anthropology

This is a very interesting question. Although not familiar with the exact trajectory of India’s demographics over the period, I know of several things that started its population growing beyond what it would have been pre-British colonisation. You can see my books on the subject here: About Sheila Newman, social researcher I would also really like to have some more details and discussion on Indian demographic history, so anyone with ideas, please contact me. [This article is based on a question and my answer posted on Quora at https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-reasons-for-the-rapid-growth-of-population-after-Indian-independence]

Here is my explanation:

HENRY JAMES SUMNER AND LAND-TENURE AND INHERITANCE LAWS

For starters, the British rewrote Indian land tenure and inheritance laws to ressemble their own, which promote high population growth. I do not know whether these rewrites left any part of India alone.

Henry James Sumner Maine was the British lawyer who rewrote the laws. As I recall, he believed, correctly, that male primogeniture, increases the chances of capitalism.

HOW DOES PRIMOGENITURE INCREASE POPULATION GROWTH?

The way it does this is to favour the aggregation of land in private hands: only one person inherits the land, and the rest become landless labour, for factories, agriculture, army, religious orders. Land aggregation was also favoured by the fact that women could not inherit land, but their husbands could, so Lord X might marry Miss Y, who had no brothers, then he would get her family fortune. In the 17th century land began to be commodified and land-titles, instead of entailing responsibilities and rights to various members of the local community, were redrafted under a single title holder. Now that title holder could buy and sell land that had previously been kept together by the entailments and rights of others. The excuse, under pareto-sufficiency economics was that, as long as the winner of a dispute put more money into the economy through selling land, then it didn’t matter who lost out in the meantime, even if they died of cold because they had lost their entitlement to cut wood on the property, for instance. That’s how British law works and how it works in all the countries that Britain carried that law to. (In continental Europe, under the Roman law system with Napoleonic civil codes, population growth is largely democratically controlled and the societies remain relatively endogamous and sedentary - especially compared to Britain.)

Male primogeniture also increases the rate of population growth, unless it happens within a sedentery endogamous society where people live on the land and most do not marry. When people cannot for some reason survive on the land, they are forced to wander in search of a living. This breaks up endogamous clans and tribes and causes new marriage opportunities by exposing the wanderers to a larger pool of people, when they might previously have remained in ‘house’ families, where only one couple bred and the rest were aunties and uncles helping, in exchange for home and food.

Before British rule, it is probable that India was composed of many endogamous tribes (or peoples), subdivided into smaller kinship groups of skins or moities. (Note that I use the term ‘tribe’ to indicate a people made up of related clans, not to indicate a non-agricultural society or something.) (Let us leave aside the castes for a moment.) The populations of these tribes and the skins or moities within them would have been much smaller. The tribes would be in part defined by their territory, which would generally remain fixed as the tribes were ‘sedentary’ - meaning did not move around much.

Tribes have rules about marriage that keep their numbers within the limits of their territory and its ability to support people, based on a tension between endogamy (marrying within your clan, skin, tribe) and exogamy (marrying outsiders). (Animals and plants also do this.) [I have a theory as to how they do it and I wrote about it in Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations and the next book in the series, called Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, in case you are interested.] I have also published diagrams of how these rules work, if you are interested, at this URL: Overpopulation: Endogamy,Exogamy and fertility opportunity theory

The tension between endogamy and exogamy limits the number of people who actually marry and therefore the fertility rate. Exogamy enlarges your marriage pool and therefore raises growth rate potential.

GENDER SEPARATION AND MALE AND FEMALE LAND

Tribes also have rules and traditions that keep the genders more or less separate and this also reduces marriage opportunity. For instance, men and women of Australian Aborigines often lived in separate quarters, engaged in different activities in different sections of the tribal land. In the Pacific Islands and Africa, and probably everywhere once, men and women had separate land, and even villages. A couple might live together for a while after marriage, but generally the woman went back to her female kin and raised the children, with the boys going to live with the men when they were around six years old.

TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGIES

Different transport technologies mean that you can go further in search of a mate than you could just on foot. So elephants, horses, boats, cars, trains, aeroplanes all contribute to increasing fertility opportunities. The most exogamous systems are cities and the global economy.

