Imagine an Earth First Policy.
Hard to? It’s already been done.
For over thirty years, I enjoyed living in upstate New York, an area rich in the country’s founding history, and calming natural beauty. After graduating from college I packed up my tiny car, and with $700 to my name, drove to the lush, rural hills of historic Columbia County, 30 miles south of Albany, where I took what turned out to be a perfectly awful job. Fortunately, with the Berkshire and Catskill Mountains close at hand, and just one traffic light on my 30-minute country commute, my stress was manageable as I fell deeply in love with my new surroundings.
The job eventually drove me on, but my love for natural spaces became core. Over time, I migrated north into the foothills of the Adirondacks, near Great Sacandaga Lake where I continued to live in or near small historic communities, surrounded by expansive views, and in the case of the Adirondacks, thousands of lakes as well. I hiked hundreds of miles in the mountains, rode tens of thousands on bicycles, and toured dozens of historic sites, from the primitive homes of the first settlers, to the galling excesses of gilded age robber barons. The Hudson River gave birth to America, and it was an opportunity to touch history, and be immersed in nature I will never forget, and always long for.
The birth of America was of course a commercial venture. The first colony, Jamestown, Virginia, was founded by the royal charter of King James I. The London Company was granted territory from Cape Fear to Long Island Sound in the interest of its shareholders, who sought to increase their wealth by exploiting the New World’s seemingly endless natural resources. Colonizing North America to enrich the British Empire was the plan.
Never mind that there were already people living here.
Jamestown was the beginning of a gruesome disaster for native people, who preceded the invaders by twelve thousand years. In the winter of 1609-1610, the under prepared colonists experienced the “starving time” in which they resorted to cannibalism. Five hundred died, only sixty survived. Some fled to the Indians, where they were fed. That following summer, when the defectors were retrieved, Chief Powhatan was deemed to be, “prowde and disdaynefull.”
In retaliation, the English attacked an Indian village, killed fifteen or sixteen people, burned their homes to the ground, chopped the corn down, and abducted the queen and her children in boats. The children were thrown overboard, and the soldiers enjoyed “shoteinge owtt their Braynes” in the water. The queen was later stabbed to death.
Apparently, these policies were good for commerce.
I have never toured the Jamestown historic site, but did tour the second permanent English colony in America, Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The Plimoth and Patuxet Museums, are “living” historic reenactment villages, and the colony for which Thanksgiving is celebrated to this day, if not, understandably by Native Americans. Established in 1620, thirteen years after Jamestown, the colony wasn’t founded for raw commercial interests, but rather by Puritan Separatists fleeing religious persecution from “Merry Olde England.”
Commercial interests were at play, however. In order to finance their voyage across the Atlantic, the Pilgrims took on debt from a group of businessmen, the Merchant Adventurers, who viewed the colony as a means of profit. Upon arriving in America, the Pilgrims were obligated to repay their debts.
The day was distressingly hot, temperature well into the 90s, accompanied by steaming, oppressive humidity. The sun beat down without mercy. I was dressed in a light T-shirt and cargo shorts, but could barely think about anything other than the heat.
My daughter and wife were with me. Claire was just four or five years old. Clearly, cold beverages, ice cream, and frequent breaks in the shade were going to be needed to survive.
The Mayflower II floated in the harbor, a replica gifted from Britain in 1957. It astonished me to see how tiny, and fragile this wooden boat was, just 106 feet long and 25 feet wide. It was difficult to imagine the desperation the one hundred-two passengers and thirty or so crew members felt to risk their lives sailing across a capricious ocean, to an unknown land. Unsettling as that was to contemplate, that wasn’t my big takeaway. What struck me most by far was the contrast of the two communities.
Plimoth vs. Patuxet
The colonists were laboring hard in the unrelenting sun. They pushed wheelbarrows, tended livestock, chopped wood, and sawed and hammered on their heavy, primitive houses. Although trees surrounded the perimeter of their dwellings, the homes occupied a cleared patch, devoid of shade. Men worked outside, women both inside, and outside. Inside was no relief from the heat, as fires burned for food preparation, in their dark, near windowless, and airless structures.
Everyone was dressed head to toe in heavy clothing, much of it dark for the men, with leather boots and hats. Women’s clothing was lighter in color, and their bonnets were white, but all wore long sleeves, and buttons went to the neck. Dripping in my light clothing, I could hardly believe these people weren’t dropping from heat stroke. The whole enterprise looked torturous, in denial of environmental conditions. The ocean beckoned, not far away.
