Laid Waste!
EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series editors:
Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher
Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Copyright 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-5184-5
AFTER HUMBLE BEGINNINGS AS faltering British colonies, by 1900 the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as a result of a process we call modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism in what I am calling a culture of exploitation. In this culture of exploitation, the resources of nature, first seen as gifts from God, became mere commodities for industry, while greed, once proscribed as sin, was naturalized and elevated to a virtue. This process of modernization has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comforts. The same process, however, now has brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. Since 1971 our children and grandchildren learned as much from the story of The Lorax by Dr. Seuss; still, many intelligent adults refuse to reflect historically on the ideas and practices that have made us rich and powerful.
In the twenty-first century we confront more urgent global challenges arising from cumulative degradation, resource depletion, and global warming. Scientists of every stripe have made the case abundantly that greater change will be required. The current rates of resource use, carbon consumption, habitat destruction, and population growth are not sustainable. The standard of living enjoyed by the rich cannot be shared with billions of the worlds poor. The global food supply is imperiled by industrial monocultures, while free market distribution systems impose hunger on at least a quarter of the worlds population.their claim on lifes necessities. They think that the way we have lived is the only way we can live; that more sustainable ways must radically curtail our comfort and our happiness. This fear is rooted in assumptions at the heart of popular culture. Some years ago an aging friend shared a bit of wisdom on the challenge of retirement: There are two ways to make ends meet, he said. You can try to get more, or you can learn to need less. We can learn to need less, but we must first unlearn the compulsion to get more.
All people understand the world through stories we tell about who we are, how we came to be, and how we know what we know. In the United States our stories have focused relentlessly on liberty and progress while mostly dismissing the negative consequences that accumulated over time. Americans in particular tend to believe (are encouraged to believe) that freedom and prosperity depend absolutely on our current social and economic systems. As popularly understood, the story of modernizationof democracy powered by capitalismpresents itself as an unfolding natural phenomenon, as inevitable as sunset. Actually, the modern world came together in historical time. We created, through cumulative choices, a matrix of ideas and assumptions that shape our understanding of the world as we know it. The resulting framework is not nature itself but a narrative we chose to embrace because of rewards it promised. It constitutes a culture of exploitation that was constructed gradually from commitments to individual liberty, private property, Enlightenment-era reasoning, certain religious and scientific dogmas, human greed and arrogance, European imperialism, and the enslavement of people of color.
According to this narrative, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries heroic and creative Europeans seized the initiative to develop the underused resources of the Western Hemisphere. The resulting plunder of the New World was not recorded as a conquest but simply as the natural result of human ingenuity turned loose in an environment of riches. The systems of colonization fed agricultural, commercial, and industrial developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, in turn, touched off patterns of social and economic change that we embrace as natural and (mostly) benevolent. Over four centuries Western Europeans and their colonial offspring became enormously rich and powerful thanks, they said, to their own creativity, virtue, initiative, and hard workthat is, to modernization. If people elsewhere around the world suffered poverty and stagnation, it was not because of Western modernization but because they failed to work hard and embrace their opportunities in the same way. Because
This simply is not true. Modernization generated Western wealth and power, but it did so at a price that was paid by environmental ecosystems and by the rest of the global population. Exploitation, through wind-powered sailing ships, state-sponsored commerce (what historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism), staple crop plantation agriculture, and a tragically brutal form of racial slave labor, set the stage for industrialization. Empowered by the use of fossil fuels to drive big machines, industrialization radically transformed material life as well as the cultures of Western societies, resulting in the modern capitalist world order. The story told by the victors naturalized these patterns of exploitation and established what economists call free market forces as laws of nature akin to gravity and mechanics. In truth these natural forces rely on axioms every bit as arbitrary as the bases of decimal arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, and modern particle physics. As famously explained by Thomas Kuhn half a century ago, normal science makes sense within a paradigm of assumptions which scientists agree support their working hypotheses. But sometimes anomalies persist that force the analysts to step outside the paradigm and entertain radically different axioms to accommodate real time problems and data.
History abounds with examples of axiomatic assumptions we have managed to revise or abandon in pursuit of more satisfying ways to understand the world. For example, early generations of smart people believed in divine right monarchy as an essential foundation for political legitimacy and national independence. We have learned to believe otherwise. After 1500 African slavery became universally accepted among Western European people who found their access to wealth and power dependent on commodified human property. For nearly three hundred years this conviction reigned supreme and yet, within about fifty years, it fell from favor in much of Europe and America. By 1863 chattel slavery had lost its legal props in most of the modern world (although its shadow long persists in forms of racial and worker exploitation). To accommodate new realities in the twenty-first century we in the Westespecially in the United Statesmust imagine a paradigm shift of similar magnitude. We must learn to celebrate intelligent resource management and a planetwide sense of the common