BRITISH SYSTEM IMPACT

The British system dispossessed and dispersed endogamous and sedentary tribes, completely breaking their endogamous systems and distancing them from local biofeedback that helped set the algorithms for endogamy/exogamy. The British then imposed inheritance laws that further interrupted the usual way that people inherited the territory they were born on. They probably also changed the land-title system and accelerated land-commodification, developing a financial system that had little relationship to the biophysical qualities of the actual land.

CASTES

Castes seem to be a relic of past invasions and takeovers and the British imperialists were another cast, but fueled by coal and iron.

Pre-British castes existed and intermarried within their own. A ruling caste is probably always smaller in number than the caste they rule over. That is because the ruling caste acts like a dynasty to consolidate their land-holding and power, by intermarrying with close relatives. This means that they have very limited marriage opportunities, but a lot of land and power per person, living in a kind of House system (called cooperative breeding in non-human species) in palaces etc. The people they rule over - the lower caste - is characteristically squeezed into smaller land areas, with less power. It may have once consisted of a large tribe with various skin groups and gender pathways. As the dominated caste is squeezed in together, these pathways and skin divisions get mixed up and broken. Usually there are battles and the deaths of the overtaken tribe cause marriage vacancies. Too many changes to write about here. If the lower caste remains endogamous and sedentary, then its population will be limited. If, however, as under the British system, if finishes up without land and having to work for low wages in cities, it will (a) have increased marriage and fertility opportunities and (b) if there are no laws enforced against child labour, may have a lot of children because their small wages will enhance the household income.

HOW DID ENGLAND GET THIS WAY?

I’ll just add that the British land-tenure and inheritance system of primogeniture, which only changed in the 1920s, was imposed on the British by William the Conqueror, who came from areas of France settled by Vikings in the 19th and 10th century. Under Viking inspired law, Britain was a colonial frontier that had to be defended by knights. The knights received parcels of land from the king in exchange for defending it. Women were not considered to be fighters, so the land and the buildings on it, could only be owned and passed on by men.

After the primogeniture rule changed in the 1920s, the system still tended to dispossess and cause landless labour because there were no rules requiring parents to pass on their estate to their children. (This was the subject of my book, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.) Under Roman law, however, the law compels parents to pass on their estate to children equally to both sexes. This is how land remains relatively proportionately within families and you have male and female inheritance lines. (The French system is the subject of the book I am currently writing which will be called, Demography Territory Law 3: Land-tenure and the Origins of Democracy in France.

Expansive Economies and Limited Economies: Industrial capitalism is characterized by population growth, economic growth, expansion and intensification. [1] Although there was a short-lived case of industrial capitalism between about 1585 and 1622 in the Netherlands, [2] industrial capitalism as we know it today really originated in England, based on the apparently limitless fossil reserves of coal and the presence of many landless people who had to live by their labour. [3] These vast reservoirs of fuel gave rise to technologies that permitted mass production and facilitated the conquest and settlement of lands all over the globe. In the 20th century petroleum oil replaced coal as the fuel of industrial expansion, particularly where wheeled transport was concerned, although coal remained a mainstay for electricity production. [This article is an extract from Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, which is part of a four-book series, of which the first two have so far been published.]
In contrast to Britain, America, Australia, Canada, with their larger landmasses, fuel reserves and well established trade links, small isolated islander societies had to learn to live within firmly fixed, immediate, territorial limits.

Any isolated island society which failed to do this must have perished quickly.

Two famous examples of reputed ‘failure’ to live within limits were Nauru and Easter Island (Rapanui). Nauru society had survived for many centuries, perhaps two or 3,000 years, but was quickly brought to its knees by capitalist ‘success’. Remarkable for its natural wealth and fertility, it did not survive the transformation of its phosphate and limestone coral-island base into a guano-mine for global-based agriculture, despite access to large but transient commercial wealth. [4]

From a well-watered densely vegetated, undulating Eden of native gardens, it was razed within about 62 years (between 1906 and it independence in 1968) by mining shovels to a flat, waterless desert, within a narrow fringe of marginal sandy coast. Rainfall ceased to gather on the island, but simply ran off the edges. The once self-sufficient nation now imports almost all food and water from Australia.

