After Byzantine authority collapsed, orchards were abandoned and the population crashed, but land degradation continued as the remaining inhabitants became dependent on intensive grazing. The insatiable goats began to eat their way through the shrubs, herbs, and grasses. The Ottoman government decimated surviving woodlands before the First World War, to obtain the wood needed for the Hejaz Railway. I and many other movie-goers thrilled at the sight of Arab guerrillas led by Lawrence of Arabia (a.k.a. Peter O'Toole) blowing up that railway in widescreen technicolour, without realizing that we were watching the last act in the destruction of Petra's forests. Petra's ravaged landscape today is a metaphor for what happened to the rest of the cradle of Western civilization. The modern surrounds of Petra could no more feed a city that commanded the world's main trade routes than the modern surrounds of Persepolis could feed the capital of a superpower such as the Persian Empire once was. The ruins of those cities, and of Athens and Rome, are monuments to states that destroyed their means of survival. Nor are Western civilizations the only literate societies that committed ecological suicide. The collapse of Classic Maya civilization in Central America, and of Harappan civilization in India's Indus Valley, are other obvious candidates for eco-disasters due to an expanding human population overwhelming its environment. While courses in the history of civilization often dwell on kings and barbarian invasions, deforestation and erosion may in the long run have been more important shapers of human history. These are some of the recent discoveries making the supposed past Golden Age of environmentalism look increasingly mythical. Let's now go back to the larger issues I raised at the outset. Firstly, how can these discoveries of past environmental damage be reconciled with accounts of conservationist practices by so many modern pre-industrial peoples? Obviously, not all species have been exterminated, and not all habitats have been destroyed, so the Golden Age could not have been all black. I suggest the following answer to this paradox. It is still true that small, long-established, egalitarian societies tend to evolve conservationist practices, because they have had plenty of time to get to know their local environment and to perceive their own self-interest. Instead, damage is likely to occur when people suddenly colonize an unfamiliar environment (like the first Maoris and Easter Islanders); or when people advance along a new frontier (like the first Indians to reach America), so that they can just move beyond the frontier when they have damaged the region behind; or when people acquire a new technology whose destructive power they have not had time to appreciate (like modern New Guineans, now devastating pigeon populations with shotguns). Damage is also likely in centralized states that concentrate wealth in the hands of rulers, who are out of touch with their environment. Some species and habitats are more susceptible to damage than others—such as flightless birds that had never seen humans (like moas and elephant birds), or the dry, fragile, unforgiving environments in which both Western civilization and Anasazi civilization arose. Secondly, are there any practical lessons that we can learn from these recent archaeological discoveries? Archaeology is often regarded as a socially irrelevant academic discipline that becomes a prime target for budget cuts whenever money gets tight. In fact, archaeological research is one of the best bargains available to government planners. All over the world, we are launching developments that have great potential for doing irreversible damage, and that are really just more powerful versions of ideas put into operation by past societies. We cannot afford the experiment of developing five counties in five different ways and seeing which four counties get ruined. Instead, it will cost us much less in the long run if we hire archaeologists to find out what happened the last time, than if we go on making the same mistakes again. Here is just one example. The American Southwest has over 100,000 square miles of pinyon and juniper woodland that we are exploiting more and more for firewood. Unfortunately, the US Forest Service has little data available to help it calculate sustainable yields and recovery rates in that woodland. Yet the Anasazi already tried the experiment and miscalculated, with the result that the woodland still has not recovered in Chaco Canyon after over 800 years. Paying some archaeologists to reconstruct Anasazi firewood consumption would be cheaper than committing the same mistake and ruining 100,000 square miles of the US, as we may now be doing. Finally, let's face the touchiest question. Today, environmentalists view people who exterminate species and destroy habitats as morally bad. Industrial societies have jumped at any excuse to denigrate pre-industrial peoples, in order to justify killing them and appropriating their land. Are the purported new finds about moas and Chaco Canyon vegetation just pseudo-scientific racism that in effect is saying, Maoris and Indians dp not deserve fair treatment because they were bad? What has to be remembered is that it has always been hard for humans to know the rate at which they can safely harvest biological resources indefinitely, without depleting them. A significant decline in resources may not be easy to distinguish from a normal year-to-year fluctuation. It is even harder to assess the rate at which new resources are being produced. By the time that the signs of decline are clear enough to convince everybody, it may be too late to save the species or habitat. Thus, pre-industrial peoples who could not sustain their resources were guilty not of moral sins, but of failures to solve a really difficult ecological problem. Those failures were tragic, because they caused a collapse in lifestyle for the people themselves.
Tragic failures become moral sins only if one should have known better from the outset. In that regard there are two big differences between us and eleventh-century Anasazi Indians—those of scientific understanding, and literacy. We know, and they did not know, how to draw graphs that plot sustainable resource population size as a function of resource harvesting rate. We can read about all the ecological disasters of the past; the Anasazi could not. Yet our generation continues to hunt whales and clear tropical rainforest, as if no one had ever hunted moas or cleared pinyon and juniper woodland. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of wilful blindness.
From this point of view it is beyond understanding to see modern societies repeating the past's suicidal ecological mismanagement, with much more powerful tools of destruction in the hands of far more people. It is as if we had not already run that particular film many times before in human history, and as if we did not know the inevitable outcome. Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias' evokes Persepolis, Tikal, and Easter Island equally well; perhaps it will some day evoke to others the ruins of our own civilization.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
EIGHTEEN
BLITZKRIEG AND THANKSGIVING IN THE NEW WORLD