| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
blog - at - crumbtrail.org |
Don Boudreaux's recent post Living in Harmony with Nature takes issue with the idea that technological civilization is disharmonious with nature.
To live harmoniously with nature is to understand and accept natural forces. The greater this understanding and acceptance, the greater the harmony. Because we know so much more today than we did before about physics, chemistry, meteorology, biology, physiology, metallurgy, and on and on with our ologies and urgies, we live so much more harmoniously with nature.This is mistaken. At the time European conquerors arrived pre-Columbians were in many ways more informed about nature and lived longer, healthier lives than the Europeans. But Europeans brought a fine collection of diseases with them that are now estimated to have killed over 90% of the American population. Europeans had guns, germs and steel which easily conquered the American bioengineers. The primitive ologies and urgies of Europeans were definitely not harmonious. In the time that has passed between the 15th and 21st centuries Eurotech has become more harmonious though it's only in the last few decades that much progress has been made.Pre-Columbian peoples lived simply, to be sure, but let’s stop mistaking ignorance and poverty with harmony. It’s an utter myth – we might say an urban myth – that primitive peoples lived with nature harmoniously. Nature devastated them. Nature battered them into early graves. Their ignorance of nature prevented them from achieving much material wealth.
It is misleading to exaggerate the ignorance and poverty of pre-Columbian people since their level of civilization at the time of conquest was comparable though different from European civilization. They had grand cities, good roads, complex trading systems, productive agricultural systems and governance institutions to keep accounts and manage far flung empires. If we compare the great cities of each civilization Europeans don't look very good, but the mental picture many harbor is a comparison of the few and exceptional European great cities to nomadic hunters or subsistence farming villages. Turn it around and compare the great American cities to the vast majority of European peasants living in squalor and ignorance, and the various plagues and pox that regularly swept Europe battering them into early graves. Compare the tall and healthy Americans to the toothless, stunted gnomes of Europe.
How might American civilization have progressed in subsequent centuries had it not been destroyed?
It is we today, with our knowledge of how to irrigate fields using science and engineering, and how to make and administer antibiotics, who live harmoniously with nature. We don't demand miracles. We don't expect nature to change its logic simply because we arrogantly wish it to do so. We accept nature's logic and work with it.Americans had some very sophisticated irrigation systems and comparatively advanced agriculture. Some of their science and engineering accomplishments still baffle scientists. See Anthropogenic Amazon for more on this.
Scientists are still analyzing the biology, but Erickson believes the Amazon Indians enriched their earth with a microorganism, one that resisted depletion and helped fertilize. If better understood, this process of inoculating poor soil with a bacterial booster could aid parts of the undeveloped world starved for agriculture. Recently, geographers estimated that the creators of this ancient technology managed to terraform at least 10 percent of Amazonia - an area the size of France. Along with the raised fields, fish weirs, causeways, and other anthropogenic features, Dark Earth may in fact be one of countless footprints left by a lost civilization. Indeed, if Erickson is right, the Amazon could be humankind’s largest engineering relic...It may also be useful to expand scholarship beyond poking fun at a caricature of Americans who "moan, chant, pray, dance, build totems, burn leaves and twigs, all in fruitless, inharmonious efforts to solve the problems" and consider Peruvian potato farmers.Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."
For at least the past four centuries, indigenous potato farmers of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes have gathered in midwinter to gaze up into the night sky and observe the Pleiades. If this star cluster appears big and bright to them, they think that they will have plentiful rains and big harvests the next summer; if the cluster appears small and dim, they anticipate less abundance. Their belief is so strong that they time the planting of their crops accordingly. One might imagine that this practice amounts to nothing more than an odd superstition, but it turns out that this scheme actually works: The apparent size and brightness of the Pleiades varies with the amount of thin, high cloud at the top of the troposphere, which in turn reflects the severity of El Niño conditions over the Pacific. Because rainfall in this region is generally sparse in El Niño years, this simple method provides a valuable forecast, one that is as good or better than any long-term prediction based on computer modeling of the ocean and atmosphere.In a sense those ancient peoples did a better job of accepting nature's logic and working with it than we do today. Our newest and best ologies and urgies are working these issues attempting to discover how those vanished civilizations accomplished what we still cannot do. Some call this the biotech century and anticipate that we will at long last come to appreciate and replicate what those old bioengineers did centuries ago. It isn't a binary problem, we don't need to choose their way or our way, we need to expand our way to encompass the things they knew, understanding them with our ways of knowing.
Boudreaux's concluding point - It is science – rational thought, skepticism, critical inquiry – that furthers greater harmony with nature - is true, but that means recognizing the science of the past and its accomplishments. They were natural philosophers too and have some things to teach us. Their soil science, agronomics and forest management techniques were superb. We are only now beginning to be able to understand their accomplishments, motivated in no small part by the failures of ours. We could have done this long ago had we not been blinded by the assumption that they were barbarians who had no useful technologies. When we winnow the natural philosophy from the superstitious mumbo-jumbo - their's and our's - our ologies and urgies progress.
We're not comparing the Indians of the past to the Europeans of the past, but to the Americans of today. Who lived more in harmony? I don't think it can be seriously maintained that, overall, the Indians better understood nature and knew how to use nature to advance their own ends. If you had to balance what we know and they didn't against what they knew and we don't, we'd come out ahead by a long shot.
On the other hand, I don't know if "living in harmony" means using nature to advance human ends. Is it something else? The phrase is ambiguous and perhaps meaningless because nature doesn't have intelligence (nor "logic," I'd argue). I don't know how you can judge the existence of "harmony" between two parties when one has no goals. Trying to divine nature's purpose is like trying to read the tea leaves.
Posted by: Matt T. at April 11, 2005 09:57 AM"We're not comparing the Indians of the past to the Europeans of the past, but to the Americans of today."
Boudreaux said: "Pre-Columbian peoples lived simply, to be sure, but let’s stop mistaking ignorance and poverty with harmony."
They didn't live simply, weren't ignorant and not impoverished until they had been conquered. They were a technological civilization capable of some things we don't yet understand or have only recently come to understand. The benefit of a more accurate view of them is that it is easier for us to recognize their technologies and learn from them. Their technologies were different, less mechanical and more biological, which made them nearly invisible to a mechanical civilization.
Some have speculated about why this is so. One compelling explanation is that there were almost no beasts of burden that could be domesticated and harnessed. Wheeled carts were of no value without motive power. There were some pack animals, but travel involved walking or running rather than riding. Their technologies took a different path as a result. It's an interesting counter-factual to imagine what might have been had horses not gone extinct in the Americas, or oxen been native.
My understanding of the "living in harmony" trope, which may differ from what others understand, is informed by complex adaptive systems thinking. Each natural system is in a dynamic equilibrium at any given time, cycling through a short term series of states, as well as having longer term cycles. Cycles within cycles. Tacit and explicit knowledge of the cycles enables human objectives to be pursued with style and grace, expending less energy to achieve goals, reducing system disruption and unintended consequences. It's environmental jiu-jitsu that uses the momentum and inclinations of the system rather than struggling against them. Harmony is another way of describing such informed and coordinated behavior.
Posted by: back40 at April 11, 2005 10:48 AM