Nauru sought compensation in the 1990s through the ineffectual International Court of Justice but finally settled with Australia outside the court for a paltry $107 million.
Nauruans are now a spectacularly unhealthy and divided people, who have been obliged to rent out their devastated country as an international refugee camp to the colonial Australian government.

Although industrial economic exploitation for outside interests quite clearly destroyed Nauru, the wider industrialized world knows little of this. The press portrays the tragedy of Nauru as something the islanders brought on themselves.

Whereas the fate of Nauru is accessible to any who care to seek – although few do - the decline of prosperous Easter Island (Rapanui) has become shrouded in mystery and myth. It has become the subject of famous inconclusive investigations and explanations, including Thor Heyerdahl’s rafting experiment to test a theory that an earlier race of people built the famous giant statues on the island, and of Jared Diamond’s Collapse book among many others. Diamond popularized a theory with elements of biblical parable, not unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, but minus God.

Such theories leave the wider industrialized world with the idea that the Rapanuians were ironically the masters of their own destruction.

It seems, however, that Easter Island was, after all, like so many islands, including beautiful, rich Haiti, just another island victim of piracy and colonial forces in the European Trade Wars. The overwhelming evidence for this will be presented further on in Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations for Easter Island and in Book Three for Haiti.
Recognising the real causes of the destruction of Nauru, Easter Island, Haiti and similarly fated islands has far-reaching consequences.

For Jared Diamond, a North American, one reason to explore the failure to prosper of Easter Island and whole civilizations in the ‘developing world’ was to try to rationally dispel 20th century racist theories for persistent poverty and overpopulation among brown and black peoples. Another reason was because Diamond saw a parallel between the fate of Easter Island and the likely fate of capitalist growth economies, as doomed to collapse.

Diamond theorized that, like modern global citizens, the Easter Islanders failed to heed abundant signs that they were overpopulating and overexploiting their environment. For years this idea has been a popular subject of elaboration by ecologists like Tim Flannery in his book The Future Eaters [5] and bloggers and list-owners like Jay Hanson, who owned The Dieoff List [6] and pioneered EnergyResources among several famous resource depletion discussion lists. Just key Easter Island into an internet browser and you will find endless discussions about the mystery of the islanders eating themselves out of house and home as they continued to senselessly construct huge statues.

Ecological die-off writers’ theorise that the major difference between Easter Island and nations in the global economy is one of scale. The apparent inability of Easter Islanders to take stock in time contained a dramatic irony due to the tininess of their territory, which meant that the warning signs should have been inescapable to all but the willfully blind. In these days of sophisticated modern communications and widespread education, similarities can easily be drawn.

Why, ecologists ask, do modern humans also sit like proverbial experimental frogs in slowly heating water, and fail to jump out of the saucepan or turn off the gas? How is it that humans seem not to understand the incremental nature of systems failure, despite a myriad of gauges and dashboards, statistics and publications?

“Are we all doomed, like the Easter Islanders?” the cry goes out.

What if our fundamental assumptions are wrong and the Easter Islanders actually didn’t befoul and destroy their own nest after all? I will argue a need to abandon the parable that the Easter Islanders brought about their own doom because it probably is no more true than that the Nauruans brought about theirs. (More about this later.)

The untrumpeted and inarguable truth is that Easter Island, like many, many successful Pacific Island societies, managed to survive for thousands of years. The durability of Pacific Island settlements is born out by DNA records which show that the Lapita people and their societies have been around for between 40 and 60,000 years, notably in New Guinea.
Major exploration and European colonization of Pacific Islands occurred a century or two later than in many other areas, like South America and Africa. The transition in the Pacific from self-sufficiency and order to overshoot and disorganisation over the 19th and 20th centuries was therefore in many cases carefully and scientifically documented by anthropologists whose excellent work now lies in dusty tomes. Not all of it caught the limelight of controversy like Margaret Mead’s study of Samoa. [7]

If what emerges is that colonisation and capitalism destroyed these island cultures, does that mean that the same forces are now destroying the rest of the world as scientists like Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery seem to think?

