Transition is easier than it might sound

Restoring peace with nature only seems difficult because we are so used to thinking in the ways of a unique 600-year period of history, the European Onslaught. This started in 1418 with the Portuguese arrival in Madeira, which began the Age of Discovery. It then unfolded globally through trade (often coercive, exploitative and long including slavery), colonial and imperial rule (likewise), and the invention of capitalism, nationalism and the other ideas and values of modernity. During it, we adopted attitudes and ideas that justified the expansion of our own social, economic and value systems into what we saw as an infinite global frontier. But this whole process is now grinding to a halt, and the thinking it shaped is fast becoming obsolete.

600 years’ worth of habits

The habits of thought of the European Onslaught represent an important strand of human nature. They have grown terribly strong through repetition and reward, deeply ingrained and seldom challenged, but at heart they are deeply natural to us. To understand this we must look back in time and sideways in geography and culture. For almost the whole word was occupied by people before the European Onslaught, and they were all living at peace with nature. It is important not to romanticise this, but all ‘indigenous people’ had and have rules – usually sacred ones that were taught to everyone from birth – about how to live sustainably within their own ecosystems. They had to. And we have certainly not forgotten how to do the same.

We are creatures of the late Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is a geological epoch that lasted from about 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, during which ice ages came and went along with droughts and floods, and rising and falling sea levels. The pre-human story is tangled, but we became fully human during roughly the last quarter-million years of the Pleistocene. This was hit by two ice ages and a warm interglacial, so climate change was just something we had to deal with. While doing so we walked, swam and rafted our way to Australia by 75,000 years ago and the Americas by 25,000 years ago.

Late Pleistocene settlement was a stop-start process

As we spread we became adept at invading new territory, and woe betide any local animals that were easy to kill with the hunting techniques we already had or invented on the spot. Likewise for local ecosystems that got in the way of our farming systems or the domestic animals, pets and commensals that we brought. We were always disruptive newcomers, and wherever people went there were waves of extinctions among large edible animals and plants sensitive to disturbance. This is the kind of ‘overkill’ thought and behaviour that would become global in the European Onslaught.

We stopped as often as we advanced

And we stopped for a lot longer. For having taken over a new place, we had to settle down and live there sustainably. We had to pay attention to the local rules of ecology, divide up the landscape and manage it according to what it could produce without undermining its capacity to feed and shelter our children and grandchildren. We therefore had to adapt the rules that we brought with us or invent new ones, along with the myths and cosmologies that would explain and justify those rules, and teach them to our children from birth. It took a generation in each river valley, up to many generations in each continent, but the overkill always stopped. The capacity to do all this is another important strand of human nature, also deeply natural to us.

A world at peace with nature

This way of looking at things contains hope and purpose for our present predicament. It means that everyone’s ancestors were once rapacious conquerors, but also that everyone’s ancestors knew how to live at peace with nature when they had to. And they always eventually did, since until recently the frontier was always quite close, and the rules of ecology were always hard and immediate, with no wriggle-room from global transfers of resources and impacts. Most of the world settled down, occupied by peoples ‘indigenous’ to each place, each in their own homeland and living freely in their own ways.

The Holocene changed things

About 11,700 years ago, the Pleistocene ended with the last ice age, and the Holocene began. So far this has been a relatively mild and stable climatic epoch. It made a lot of new things possible, including the discovery of agriculture. Farming could sustain cities, and cities offered new paths to power for the ambitious. Those who wielded urban power could then coerce rural production, and soon there were kingdoms and empires. Some worked out how to survive for a while, usually by continuous expansion at the expense of their neighbours. The frontier was someone else’s property, after all, and Onslaught thinking put down roots.

Warring states and creativity

China had a brief Warring States period from about 475 BCE until a single, durable empire was established some 250 years later. Without competing equal powers north of the Himalayas, China became self-contained and quietly dominant in East Asia. But in South-west Asia, North-east Africa and the Mediterranean, there was a warring states period that lasted for at least ten times as long. From about 2,400 BCE, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Kushite, Carthaginian, Achaemenid (Persian), Greek (Hellenic and Macedonian) and Roman polities and their many subsidiary and successor states all strove to eat each other, as did insurgent challengers from Central Asia (such as the Huns and Mongols) and from Islam. This intense, sustained competition drove everyone’s creativity to new heights.

Opportunity and enterprise

Having trained so hard and for so long, what Europeans developed  was the capacity to grab the whole world as soon as the opportunity arose. That came in the 15 Century, with Islam in disarray due to Mongol invasions (which had also caused China to abandon a nascent global role), and the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. The technologies of seaborne exploration and warfare were maturing, while the Renaissance was generating new ideas and popularising old ones. The details of what happened thereafter are many and varied, but the important things are the resulting attitude of mind, and its global consequences. The more we learn and think about the events that followed, the more horrible they seem. We can rationalise them as inevitable, or justify them as civilisational, but they still add up to extraordinarily widespread genocide (the destruction of peoples), ethnocide (the destruction of ways of life), and ecocide (the destruction of ecosystems).

Julian Caldecott