On the Patuxet side were the Wampanoag people (actual descendants of those the Puritans met centuries earlier, I was told). Two lightly dressed men worked in quiet conversation in a breeze by the water on a dugout canoe, in the shade of trees. Others tended gardens. Men or women, arms shoulders, and legs were exposed in simple deerskin clothing.
We made our way into one of their communal homes called Wetu, one room structures which encourage air flow through domed, oval shapes and vented roofs, allowing heat to escape in the summer and serving as chimneys in the winter. The perimeter was lined with seating, or beds, depending on time of day, and covered in soft animal furs. A gracious, bare-shouldered woman was there to tell us about their lifestyle, and answer questions.
She explained that her people centered on community. Each had jobs and responsibilities to everyone else, whether it was hunting, tending crops, practical and ornamental crafts, or making clothing, but what was most striking was that they worked an average of just four hours a day. The rest of their time was spent socially, all generations together, contributing to raising the children, and passing along the history and the wisdom of lessons learned from the past, to the next generation.
That is a model of civilized society.
White people subjugated black and brown people through technology, not legitimate claim to having better civilizations. In the 17th century, ships that could cross oceans, and muskets, and cannons, were high technology. People of color, indigenous people, hadn’t invented these things. This was not from a lack of intelligence, or a sign that they were inferior, or savage as was claimed, but rather a lack of need for these inventions, since they lived within sane constraints of what the Earth naturally provided. While Nordic types sought to control and exploit the planet, indigenous people sought to find meaning and wisdom from the Earth, her mystery, beauty, and miraculous provision of sustenance. This was a wise and deeply spiritual way of thinking.
It could be debated why lighter-skinned people tended to create technology before darker-skinned people. One theory posits that harsher, colder climates tended to force invention faster than warmer, relatively benevolent ones. Certainly, conditions of the Earth shape us, but this theory doesn’t completely hold up, in my mind. North American Indians faced conditions just as harsh as Northern European races. Probably, it was just serendipity. Those muskets for “shoteinge owtt Braynes” were only possible with gunpowder, invented by the Chinese, hundreds of years earlier, another race white-skinned people slanderously diminished.
When I think of climate change, I think of three camps, those like me who believe there is irrefutable evidence we are on the edge of collapse, those whose ignorance and greed give license to evil denial in the pursuit of racism and profit, and those who blithely believe technology will save us. What I find missing in these debates is discussion of our obvious behavioral problems, which have driven our predicament.
What happened in Jamestown was just the beginning of 400 years of slaughter, slavery, and genocide. It continues to this day and is a persistent marker of human behavior. Weaponizing technology and spiritual beliefs as false evidence to call others heathens is evil. Using such ideas to steal what others have is heathen. To call any empires of the past or present models of civilization, is farcical. Civilization is not defined, by the sophistication of its art, or the prowess of its technology. It’s defined by the wisdom of how we treat each other, and all those who are weaker, including creatures great and small, down to the microbes in the soil. A civilized society should revere and protect the Earth. A civilized society would take only what it needs, and replenish what has been taken. A civilized society is not greedy.
Indigenous people had violence, wars, and social inequities, too, they weren’t and aren’t perfect. It’s not surprising since ninety-nine percent of our DNA is in common, no matter our color, the shape of our eyes, or the texture of our hair. However, the indigenous people who have been persecuted, enslaved, and murdered practiced an Earth first policy. The ones who were deemed subhuman, inferior, are the ones that provided a model of how to live sustainably on the planet.
As I watch the #ClimateEmergency unfold, I think of my days in the woods, and on bicycles, being in the moment, being in reality, without stress. Technology won’t save us from ourselves. It keeps taking us further and further away, lie after lie about what happiness is, to enrich soulless sociopaths who run the London Companies, and Merchant Adventurers of our day.
In the end, if we don’t change course, even the dumbest and the richest will learn, we don’t define the Earth. The Earth defines us.
Very high compliments on this article.
The answer to how we should restructure society is right in our faces and always has been.
One of the biggest puzzles in my life has been trying to answer why the European races have been so vicious, dominating and theiving. I've pondered the climate/technology question but Eskimos deal with a far harsher climate but never developed technology or moved to better climates.
The Stonehenge civilization existed for 8000 or more years. Primitive technology built Stonehenge a feat that would be difficult today and prior to that Woodhenge. Not to mention the Egyptian pyramids. What is the difference in the psychological makeup that makes us so different? I doubt we'll ever know. My best guess is that it's a small group of people who are good at controlling others. Like present times.