Well, yes and no.

This book argues that there are two major systems in the industrial world. One of these systems is beyond the control of its citizens, but the other is not.

The work of Diamond, Flannery and others does not take significantly into account that the remorseless conditions of uncontrollable population growth and economic growth which are driving some major first world countries into overshoot do not really exist in the Western Continental European system.

Yes, Europe’s population is too big to maintain without fossil fuel despite nuclear supplements already in place and it is causing unsustainable environmental destruction beyond and within its own borders, but the Europeans know this and they are preparing to ‘downsize’ thorough natural attrition. In fact population growth in Europe slowed dramatically from the first oil shock in 1972-73.[8] The problem is that the populations of North America, Britain, Australia, Canada, etc – the Anglophone states – failed to slow their growth after the first oil shock, even though this was apparently desired by some of their leaders. [9]

Not only did they fail to slow down, they have actually increased their population growth rate on bases which have more than doubled since the 1970s, in the face of increasingly serious threats to democracy, international politics and environment.

Since the oil price-rises and global financial shocks at the beginning of the 21st century, the Anglophone states have hugely ramped up aggressive exploitation of their own, as well as other countries’ natural resources, with horrendous consequences to environment, democracy and international politics. (War with Iraq, Afghanistan, fracking for gas, blowing the tops off mountains for coal that had been considered uneconomic half a century prior, mining arctic national parks, etc.) These consequences have shocked and alarmed their own informed citizenry and the rest of the world. Yet the Anglophone states do not seem able to exert any more control over their fates than did the Easter Islanders, the Nauruans and the Haitians.

The problem of inertia in dealing with ‘overshoot’ in the Anglophone states is worsened by their institutional and commercial investment in continued population growth.
Europe’s Roman law system seems to contain a solution in its retention of some features of traditional local societies. Starting with France, the system has been adopted by nearly every country in Europe since the 19th century, making the Anglophone system a minority one.

The principle difference between the systems is that Anglophone state citizens have very little democratic power to organize to defend themselves against a Market and destructive corporate interests to which they and their governments have become captive. In continental Europe, however, citizens and the state have quite effective power against corporate interests, largely because the state still controls most of the land-use. In the Anglophone states, private and corporate ownership of land, resources and utilities rivals that of the state.

Industrialization looks increasingly like a short-lived phenomenon. Unlike the successful Pacific Islander societies, industrial society has no experience of economies or polities lasting thousands of years. Despite this, business as usual in industrial societies, depends on a widespread assumption that industrial capitalist society will go on forever. Moreover, it is believed that the future holds material utopias which will gradually fuse into some kind of total knowledge. A popular book by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity, is an excellent example of this new religion. Central to Kurzweil’s thesis is an extrapolation of “Moore’s Law” where trends based on past rate and production of technological improvement go on exponentially forever. [10] This works fine as an isolated theory, but the author gives little consideration to practical problems. The major practical problem is the concomitant trends in material, social and environmental costs [11] that underlie those past trends and which extrapolation of those trends would also increase.

NOTES

[1] Burnham, Peter, 2003. Capitalism: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Oxford University Press, p.64"Karl Polanyi concludes that capitalism did not emerge until the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. Capital existed in many forms - commercial capital and money-dealing capital - long before industrialization. For this reason the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is often referred to as the merchant capital phase of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dates from the last third of the eighteenth century, finally establishes the domination of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to liberals, writers in the Marxist tradition understand twentieth-century developments in terms of the movement from the laissez-faire phase of capitalism to the monopoly stage of capitalism. On the basis of Lenin's famous pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the monopoly stage is said to exist when: the export of capital alongside the export of commodities becomes of prime importance; banking and industrial capital merge to form finance capital; production and distribution are centralized in huge trusts and cartels; international monopoly combines of capitalists divide up the world into spheres of interest; and national states seek to defend capitalist interests thus perpetuating the likelihood of war (see also imperialism).

