HIST 200 SUNY at Buffalo Environmental History Questions

This lecture was prepared by Stacie Edick from ?A Green History of the World: The Environment
and the Collapse of Great Civilizations? by Clive Ponting.
On Easter Sunday, 1722, the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen landed on a ~150 square mile, treeless
island in the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the west coast of South America. He found about
3,000 people living in huts or caves. They were constantly at war with each other and resorted
to cannibalism to supplement their scant supply of food. It was a mystery that the island
contained over 600 massive stone statues, scattered across the island, and located far from the
stone quarry where they originated. The people on Easter Island could barely feed themselves,
they couldn?t possibly have built and moved these great statues. Who did? And when?
Over the years other Europeans visited the island and witnessed the society?s further decline
until in 1877 the Peruvians captured and enslaved all but 110 old people and children. Soon
Chile took over the island as a sheep ranch and only a few of the native people remained.
Archaeologists eventually developed a theory that is now generally accepted.
?The history of Easter Island is not one of lost civilizations and esoteric knowledge. Rather it is a
striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the
consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is a story of a people who, starting
from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the
world for the technology they had available. However, the demands placed on the environment
of the island by this development were immense. When it could no longer withstand the
pressure, the society that had been painfully built up over the previous thousand years fell with
it.? (p. 2)
Easter Island was first settled by Polynesians sometime around the fifth century. They ?came
from south-east Asia and they reached the islands of Tonga and Samoa about 1000 BC. From
there they moved farther east to the Marquesas Islands about 300 AD and then in two
directions, south-east to Easter Island and north to Hawaii in the fifth century?[next ] to the
Society Islands about 600 [AD] and?New Zealand about 800{AD}.? (pp. 2-3) They migrated in
double canoes with a wide platform to carry people, plants, animals and food. The purpose of
these voyages was cleary to colonize new lands. The Polynesians must have had great
navigations and seamanship skills in order to make such a journey against prevailing winds.
When they reached Easter Island, it?s 3 volcanoes had been extinct for at least 400 years.
Lakes in the craters of these volcanoes provided the only fresh water on the island. There were
only about 30 species of plants, no mammals, a few insects and two types of small lizards on
the island. But the settlers (probably about 20-30 individuals) had brought with them chickens,
rats, sweet potatoes. The other food plants they brought did not grow in the severe climate of
the island.
?The basic social unit was the extended family, which jointly owned and cultivated land. Closely
related households formed lineages and clans, each of which had its own centre for religious
and ceremonial activity. Each clan was headed by a chief who was able to organize and direct
activities and act as the focal point for the redistribution of food?within the clan. It was this form
of organization and the competition (and probably the conflict) between the clans that produced
both the major achievements of Easter Island society and ultimately its collapse.? (p. 3-4)
On Easter Island very little time was required for growing sweet potatoes and raising chickens,
so the people had lots of time, which was directed into ceremonial activities including elaborate
rituals and monument construction. Each clan had it?s own ceremonial space which consisted of
an ahu, a large stone platform typical of Polynesian culture. On Easter Island there were over
300 ahu, mainly near the coast, and many were arranged with sophisticated astronomical
alignments, usually towards the solstices or equinox. Each ahu was surrounded by 1-15 huge
stone statues that survive today. They were carved at a quarry on the island, using only
obsidian tools. The male head and torso was crowned with a ~10 ton ?topknot? of red stone from
another quarry. These statues, weighing several tens of tons, had to be moved to the various
clan centers to be erected on top of the ahu. Since they had no beasts of burden, but plenty of
people with lots of free time, they used human power and tree trunk rollers to drag the statues to
their new locations.
By 1550 the population had grown to about 7,000 people. Then, suddenly, the society collapsed
and the population plummeted. Many statues were left uncompleted in the quarry. What caused
this sudden collapse?
