permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

>> so i am afraid the attitude you can observe in todays indiginous
>> people is simply a result of the fact, that at present they are the
>> dominated (read: raped, killed, exploited, colonized, dislocated,
>> etc.etc.) ones, and not the other way around as in: they are dominated
>> because they are so non-dominating.

This discussion has me thinking a lot about the observations in "Guns, Germs
and Steel." Jared Diamond's description of the Maori's systematic
extermination of any neighboring people in the way of their expansion was
particularly chilling, in part because it sounded so familiar to an
American. The evidence that nearly all people exploit their environment to
the fullest that their technology and numbers will allow is very compelling.
He demonstrates that when humans entered North America and Australia, they
exterminated nearly all species of large mammal within a few centuries; only
a small percentage of the originals remain. It's not just white folks who
exterminate anything that they perceive as a threat, and overexploit
resources; it's all humans. We limit ourselves only when we have no other
choice.

Early white journals show that the older or larger a Native American
settlement was, the larger the surrounding clearcut. Fire-stick agriculture
utterly transformed the ecologies of Australia and North America, far more
than chainsaw and bulldozer have managed to. What remained when whites
arrived was a much-tamed landscape that indigenous people had shaped to
their liking. They had so much knowledge about it because they created it
and preserved what they liked, burning off or killing as much of the rest as
they could. To me, understanding this is both depressing and
guilt-assuaging. I suspect that developing a truly sustainable culture will
require both ancient knowledge--should they be willing to share it--and an
evolution into a less-exploitative, wiser type of human than has ever
existed.