[2] The Netherlands case is explored in detail in Book 2 of the Demography, Territory and Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, series in the chapters related to the Trade Wars from the 14th century to the 19th century.

[3] This phenomenon of dispossessed labourers in Britain is a core subject of the second volume of Demography, Territory and Law.

[4] Mary Nazzal, April 2005. An Environment Destroyed and International Law, p.3. http://www.lawanddevelopment.org/docs/nauru.pdf. "By 1906, the Pacific Islands Company reached an agreement which granted them mining rights in Nauru at which point the company was renamed the Pacific Phosphate Company. It is interesting to note that at this time the Nauruans could already foresee the demise of their island. A traditional song created in 1910 illustrates this point:
By chance they discovered the heart of my home
And gave it the name phosphate
If they were to ship all phosphate from my home
There will be no place for me to go
Should this be the plan of the British Commission
I shall never see my home on the hill.'"

"[...]The Jaluit-Gesselschaft mining rights were transferred to the Pacific Phosphate Company for a cash payment of £2000, £12,500 worth of shares in the Pacific Phosphate Company and a royalty payment for every ton exported. While the Nauruans were not part of any formal agreement, the Germans paid the native landowners a very modest amount per ton of rock removed from their land."

After Germany was defeated, Nauru became part of a new political agenda designed at the 1919 Versailles and Australia occupied and administered the island.

See also, TED (Trade Environment Database) Case Studies: Case Number: 412, Case Mnemonic: Nauru, Case Name: Phosphate Mining in Nauru, Case Author: Michael E. Pukrop, May, 1997. http://www1.american.edu/ted/NAURU.htm.

[5] The passage you are reading is from Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013. The second book in the series is, Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014. The volume in the series that includes remarks on Haiti is still being edited. It will be published by Countershock Press as Sheila Newman ,Demography Territory Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Democracy in France, probably in 2018.

[6] Tim Flannery, 1994. The Future Eaters, 1994, Reed Books, Melbourne.

[7] This was a yahoo list about energy resources that was popular in the late 1990s and which was one of the first run by Jay Hanson in a series of yahoo lists with an international membership. There is an associated Dieoff website at http://www.dieoff.com. Jay Hanson has a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/JayInHawaii [Since these old addresses don't have SSL certificates, I have not activated links to them.]

[8] Sykes, Brian, 2002. The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, Corgi Press, UK.

[9] This slowing was a precautionary response to the prospect of oil depletion, which threatens the survival of the unprecedentedly large post-war populations. See Chapter 7 of Newman, S.M., 2002. The Growth Lobby and its Absence in Australia and France. Environmental Sociology Research thesis, Swinburne University, 2002. https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/a3115a39-c50a-4504-8d1f-4aca21be26fd/1/Sheila%20Newman%20Thesis.pdf, Chapters 6 and 7. [Note that the virtual location of this thesis at the universitiy changes from time to time, so if you cannot find it there, I suggest you use a search engine to find its new address or other copies that exist on the internet. ]

[10] Stephen D. Mumford, 1996. The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, Centre for Research on Population and Security, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, pp.179-352. This study also contains an appendix recommending population growth reduction as a method of combatting fossil fuel depletion.. (Appendix 2.) NSSM 200 stood for National Security Study Memorandum. This was an interagency study of world population growth, US population growth, and the potential impacts on national security. In this work evidence was given to support an argument that population policy initiatives failed largely due to interference from a lobby group of Catholic bishops in the United States. See pp.179-352).

Aristide R. Zolberg, 1993. Are the Industrial Countries under siege. In G. Luciani, (Ed), Migration Policies in Europe and the United States. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, pp.53-82, p. 61 : "In the 1970s, mounting objections by conservative segments of the citizenry to the presence of culturally and often somatically distinct minorities, as well as the oil crisis and ensuing economic crisis, prompted the governments of the industrial countries to undertake a drastic reevaluation of ongoing immigration, but the difficulty of reducing the flows to the desired level, as well as to restoring the status quo, precipitated renewed fear of 'invasion'. In the United States, in the 'stagflation' 1970s, estimates of illegal immigrants escalated to as high as twenty million, on the basis of which it was argued that the nation had 'lost control of its borders'. The major solution proposed was to impose sanctions on employers of unauthorized labour, but this failed of enactment because of resistance by organized business interests, so that in 1979 the Congress established a commission to overhaul the entire immigration system."

