Reading an intriguing book the other day, I was reminded of our species' inability to restrain our use of technology. The book is Bison and People on the North American Great Plains and contributors include historians, archeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and Native American perspectives. It describes the history of the buffalo including its near demise in the 19th century.It was somewhat of a surprise to me that the great herds were decimated chiefly by Natives, not by Whites. The White hunt and the pressures of settlement in the U.S. did indeed finish the buffalo off, but by the that time the southern herds had been reduced to half their original size through over-hunting by Natives. White hunters delivered the coup de grâce so to speak. In Canada the northern herds suffered no White hunt. The Indians, with the help of the Métis, managed to exterminate the herds entirely on their own.
When the horse arrived in North America, courtesy of the Spanish, the buffalo were doomed. The Indians embraced this new technology with unalloyed enthusiasm. It utterly changed their culture. Both horse and man pressured the buffalo. The hunters became more efficient killers and the horse herds, domestic and feral, competed with the buffalo for grazing. As markets for hides and pemmican flourished, killing buffalo became highly lucrative enabling a hunter to become rich in horses and trade goods.
Native North Americans had achieved a balance with the buffalo for thousands of years, but this was not a matter of choice. They had simply met the limit of their technology. Once they gained new technologies, the horse and then the gun, they did what we all do and immediately pressed their advantage.
We tend to push our technology to maximize our exploitation of nature, only occasionally restrained by conscience. Rarely do any people live in balance with nature voluntarily. Will we carry on like this until we have exhausted the entire planet's resources?
The Indians thought the buffalo were inexhaustible. If they disappeared for a while into the earth from whence they came, they would return. We know better. We know resources are limited, the planet is finite, yet we race on, consuming as if the Earth has no limits. In 1871, Cree chief Sweetgrass told a Hudson's Bay official, "Our country is no longer able to support us." Unless we recognize limits, one day a future leader may say to no one in particular "Our planet is no longer able to support us," and we will wind up like the Plains Indians, destitute and starving.
3 comments:
Bill, several years ago I became interested in a highly-rated NGO, the Global Footprint Network. It's a team of researchers and scientists who monitor and evaluate mankind's ecological footprint. They weigh consumption against the rate that the Earth replenishes renewable resources - air, water, soil, biomass.
Once you hit the limits of our planet's ecological carrying capacity you get into "overshoot." At this point you become reliant on the planet's reserves. This excess and unsustainable consumption is possible through exhausting resources such as groundwater (aquifers), soil depletion, species depletion and extinction (fishing down the food chain, etc.), and the accumulation of pollution at levels beyond the ecosystem's natural ability to cleanse them. All of those things are backing up on us now.
When I got onto GFN, Overshoot fell in the first part of October. It arrived this year on May 22nd. That means, for seven months every year, we're eating our 'seed corn.'
We've now entered the second stage of Overshoot where our excess consumption and predation of other species has begun to degrade Earth's carrying capacity.
GFN calculated that we went into Overshoot in the early 70s when mankind's population neared 3.5 billion. Today we're at nearly 8 billion heading, we're told, to 10 billion or more. Since the 70s our per capita consumption has increased markedly as has human longevity.
The evidence is everywhere. We now consume so much that we're squeezing out non-human life. The Living Planet Reports of 2014 and 2016 inventoried terrestrial and aquatic life and in both cases found that, since the 70s, terrestrial and marine life have declined by more than half. As we went into Overshoot other life went into decline.
More recently the UN's IPCC issued dire warnings about a massive increase in species extinctions.
What is rarely mentioned is mankind's mortal dependence on overconsumption. Were we to collectively agree (it would have to be a collective effort) to rein mankind's consumption, to bring the economy back within the limits of our ecosystem the developed nations would have to give up growth in favour of what Lovelock terms "sustainable retreat." Do you think we'll have many takers for that?
I should add a mention of Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Human civilization has a considerable history of knowingly choosing failure provided collapse is far enough into the future. It may be perfectly rational to do things today that benefit us even if we're aware it may doom future generations. That's exactly what we see today from Jason Kenney, Scott Moe and even Justin Trudeau.
Those of us of a certain age may be lucky not to be around to see what is surely coming and what has already arrived in the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world.
It isn’t looking good, Mound. The political class has finally accepted that anthropogenic global warming is real, but all too many still don’t grasp the urgency. And they don’t seem to be aware of species extinction and resource depletion at all. Maybe homo sapiens has reached its dinosaur moment. It’s a terrible thing to say about your own species, but the rest of life on Earth would be better off without us.
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