Two new publications — one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the other in The Atlantic — help make a point that critics of the “Anthropocene” (the name, not the geological designation) have been making for years: that it’s not humanity that is somehow at fault for the ecological crisis, since many human societies over millennia have learned how to live more or less sustainably within their environments, and that those who have deserve more recognition for it, recognition that could and probably should include some measure of land repatriation. I’m referring, of course, to indigenous societies.
The PNAS article, co-authored by Erle Ellis and 17 other environmental and Earth systems scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, demonstrates, as its title puts it, that “People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.” This long history of “shaping” “nature” suggests a much more blurred continuum between “nature” and “culture” than was taken for granted until recently. The authors speak freely of “cultural natures,” the “global history of anthropogenic nature,” and of “anthromes” (or anthropogenic biomes) in a way that recalls the “nature wars” of the 1990s, when environmental humanists like Bill Cronon were chided by ecologists for disrespecting the boundary between culture and wilderness — except that now it’s scientists in PNAS who are doing that with hard scientific facts (rather than deconstructionist arguments) at their disposal.
The authors write:
“there is increasing evidence that human cultural practices can [and have] also produce[d] sustained ecological benefits through practices that expand habitat for other species, enhance plant diversity, increase hunting sustainability, provide important ecological functions like seed dispersal, and improve soil nutrient availability.” [. . .]
“Hunter-gatherers, early farmers, and pastoralists often shared regional landscapes, which they shaped through a wide array of low-intensity subsistence practices, including hunting, transhumance, residential mobility, long- and short-fallow cultivation, polycropping, and tree-fallowing that created diverse, dynamic, and productive mosaics of lands and novel ecological communities in varying states of ecological succession and cultural modification. In many regions, these diverse cultural landscape mosaics were sustained for millennia.” (p. 2, citations removed)
All of this is in “striking contrast to prior historical global reconstructions,” according to which “Wildlands,” defined by “the complete absence of human populations and intensive land uses,” were thought to cover over 80% of the Earth’s surface in 6,000 BCE. Today we know that such Wildlands covered “just 27.5% of Earth’s land in 10,000 BCE,” 4,000 years earlier than the other date (p. 7).
The progress here, as Ellis et al suggest in their last section heading, “Decolonial natures, past and present,” is indicative of the shedding of the colonial blinders that kept even the most hard-nosed scientists unaware of what they were seeing when Europeans arrived in the Americas (or Australia). These were, it turns out, managed landscapes, “cultured natures,” cultivated ecological mosaics, that looked like “wilderness” only because arriving Europeans didn’t know any better (or actively denied what they suspected), and because the biopolitical onslaught they brought with them, including an arsenal of new germs, had so quickly taken a terrible toll on the indigenous populations.
Ellis et al conclude that recognizing and empowering “Indigenous, traditional, and local peoples and their cultural heritage of sustainable ecosystem management through rights and responsibilities” is essential for achieving global conservation and restoration agendas. “Global land use history,” they write, “confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet” (p. 7).
This decolonizing message serves as a wonderful preamble to David Treuer’s provocative Atlantic article, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” just published as part of the series “Who Owns America’s Wilderness?” The article distills the recent trend toward recognizing the Aboriginal legacies of this country, and resonates well with influential articles like Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (with its 3600 citations and counting), which provocatively argued that real decolonization goes far beyond talk — toward actual repatriation of stolen land.
No one says that returning land taken away many decades ago by war or by broken treaty can ever be easy. The real point, as I see it, is to highlight the significance of land both for Indigenous people (and their descendants today) and for anything approximating the kind of re-indigenization that many models of environmental sustainability call for, and to point to those places where some measure of indigenous ownership is both possible and feasible. The national parks, as Treuer shows, are one such place.
Among the stolen lands are those transferred by the federal government to universities in the creation of the land-grant university system by the 1862 Morrill Act. High Country News, in their “Land Grab Universities” series, has been documenting exactly what those lands were, which institutions benefited, and how much of a financial windfall that resulted in for them over the decades. One of those institutions is my own, and an indigenous people’s working group is currently looking into what we might be able to do to redress the historical wrongs done, which our institution has benefited from.
Treuer’s piece should be read by every lover of the U.S. national park system. Lee and Ahtone’s “Land grab” article should be read by everyone who supports or teaches in the land-grant system. As for the Ellis et al piece, every intelligent person should at least be aware of this new and more accurate history of the Holocene, the time we are precariously poised to exit.
Cited articles
- Erle C. Ellis, Nicolas Gauthier, Kees Klein Goldewijk, et al, “People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 27, 2021 118 (17) e2023483118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
- David Treuer, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes: The jewels of America’s landscape should belong to America’s original peoples,” The Atlantic, published online April 12, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/
- Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-grab universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities