By now we have only a vague memory of the millenniums-long
war that raged between the nomadic hunter/gatherer cultures and the agrarian
revolution. This war in Europe and Asia culminated in the ravages of Ghengis
Khan’s Mongol hordes upon almost all of the settled peoples from the Asian
Pacific to Eastern Europe. Western Europeans have always viewed Ghengis Khan as
the devil and his demon hordes. But I am sure that he saw himself as the
champion of the ancient nomadic way. But even the Mongols were seduced by the
luxury of Persia, which they had invaded in order to destroy the agrarian based
civilization there.. The final phase of this World war against the nomads
culminated in the invasion of the Americas by European settlers.
Agricultural societies were more successful in generating
physical security for large populations, which, in turn, were able to gain
greater control over raw materials, food supply and territory. These burgeoning
populations were, in turn, driven to wars with each other, as room for expansion
and raw materials dwindled. These wars, often followed by karmic plagues and
famines, also served to temporarily reduce populations. A more recent example of
this process is the global influenza epidemic immediately following the first World
War (1914-1918) in which an estimated twenty million people died. Add this to the number
of people who died directly and indirectly in that war and you have one example
of what ecology calls ‘dieback'.
As we view history at this level we see the onrush of
increasing organization of nation states and increased mastery over nature as a
means to maintain large populations in a state of readiness for imperial
expansion, trade and war. This trend towards the control, mastery and
exploitation of the Earth and nature is culminating in our time as global
technology and the global, economic, political reality emerging, however
hesitantly, through the U.N. To be sure, this trend remained unconscious for
thousands of years because it was masked by a sensibility of religious belief
and idealism. God says to Noah “... and the fear of you and the dread of you
shall be upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth ...
etc. “ (Genesis 9: 2). This, being part of the covenant between God and Noah,
gives the expropriation of the fallen Earth and its creatures the appearance of
a sacred relationship. Many ecologists point to this aspect of Western theology
as the root cause of the mentality that has led to our current alienation from
the natural world.
Aboriginal cultures have managed to retain some sense of the
sacredness of nature, which, of course, means to experience it as a spiritual
reality and this is intimately connected to their remaining at the
hunting/gathering and small farming stage of social organization. These cultures
began to be marginalized thousands of years ago with the advent of the
worldwide, agrarian revolution. Even so, in the pre industrial world, the
relationship with nature retains a semblance of balance in the sense that
agricultural society is tied to the rhythms of nature and its festivals of the
seasons, where man sees the cycle of his own existence reflected back to him.
For the vast majority of the World’s peoples this is no longer the prevailing
reality and this is so, not only for our vast urban populations, but for the
mechanized employees of corporate agribusiness and the Third World, peasant
populations who aspire to urban lifestyles.
In Europe, the demonization of the pagan mysteries as
witchcraft and Satanism, which was used to justify their systematic destruction,
set Western humanity up for the materialism which was to follow in the
seventeenth century. Had we managed to retain these pagan populations and the
nature cultures that they carried we might have been in a position to force the
Industrial revolution to get off to a more ecologically responsible start. At
this late date these pagan earth loving cultures are beginning to reassert
themselves. But the damage has already been done by a century of
industrialization.
For Third World populations today it is technology which is
eliminating what is left of their mystery knowledge and culture. History, then,
from this perspective, represents a long slow fracturing of humanity’s
experience of nature as sacred, resulting in a process which culminates in our
time as technology. When ecologists speak of the resacralization of nature, they
are reaching an awfully long way back to a time and a sensibility, which is a
hazy archaic memory, even in the minds of peoples still ostensibly tied to the
land.
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