The persistent myth of the green cult is a perverted version of Christianity’s Genesis narrative, indeed of an Arcadian myth that has pervaded much of Western for centuries. According to this myth, primitive humanity lived in an Eden-like perfect harmony with a natural world that was largely a vast, pristine wilderness.
This childish narrative pervades green-left thinking, which has blended it with Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ idealism, to produce the sort of tosh that’s taught to schoolchildren in New Zealand and Australia as ‘Mātauranga Māori’ and Bruce Pascoe’s risible taradiddle, Dark Emu. Even Medieval Europeans are supposed to have lived in a state of oneness with the land.
It’s all a load of bollocks, of course. As Jared Diamond put it, “tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war”. Anyone who thinks the Māori was uniquely eco-conscious stewards of the land might want to ask the moa, the Haast’s eagle or the vanished forests of the South Island. In Australia, the vanished megafauna would also no doubt have a strong opinion.
Humans, like any other animal, have always impacted their environment.
From deforestation to driving animal species extinct, human beings have been altering their environment in many ways since long before industrialization.
As the Māori and Aborigines show, too, this was hardly the sole preserve of wicked (White) Europeans. The American landscape was systematically modified by human activity for millennia prior to Columbus. Europeans mistakenly saw the New World as an Arcadian wilderness, because it had recently been re-wilded. Introduced diseases spread among the indigenous populations well in advance of European explorers and settlers, who arrived, had they known it, in recently vacated, highly modified landscapes that were in the process of being reclaimed by nature.
Indeed, says Richard Hoffmann, author of An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, “any long-inhabited environment bears the mark of generations of active human alteration”.
“The Europe inherited by the Middle Ages [was not] in any way pristine. From the Neolithic to the age of classical Mediterranean civilization successive human cultures had repeatedly affected and transformed European landscapes. Even Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene hunters deployed fire to make game more accessible. Subsequent agricultural adaptations (arable and pastoral) further opened European woodlands.” Intentional fires “to manage landscapes for game created open ‘parkland’ woods and in northwestern Britain, even anthropogenic steppe grasslands.”
Fire was used by both the Aborigines and the Māori, and many other pre-industrial people, as a large-scale land management tool. Early explorers in Australia remarked not only on the unique landscape – large, open grasslands dotted with trees, ‘like an English park’ – but on the near constant smoke from fires which they observed across the length and breadth of the continent.
Pre-industrial peoples were and are simply too concerned with scratching out a living to give a rat’s arse about the environment.
Preindustrial people were largely unworried about their environmental impact. In fact, “adversarial relations between humans and nature are a continuing strand in medieval thought.” Indeed, “late antique and early medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to ... Humankind” […]
Most people had no interest in anything like the modern concepts of environmental conservation or stewardship. “Environmental protection for its own sake had no meaningful role in official discourse.” Any legal limitations on the use of natural resources revolved strictly around how such rules affected human beings. For example, most hunting limitations were focused on keeping the peasants from engaging in an activity (hunting) perceived as above their station in life […]
Moral consideration for animals or the natural environment played essentially no part in preindustrial debates on hunting, fishing, forestry, and land use.
From before the Bronze Age to historical times, people with stone-age technology nonetheless cleared vast swathes of forests. The great forests of Germanic Europe vanished like the forests of the South Island. The eastern seaboard of Australia was likewise cleared by the first human arrivals, leaving behind the Aborigines’ preferred savannah hunting grounds (not to mention a distinctive layer of charcoal in the geological record).
By the 14th century, a mere 10 per cent of central Europe was wooded. The Domesday Book in 1086 recorded just 14 per cent tree cover – which fell by another two-thirds, to just six per cent, in the next 250 years. Sixty per cent of France was wooded in the time of Charlemagne. That shrank by half over the next few centuries.
With the loss of forests came the loss of many species.
Lion, hyena, and leopard had vanished from Mediterranean Europe by the first century BCE and bear populations in both the Balkans and the Apennines were much reduced. Elimination of all the now proverbially ‘African’ animals – lion, elephant, zebra, etc. – from areas north of the Sahara was complete by the fourth century CE. Besides these purposely targeted ‘trophy’ organisms, pursued on cultural grounds beyond all reasonable expenditure of energy, economic pressures took their toll on other biota. Capture and export of sturgeon from the Rhône delta to Roman markets, for example, caused steady shrinkage in their average size and eventual near disappearance from the archaeological record […]
“Such prized game as bear, wolf, and wild pig were extirpated from the British Isles by the end of the Middle Ages. The last individual specimen of the great native European wild ox, the aurochs, was killed by a known noble hunter in Poland in 1637.” Perhaps human activity resulted in “a western Europe lacking pine marten or sturgeon.”
Even the supposedly modern sin of ‘invasive species introduction’ is far from a modern, Western innovation. Rabbits, native to North Africa, were spread to Europe and Britain by Roman soldiers. The same soldiers also brought malaria to central Europe. Introduced carp decimated native salmon from the streams of coastal Normandy. The dingo wiped out thylacines and Tasmanian devils from Mainland Australia. Rats and dogs brought on Māori canoes devastated New Zealand’s bird species.
But there is one significant difference between modern Westerners and pre-industrial peoples. Westerners care about their affect on the environment. The environment, for probably the first time in human history, is seen as a good unto itself. Wealthy, industrialised peoples make concerted efforts on behalf of the environment.