[11] Ray Kurzweil, 2005. The Singularity, Penguin Group, USA. Review by Robert D. Steele. www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/product-reviews/0670033847/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1.

[12] Energy costs in fuel and materials, plus the social costs of the politics of wealth distribution (piracy, slavery, environmental impoverishment, third world inequality, destruction of whole peoples through colonization, loss of biodiversity, rise in pollution, social engineering etcetera.)

“Si spegne, signori, si chiude”
("Lights off, gentlemen, we are closing down”)

Recently a well-known professor of Siena University, a hydrology expert and director of FAO development projects in Africa, launched an extraordinary thesis, using instruments of cultural anthropology, in an Italian publication.

In the middle of the renewed interest in demography, with one side decrying the population dearth and the other denouncing the obscene threat of overpopulation, professor Pietro Giuliano Cannata has introduced what amounts to a new world vision, challenging both views.

Liberation from the shackles of determinism is at hand.

For Cannata, the long and anguished process of evolution, dictated by biological necessity, but without a design (telos) has been overtaken by culture, which now governs evolution.

Reading the book is in itself an experience regarding the revelation of the psychological forces that impel our behaviour and preoccupy every human being. Fear of death and attempts to dominate and exorcise it, using a variety of means from civilisation to civilisation, define those civilisations in major leit-motifs.

I use the editor’s comment to convey the main thesis:

“Suddenly one day, it became clear that the human species was taking control of its own destiny, because humans started to “choose”, in a confused and intermittent way, between life’s accidentally encountered bifurcations, in the long story of biological blind evolution.

Among these choices one triumphed over others: the decrease of births and the consequences of this, plus a significant new element: the refusal to procreate.

What were the reasons for this reluctance? Apart from the usual causes of economic difficulties, lack of social services, demand for political and professional participation by women, and aspirations for a continuously higher quality of life, another reason appeared. This one is a guiding anthropological, psychological and cultural factor, the unconscious determination to shirk the call for procreation, to refuse to transmit life.

After winning the competition for nourishment and space, after madly multiplying and achieving extraordinary levels of well being, consuming to satiety almost all the world, the human species refuses to grow anymore. Humans are getting ready for the final decline, in a disciplined way.”

The author wants to show an ontological transformation of evolution, no more driven by blind necessity and condemned to repeat the past. Life then, as glimpsed through the testament of some great philosophers and poets, is an insensate flight towards Nothing. The question about our final destination has no answer since the faith in a divine origin and destiny has dwindled.

The old fertility paradigm

The old paradigm imposed the fertility imperative on women. The female of the species will however soon everywhere be liberated by contraception and the possession of her body. History points to a rather different view of the maternal instinct: "Against the terror of repeated pregnancies, reality shows abortion and infanticide to be common practices. The casual smothering of the new born (which resulted in the canonical law of the suspended cradle), exposure to freezing weather, the fable of the children lost in the woods…”

Did men invent the maternal instinct?

Was the notion of maternal instinct invented by men, to better subjugate women and insure their cooperation in the propagation of their genes?

These and other strange questions run through the book, supplied and documented with vast philosophical, environmental and anthropological knowledge. The mind boggles and is taken over by a sense of despair, an outcome which I am sure the author did not intend. On the contrary, he seems to present the vision of a future without humans as the best solution to this absurd eternal flight towards death, the only sure thing in the uncertainty of life.

To be born - "Ed è rischio di morte il nascimento" - ("To be born is to risk death" - G.Leopardi) is the same as being mortal. Mortality is a state of being so intolerable that every century, every culture has invented a way to exorcise and justify it. The thirst for meaning cannot be satisfied: the enlightenment has eliminated all dogmas and the crumbling edifice of faith brings with it isolation and alienation.

Challenging paradigm of dominant males' reproductive success

Among the numerous themes to be dissected is the presumption that dominant males dominate natural selection in reproduction, denying the weak the chance to reproduce themselves.

