both the burdens and the windfalls of modern society (Native Perspectives lecture, Sept. 3). Major fallacies and inaccuracies relating to the noble savage ideal are revealed with some light critical thinking, but the ideal is alluring nonetheless, especially in light of our own relationship to the environment. From agriculture to industrialization to urbanization, Europeans, and more generally capitalists, have had far-reaching and highly visible impacts on the environment. Many of these impacts are negative, leading to an evolving backlash against progress, and the manipulation

and exploitation of nature. Since the vast majority of humans probably favor survival first and environmental awareness second, the natural response is to search for examples of humans that managed to actually exist and thrive without negative impacts on the environment, or without any impact at all. This search for a light-stepping, non-consuming human might seem to end at the Native American, portrayed as the noble savage. But, as the key word in G.P. Marshs well-known quote indicates, man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Without judging the morality of these disturbances, it is important to recognize the impact that Native Americans did have on their environment. Since it is impossible for a human to totally avoid interaction with the environment, maybe we should look at the next best thing: minimal impact, or at least less impact than our current society. Far from suggesting a mass return to semi-agricultural and hunter-gatherer practices, a look at how Native Americans lived with nature might provide nudges in the direction that seems most appropriate today: away from mass consumption and apathy, towards sustainability and awareness. Just like people today, Native Americans were probably concerned primarily with their own survival. Consumption of food and creation of shelter for security are two of the essential building blocks of survival, and both necessitate manipulating natures resources. Native Americans food production depended on the climate (Native Perspectives lecture, Sept. 3). In colder areas, they would hunt and gather, and accept that winters would be seasons of want. Where hunting was a primary source of food, populations tended to be less dense and more mobile better able to follow herds and react to changes in the food supply. In warmer areas, many were semi-agricultural. While they moved on to better hunting grounds in the winter, in the other seasons they settled down, cleared land, planted crops and harvested. In warm areas of

the continent where the climate could support it, populations grew denser and constructed longterm settlements for the purpose of agriculture (Allen 1996). Native Americans ascribe to different farming techniques than Europeans, including the use of deliberate burns to clear away brush and replenish the soil. In Northern California, fire was the primary tool used to reshape the landscape and native vegetation. Native Americans used it to stimulate new plant growth, control insect infestations, and alter plant growth characteristics to make the plants more usable for gathering. Regulated fires also prevented the spread of wild fires that fed off dense growth and dead underbrush (Allen 1996). Europeans didnt understand the purpose of these fires, and thought them foolish, or even dangerous. The Native Americans practice of disorderly agriculture also went over the colonists heads. Their crops were left unorganized to avoid depletion of any key nutrients in the soil and actually increase the yield; to the Europeans, it looked like the Native Americans were lazy or unskilled farmers. Self-justified in part by the Native Americans perceived laziness, Europeans claimed land en masse and set to work improving it by building fences, setting loose domesticated animals and plowing the ground into neat little rows. Allens study of the Anasazi Indians and their famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colo., illustrates the positive linear relationship between agriculture and population density. Agriculture can generally support more people, and more people means more food required and more impact on the environment. In the Anasazi case, that relationship came to a tragic end. Famine devastated the large population in a drought year when agricultural production was much lower than previous years.

The immense human population on earth today relies on a much tighter subsistence pattern. There is plenty of cheering about the efficiency of our agriculture. Genetically modified produce is resistant to pesticide and herbicide, theoretically increasing yield. Powerbars contain all the nutrients needed to become big and strong. Modern irrigation makes the threat of a drought less frightening (at least to most people lucky enough to eat in the United States climate plays a deciding role in the subsistence, or lack thereof, of citizens of other regions). Massive waterways and daily multivitamins might be the 21st century incarnation of the Anasazis better basketweaving tactics and sharper hunting weapons. They are security blankets to quiet the fears of an insufficient food supply due to external causes. The Anasazis learned the hard way that tweaking the process of agriculture doesnt provide a permanent solution to its systemic problem: dense populations. Overall population size can be a good indicator of the total environmental impact of a group. Population density might be a better framework to analyze the effects of agriculture and population growth in a prescribed area. Ultimately, that populations practices with regard to the environment will determine its impact as much as any numbers. Native Americans environmental practices, like those of all other societies, stemmed from their worldview, particularly their philosophy and attitudes toward the environment. Attempting to summarize and synthesize every Native American groups environmental ethics would be a mistake akin to the noble savage error. There is no set of prescribed beliefs towards the environment that can be found in every Native American group, but there have been efforts to define the commonalities between groups: Beliefs and attitudes held by the people in the quality of their relationships to the natural environment. All American Indian people possessed what has been called a metaphysic of nature, manifest a reverence for the myriad forms and forces of the natural world specific to their immediate environment; and for all, their rich

complexes of rites and ceremonies are expressed in terms which have references to or utilize the forms of the natural world (Brown 1974). Another writes about certain elements which many if not all these ideologies seemed to share, the most outstanding being a genuine respect for the welfare of other life-forms (Martin 1978). The mythical noble savage left no footprint on nature; the realistic Native American was extraordinarily aware of his footprints. Details vary with belief systems, but from culture to culture, Native Americans understood the environment and respected it, in some form, as an individual entity or entities. They realized that, in order to eat, sometimes animals had to die, and in many cases they tried to appreciate the animals resources through ritual and by using every available part of the animal. Similarly with agriculture, they recognized the gifts of the land and their own relationship with the crops, as both are products of the land and sky. Native Americans thought more about the proper consumption of resources than trying to protect those resources, or the environments from which they came. Probably due to both survival instincts and tradition, Native Americans would desire the welfare of this generation first, and afterwards the welfare of the generations to follow, as Pinchot described one of the central tenets of modern conservationism. As Europeans spread across North America, they brought a commercialism as novel to the Native Americans as the guns and horses. The colonists dominating sense of property rights was difficult for the Native Americans to react to, and the resulting European exploitation of the land violates another of Pinchots mandates for conservationism: Natural resources must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many, and not merely for the profit of a few.

Native Americans might share some traits with preservationists like the emotional relationship with nature and respect for the environment. They seem to view natural resources in a similar way to conservationists, practicing and advocating prudent usage, though maybe with less focus on quantities and more emphasis on quality of the resource. The Native American branch of conservationism is reflected in their impact on the land. They use available natural resources in an intelligent and conservative manner and maintain a small footprint by virtue of their awareness of the environment around them lessons that seem to be casualties of progress.

References: Allen, Michael and Robert Stephen. 1996. People and their environment: Searching the historical record, Social Studies 87 (4). Pp. 156-161. Brown, Joseph E. 1973. Modes of Contemplation through Action: North American Indians, Main Currents of Modern Thought 30 (1973 1974): 60. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the land. New York. Hill and Wang. Martin, Calvin. 1978. Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), Pp. 186. Pinchot, Gifford. 1910. The fight for conservation. New York. Doubleday, Page and Co. Sachs, Aaron. 2009. History 3150 class lectures.