?Massive environmental damage brought on by deforestation of the whole island.? (p. 5)
Analysis of pollen types shows that Easter Island had ?a dense vegetation cover including
extensive woods? when the Polynesians arrived. (p.5) As the population grew, trees were cut
down for gardens, heating and cooking, construction material for houses, tools and canoes. And
great quantities of trees were required for moving the massive stone statues. By 1500 the
shortage of trees forced many to live in caves. Canoes could not be built, so long voyages were
now impossible. Fishing nets from paper mulberry trees could no longer be made. Lack of tree
cover caused extensive soil erosion which damaged sweet potato production. Eventually
chickens were practically the only food source left, as evidenced by the defensive stone chicken
coops. 7,000 people could not live this way. Numbers fell rapidly. Without canoes, they could
not escape the environmental collapse they had caused. Competition over the few remaining
resources led to practically continuous war, slavery became common, and cannibalism was a
last resort. The massive stone statues of opposing clans were toppled. By the 1700?s visiting
Europeans found only a few still standing, and none stood by the 1830?s. When asked, the
natives people no longer remembered how the statues had been created and moved, and they
told the Europeans that the statues had walked across the island.
?For a thousand years they sustained a way of life in accordance with an elaborate set of social
and religious customs that enabled them not only to survive but to flourish. It was in many ways
a triumph of human ingenuity and an apparent victory over a difficult environment. But in the
end the increasing numbers and cultural ambitions of the islanders proved too great for the
limited resources available to them. When the environment was ruined by the pressure, the
society very quickly collapsed with it leading to a state of near barbarism.? (pp. 6-7)
They must have been aware of the problem, they could walk around the entire island in a day or
two. But when the limitations of their island resources must have become very apparent there
was a mad scramble to build more statues and secure more status (or perhaps favor from the
Gods?- Stacie) .
?Like Easter Island the earth has only limited resources to support human society and all its
demands?But have [we humans] been any more successful than the islanders in finding a way
of life that does not fatally deplete the resources that are available to [us] and irreversibly
damage [our] life support system?? (p.7)
Ponting, Clive. A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great
Civilizations. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
For further information Google Easter Island or Google IMAGES of Easter Island.
1491
The Atlantic Monthly, March 2002 v289 i3 pcover,41-6,48-53
1491: before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and
sophisticated than has been thought … the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.
Charles C. Mann. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine
The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the
Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human
settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too,
disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.
Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly
as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the
land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province’s northern
rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the brightgreen vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was
what had drawn the researchers’ attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth
inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.
Clark Erickson and William Balee, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson is based at the University of
Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that
day. Balee is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples
have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men
differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with
identical enthusiasm.
Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round
and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing
trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as
straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape–30,000
square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways-was constructed by
a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balee, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this
view but was not yet ready to commit himself.
Erickson and Balee belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of
what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was
taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived
for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that
even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his
schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balee would be to say that in their
opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than
previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so
successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere
thoroughly dominated by humankind.
Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and
history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with,
some researchers–many but not all from an older generation–deride the new theories as fantasies
arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. “I have
seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” says Betty J. Meggers, of the
Smithsonian Institution. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.” Similar criticisms apply to many of
the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania
State University. The problem is that “you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record
tell you anything you want,” he says. “It’s really easy to kid yourself.”
More important are the implications of the new theories for today’s ecological battles. Much of the
environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the
University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, “the pristine myth”–the belief that the Americas in 1491 were
an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of
1964, one of the nation’s first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin
historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of
environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the
work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?
The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson
says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense
zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted
trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an
intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophiha. The current inhabitants
of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area,
the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred
areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees–many of them, one assumes, of the varieties
that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.
After we landed, I asked Balee, Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees
invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for
millennia?
Balee laughed. “You’re trying to trap me, aren’t you?” he said.
LIKE A CLUB BETWEEN THE EYES
According to family lore, my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s great-grandfather was the first
white person hanged in America. His name was John Billington. He came on the Mayflower, which
anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not a Puritan; within six
months of arrival he also became the first white person in America to be tried for complaining about the
police. “He is a knave,” William Bradford, the colony’s governor, wrote of Billington, “and so will live and
die.” What one historian called Billington’s “troublesome career” ended in 1630, when he was hanged for
murder. My family has always said that he was framed–but we would say that, wouldn’t we?
A few years ago it occurred to me that my ancestor and everyone else in the colony had voluntarily
enlisted in a venture that brought them to New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter.
Half the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I
wondered, did they survive?
In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves.
The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a
recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers–hungry, cold, sick–dug up graves and ransacked
houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found
this corn,” Bradford wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done,” (He felt uneasy about the
thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another
deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had “died on heapes, as they lay in their
houses,” the English trader Thomas Morton noted. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of
their habitations made such a spectacle” that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be “a new
found Golgotha”–the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.
