The Natural West

Dan Flores is an environmental historian.  His book, The Natural West, focuses on the region of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.  This ecosystem has been radically changed in the last 300 years, and a number of these changes have resulted in irreversible degradation.  Flores has a misty vision of restoring the West, and his work explores issues that contributed to ecological imbalances.  We can’t address challenges that we don’t understand.

At the time Flores was writing, many green thinkers were indulging in a fantasy that imagined an environmental Golden Age, when the continent had no scars from human activities.  Native Americans lived so lightly that they left almost no footprints.  Flores was among the scholars who questioned the fantasy.  What happened to the mammoths, mastodons, and camels?  Where are the wooly rhinos and saber-toothed cats?

He noted that many ecosystems were altered by the Indian practice of periodic burns to control the growth of brush, and to maintain grassland habitat that was ideal for bison.  In The Ecological Indian, Shepard Krech wrote that some of these fires grew too large and killed entire herds of animals.  Flores didn’t mention the “buffalo jumps,” where herds of bison were driven off the edge of cliffs.  Of course, far more impact was caused by the technologically advanced settlers.  Never before, in North America, have a group of humans wrecked so much, so quickly.

Obviously, we would not be where we are today if hunter-gatherers possessed a level of ecological knowledge that a small herd of ecology experts now have (and the vast herd of consumers really need).  If our wild ancestors had possessed wizardly understanding, then pockets of humans would not have reduced carrying capacity via overhunting, leading to the catastrophe of agriculture, and the resulting population explosion.

Some Western Indians were bison hunters for more than 8,000 years.  Bison can zip along at 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  On the wide-open prairie, sneaking up on a herd unseen, unheard, and unsmelled, required remarkable stalking skills.  Then, Spaniards brought domesticated horses to the New World.  Over the next 200 years (1680–1880), more than thirty Indian groups adapted horse-propelled bison hunting, which made it much easier to get lots of meat.  This very unusual era was recorded by white painters, and it has become a common perception of traditional Native American life.

Plains Indians imagined that there were infinite bison, it was impossible to deplete their numbers.  Herds had been boosted by the cooler wetter climate of the Little Ice Age (1550–1850).  Then, the shift to a warmer dryer trend reduced vegetation growth, which reduced carrying capacity for bison.  Meanwhile, the horse population exploded, and horses competed with bison for the same vegetation.  Among the many unwelcome gifts brought by settlers were bovine diseases like anthrax.

The Gold Rush migration of 1849 brought cholera, which triggered a diarrhea rush, killing many natives.  By 1850, there were many reports of starving Indians.  Comanches were eating their horses.  Competition for bison and horses spurred tribal warfare between 1825 and 1850.  Tribe raided tribe to snatch horses.  (See Paul Shepard’s book, The Others, for an excellent discussion of the many problems resulting from animal domestication.)

So, it turns out that bison herds were not infinite, and that horse-propelled hunting very likely did not have a rosy future, even if whites had stayed out of the West.  The experiment was cut short by industrial bison hunting, which accelerated after the Civil War ended in 1865.  It rapidly brought the species close to extinction.

I learned a lot from the chapter on the settlement of Utah, which got little notice in my history textbooks.  In the early years, Mormon society was strikingly un-American.  Rights to water and forests could not be privately owned by individuals.  They belonged to the entire community.  Joseph Smith believed that animals had souls, as did the Earth.  Farms were limited to 20 acres (8 ha) to discourage the emergence of wealth inequality.

Unfortunately, their impact on the ecosystem was similar to American communities everywhere.  Population quickly grew.  Most of the forests around Salt Lake City were gone in just ten years, and not reseeded.  Grassland was overgrazed.  War was declared on “wasters and destroyers” (wild predators).  When the transcontinental railroad was completed, many non-Mormons moved into Utah, accelerating the turbulence by increasing cultural diversity and economic competition.

In 1896, when Utah was admitted as a state, they were required to Americanize.  Polygamy was banned.  Firewalls were erected to separate church and state.  Utah leaped onto the free market bandwagon, and grew like crazy.  Explosive growth was not kind to the ecosystem.  Everyone agreed that overgrazing was dumb, but everyone disagreed on which animals were the problem (not mine!).

Americans brought many exotic weeds to the West, causing immense irreversible damage.  Cheatgrass displaced native vegetation across large areas.  It created biological wastelands, since cattle and wild grazers would not touch it.  Cheatgrass was highly flammable.  After a fire, exposed soil was vulnerable to erosion and gullying.  When it rained, the runoff of water was rapid, leading to sudden floods.  By 1930, the risk of repeated floods forced the abandonment of thirteen Utah communities.  In the 1930s, four Utah valleys that were once lush grasslands became barren dust bowls.

Flores was raised in a Mormon household.  He laments that this culture (like most Americans) perceives humankind to be the crown of creation.  The Earth is merely a funky waiting room on the journey to paradise, and if we trash it, it doesn’t matter.  Many in Utah, and other Western states, want federal lands returned to the states, so that resources can be profitably extracted, as quickly as possible, without the annoying restrictions of regulations (sorry kids).  The culture is conservative, and environmentalists are not warmly welcomed.  Growth is the god-word.

Flores circles the word “animalness,” and suggests that it might aid the healing process.  Behaving like the masters of the world has been very harmful to the planet.  What might happen if we came to perceive humans as one animal among many, in a circle of equals?  Many of the vital lessons in life are learned from mistakes.  Flores serves readers a lavish banquet of eco-booboos.  The West has been dying for 200 years.  What should we do?  What does “restore” mean?  Is it possible?  Are we willing to bury industrial civilization and get a life?

