Monoculture clears the ground after 1492:
A natural forest or prairie has a diverse, complex system of inter-dependent species, a self-sustaining system (as long as it isn't poisoned). The various species, together with the ground and air and water, form an intricate web, full of checks and balances. Any species that starts to dominate, eats itself into an untenable crisis, and then there is a painful adjustment, till the balance is restored.
Modern agriculture takes this, on Iowa prairies and Brazilian jungles and everywhere else, and begins by clearing the ground, ripping up and killing every living thing, smoothing the dirt to a uniform flat plain. Then a single species, wheat or rubber or fast-growing pine, is planted, and that monoculture is defended against the return of diversity, with the regular application of poisons.
What we do in agriculture, we also do culturally. When Columbus made the oceans a highway rather than a barrier, while the Spanish were converting or killing or exiling all their Jews and Muslims, there existed a thriving cultural ecosystem in the "New" World. Several thousand languages; as many different Gods prayed to. Every possible variety of society, each with their own unique system of settling disputes, raising children, regulating sex and family, land ownership, government. The Europeans killed it all, replacing it with a "more productive" monoculture. What that asteroid did ecologically to the dinosaurs, the West Europeans did culturally to the Western Hemisphere. It was a Cultural Mass Extinction Event (CMEE).
There are many and varied excuses given, by the champions of monoculture, for the destruction and death they cause, "ground-clearing" on a scale larger and more thorough than anything Tamurlane or the Vandals or Hitler or the Khmer Rouge did. None of these excuses bear close inspection. The very words we use, are embedded with lies: we say we "discovered" the "New" World, implying there was no there there before we found it, that it was a tabula rasa, already a sterile cleared levelled field, just waiting for us, yearning for our bibles and swords and diseases.
We believe, and teach our children with an endlessly elaborated mythology (which we call "history"), that the Europeans were more "advanced". In what way, exactly? Closely examined, the superiority of the Europeans was exclusively in the arts of Death. They were more "advanced", only in the technology and organization and ideologies of military conquest. They were "advanced", in the same way that the 13th-Century Mongols were the most advanced culture in Eurasia at the time. Toledo steel made swords, that could be bent in half without breaking. The conquest of Iberia from the Moors had created a warrior caste, who thought nothing of 10 horsemen charging a thousand infantry, screaming "For God and King!"
The Incas created a system of runners and roads, a communication and transportation network which the Spaniards admitted was superior to what they had in Spain.
Inca agriculture was more technologically advanced, required more organization and building and planning, than anything the Spaniards could build, or even understand and maintain. It was a huge network of dams, canals, reservoirs, with an intricate system of mass organized labor to maintain it, and to allocate the water as needed for maximum production. When the Mongols conquered Central Asia, they found a similar terrain of mountains and deserts, and a similar agricultural system, which maintained thriving cultures and many large cities. The Herat Valley in south Afghanistan, before the Mongol Conquistadores came, was a center of global civilization for several thousand years. In this region, the cultures of Greece, Persia, India, China met and mingled, with results such as the Gandhara statues of Buddha done in the style of classical Greece. The Mongols, like the Spaniards in Peru, destroyed the canals and reservoirs, leaving rubble and sand and pyramids of skulls, and the population took centuries to recover. The cultures never did.
Native population of California:
at least 900,000 before European diseases arrived
300,000 when the first European settlements were established by the Spanish in 1769
100,000 in 1848, at U.S. annexation
32,000 in 1860, after ethnic cleansing by the 49er gold miners
16,000 in 1900
It is a Western-Judeo-Christian conceit, to define "superior culture" as "those with the most effective ways to kill other humans". The Mongols considered themselves superior, too.
Monoculture is inherently brittle. It may increase production, but it is prone to catastrophic crop failure. You get bumper crops, year after year, but at a cost. The cost is diversity, resilience, the death of back-ups and alternatives, if and when the OneAndOnlyCrop fails.
The "New" World CMEE is history, and there is nothing that can be done, now, to bring back the thousands of murdered languages, religions, cultures. But we could repent of our sins, forgive ourselves, and promise to sin no more. |