To the Pilgrims’ astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French
ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One
of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy
them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they
bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E.
Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the
director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have
killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history.
“The good hand of God favored our beginnings,” Bradford mused, by “sweeping away great multitudes of
the natives … that he might make room for us.”
By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more
than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the
coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the
Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited
Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived
there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges–British despite his name–tried to establish an English
community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better
organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within
months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his
ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.
Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the
time of contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496,” William
Denevan has written, this “remains one of the great inquiries of history.” (In 1976 Denevan assembled
and edited an entire book on the subject, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) The first
scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished
ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491
North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney’s glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent
researchers accepted his figure uncritically.
That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An
Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate,” in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite
the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting. In the view of James
Wilson, the author of The Earth Shall Weep (1998), a history of indigenous Americans, Dobyns’s
colleagues “are still strugghng to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology.” Not only
anthropologists were affected. Dobyns’s estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today’s
culture wars.
Dobyns began his exploration of pre-Columbian Indian demography in the early 1950s, when he was a
graduate student. At the invitation of a friend, he spent a few months in northern Mexico, which is full of
Spanish-era missions. There he poked through the crumbling leather-bound ledgers in which Jesuits
recorded local births and deaths. Right away he noticed how many more deaths there were. The
Spaniards arrived, and then Indians died–in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me
recently, “like a club right between the eyes.”
It took Dobyns eleven years to obtain his Ph.D. Along the way he joined a rural-development project in
Peru, which until colonial times was the seat of the Incan empire. Remembering what he had seen at the
northern fringe of the Spanish conquest, Dobyns decided to compare it with figures for the south. He
burrowed into the papers of the Lima cathedral and read apologetic Spanish histories. The Indians in
Peru, Dobyns concluded, had faced plagues from the day the conquistadors showed up–in fact, before
then: smallpox arrived around 1525, seven years ahead of the Spanish. Brought to Mexico apparently by
a single sick Spaniard, it swept south and eliminated more than half the population of the Incan empire.
Smallpox claimed the Incan dictator Huayna Capac and much of his family, setting off a calamitous war of
succession. So complete was the chaos that Francisco Pizarro was able to seize an empire the size of
Spain and Italy combined with a force of 168 men.
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in
1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618–all ravaged the remains of Incan
culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed
his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second,
related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before
Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of
saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many
European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared–“virgin soil,” in the metaphor of
epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines
initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person.
The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were
already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.
Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver
led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains
“promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.” Smallpox, Vancouver’s crew discovered,
had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were “most terribly pitted …
indeed many have lost their Eyes.” In Pox Americana (2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George
Washington University, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a
continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.
Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any immunity. The
virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec.
The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did
to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. “The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his
wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” In retrospect, Fenn says, “One of George Washington’s most
brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without
inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British.
So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney and his
successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known
with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the
people in the Americas died–the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.
Dobyns’s ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, a push from the hate-America crowd to
inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue to this day. “No question about it, some people want
those higher numbers,” says Shepard Krech III, a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of
The Ecological Indian (1999). These people, he says, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a
book, Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983)–and revised his own estimates upward. Perhaps Dobyns’s
most vehement critic is David Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin, whose
Numbers From Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of demographic fulmination. “Suspect in
1966, it is no less suspect nowadays,” Henige wrote of Dobyns’s work. “If anything, it is worse.”
When Henige wrote Numbers From Nowhere, the fight about pre-Columbian populations had already
consumed forests’ worth of trees; his bibliography is ninety pages long. And the dispute shows no sign of
abating. More and more people have jumped in. This is partly because the subject is inherently
fascinating. But more likely the increased interest in the debate is due to the growing realization of the
high political and ecological stakes.
INVENTING BY THE MILLIONS
On May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay, in Florida. Soto, as he
was called, was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He had grown very rich very young by
becoming a market leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund Pizarro’s
seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still. Looking quite literally for new worlds to
conquer, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to let him loose in North America. He spent one fortune to
make another. He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that would justify Soto’s actions. For
four years his force, looking for gold, wandered through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South
Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, wrecking almost everything it touched.
The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they had never before encountered an army with horses
and guns. Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins; along the way his men had managed to rape,
torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some researchers say,
was entirely without malice–bring the pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years
reconstructing the path of the expedition, Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the
present site of Memphis. It was a nervous passage: the Spaniards were watched by several