Flores, Dan, The Natural West — Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2001.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Science is a painfully tight pair of shoes.  It perceives the family of life to be little more than a complex biochemical machine.  It has created powerful tools for ravaging the planet’s ecosystems, creating a hard path for our descendants.  It gives us knowing, but not caring.  It’s not about wisdom.  It’s about pursuing the wants and needs of humans, with less concern for the more-than-human world.

Robin Kimmerer is a biology professor.  After being trained in the rigid beliefs of science, she heard a Navajo woman talk about the realm of plants from the perspective of indigenous knowledge.  For that woman, plants were not subjects, but teachers.  In a flash, Kimmerer realized the shallowness of her scientific training.  It only provides a pinhole view of reality.  Science is not enough.

Her grandfather was Potawatomi.  When he was a boy, the government sent him away to the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was trained to become an English-speaking wageworker.  He forgot his language and culture and drifted away from his people.  He never felt at home in either world.

Kimmerer has worked hard to reconnect with her Native American roots, because traditional indigenous cultures are blessed with a far more holistic relationship with the family of life.  All people on Earth have tribal ancestors who once lived close to the land, but so much has been lost with the passage of centuries.  Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is a collection of stories that focus on living with respect and reverence for the land.

She once asked a city lad where his sense of place felt strongest.  He immediately responded, “My car.”  Her book is especially important for the impoverished millions, who have grown up indoors, in a ghoulish netherworld of glowing screens.  She has a strong and respectful relationship with the land, and she describes it beautifully.  It’s a perspective that is almost absent in our culture, and without it, a long-term future for humans is impossible.  We must remember.

While explaining the culture of sharing, respect, and gratitude, she does not conceal her scientist badge.  So, readers are less tempted to automatically dismiss her stories as daffy rainbows of New Age woo-woo.  Science is not worthless.  In the centuries of restoration that lie ahead, it can offer some useful ideas, if we keep it on a short leash.  Nature will play a primary role in healing the land as much as possible — it knows what to do.  The far bigger challenge is dealing with the monsters that inhabit the goop between our ears.

In the native world, when a patch of ripe strawberries is discovered, the plants are warmly greeted.  The people ask permission to take some berries.  If the response is yes, they take only what they need, never more than half of the fruit.  The plants are thanked for their gift, and the pickers leave an offering of tobacco.

Gifts and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin.  The berry pickers now have an obligation to promote the wellbeing of the strawberry people, by depositing their seeds in good locations (not a toilet).  This is a relationship of reciprocity between berries and people.  The berry eaters need the plants, and the plants need the berry eaters.

On the other hand, the relationship between mainstream people and nonrenewable resources is not reciprocal.  The oil, coal, iron, and other minerals do not need the miners, nor is their wellbeing improved by the mining.  The planet’s atmosphere does not appreciate our toxic offerings of carbon emissions.  The ecosystem does not enjoy being treated like an open pit mine.

Cultures that enjoy a direct and intimate relationship with their ecosystem have far more respect for it than those that forage at malls and supermarkets.  Consumer culture receives enormous gifts from the land, but gives almost none in return.  Kimmerer’s students clearly understand that the relationship between consumers and nature is abusive.  It’s difficult for them to imagine what a healthy relationship would look like. 

Kimmerer lives in the Onondaga Nation.  At the school, the Haudenosaunee flag blows in the breeze, not the stars and stripes.  There is no pledge of allegiance to a political system that claims to provide “liberty and justice for all.”  Instead, each day begins with the Thanksgiving Address, in which the students express gratitude for all of creation.  It helps them remember that, “everything needed to sustain life is already here.”  We are wealthy.

I had one issue with the book.  Natives from corn-growing cultures see corn as sacred.  Corn was a recent arrival to the region of the eastern U.S.  Its expansion spurred population growth and conflict.  We know that hunter-gatherers could succeed in achieving genuine sustainability when they lived with the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint.  But environmental history has not documented a culture achieving sustainability via intensive agriculture.

Potawatomi legends describe a dangerous spirit called the Windigo.  It wanders across the land in the lean months of winter.  It is always hungry, and never stops hunting.  It’s a selfish spirit that is obsessed with its own survival, by any means necessary.  The Windigo is notorious for having an insatiable hunger.  The moral of the story is to share, to take care of one another.  Don’t be a greedy butthead.

Much to the horror of the natives, the colonists imported a diabolical spirit of incredible self-destructive overindulgence — Super Windigo.  In white society, mastering the madness of insatiable consumption was seen as an admirable mark of success!  Kimmerer winces.  “We spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.  It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

After a lifetime of shopping and discarding, we don’t return our bodies to nature.  The dead are placed in heavy caskets and buried deep in the ground, where nature will struggle for centuries to retrieve the nutrients.  I’ve always hoped that my corpse would be eaten by mountain lions in a wild location, an offering to an ecosystem upon which I have lived far too hard.

From other books, I have learned about cultures that did something like this.  Carl Jung noted that the Maasai tribe did not bury their dead.  Corpses were left outdoors for the hyenas to eat.  John Gunther wrote that the Bakutu people of the Congo recycled corpses by laying them on a termite hill.  In sky burial, corpses are fed to the vultures.  This is done in Tibet, and in Zoroastrian communities in India.  Evan Pritchard noted that the Western Algonquin people also practiced it.

Over the years, Kimmerer has heard the Thanksgiving Address recited countless times.  It is so inspiring to listen to people express gratitude for all of creation.  She longs for the day “when we can hear the land give thanks for the people in return.”  So do I.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013.

Questions for a Resilient Future is a 17-minute talk given by Kimmerer.

Returning the Gift is a brief essay.