“But the examination of DNA explodes this theory, showing more exceptions than confirmations of the dominant male theory, revealing six different fathers for each of the six kittens born to one female cat. Every male cat had a chance. Selection is therefore dictated by chaos.”

"It is clear that the health of the planet is a human task. It depends on humanity. Humanity is freeing itself from the unbearable weight of the world. This liberation will be the end of the future and maybe the end of history, because our descendant’s won't continue to get on and off the merry-go-round. Inexorably, the merry-go-round will slowly empty itself and finally stop. Nobody will get on anymore."

"Lights off, gentlemen, we are closing down."

"Michael Crichton spoke of environmentalists requiring a belief in an unspoiled 'Eden' that existed before we corrupted it and will again exist once we have had our comeuppance. My thought is that the belief that Aboriginals were noble eco-savages falls into this same category. The Platonic need to believe in perfection." Tim Murray

Whilst I am a great fan of Tim Murray's, I feel the topic and the opinions expressed need further investigation.

Tim Murray's article, The Record of Indigenous North Americans raises the issue of whether non-capitalistic or less complex cultures were as unethical or worse than modern industrial societies. Since the initiator of the debate, Tim Murray, hails from Anglo-Canada and talks about North American Indians, I will proceed as if we are mainly talking here about Anglo-capitalism. I don't want to be accused of cultural-cringing because of my own precision of 'Anglo' capitalism, so I will precise here that the system of capitalism and industrial society originated in England and colonised itself most typically in the English-speaking settler societies like the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and, I think, South Africa. Other capitalisms have different relationships with fossil fuels, democracy, and land-inheritance systems. They incorporate other organisational, economic, social and political blends, although industrialisation is heavily affected everywhere by Anglo-capitalism.

I think that the imbalance of romanticism almost entirely favours fossil-fuel based Anglo-capitalism. I agree with Michael Creighton about environmentalism as a religion in that, clearly, some environmentalism is religious. Corporations, spin-doctors, the mainstream media and advertising (the latter three being parts of the same thing) rely on this uncritical faith by the public in symbols and banners. Religious environmentalism ritualises and promotes 'environmental values' in the same way religions push various other ethical values, without the rituals having much if any practical application to Energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) and preserving biodiversity, any more than a politician's or Corporate CEO's swallowing wine-soaked bread from a priest (taking of the Eucharist) necessarily affects their real-life conduct of business.

The same religious approach is often present in defenses of the superiority of industrial society and of what passes for democracy in Anglo-capitalist societies. I would also say that people believe naively in the value of their governments in the way that children believe that their parents are essentially good and loving even when they are cruel, dishonest, niggardly and abusive. To seriously challenge the idea that your country's leader ultimately has your country's welfare at heart, upon which your welfare utterly depends, is in practice as unlikely as a pre-schooler losing faith in his mother or a priest losing faith in the God the Father. Although it does happen, populations have to be pushed to the limit and to have little left to lose before they seriously challenge outrageous governments. The tendency is for the worshipper to seek in themselves the explanation for bad behaviour in a leader, a parent, or a deity. The first person the doubter approaches is the parent or the priest, who reinforce the dogma of course. In Australia the tendency is to write to one's member of parliament or to the editor of a mainstream newspaper - with predictable results. The last person we tend to rely on for verification is ourself.

Anglo-capitalism is a system born of dispossession and one which has industrialised cruelty to humans and animals on a massive, constantly worsening scale. (See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, a longer view, Verso, London and New York, 2002 and Christopher D. Cook, Diet for a dead planet

There is abundant evidence of steady-state hunter gatherer and herding cultures lasting many hundred and even thousands of years. They had to get along with the other species in their environment because they depended upon them for survival; they could not afford to to damage or scare them all away. Those cultures which did break their environments also broke, died back, and often did not survive. The societies which survived for long periods got it right.

A recent book which tests theory on the durability of such cultures is Fikret Berkes & Carl Folke (Eds.), Linking Social and Ecological Systems, Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, Cambridge Univ Press, 2000.

Only if we equate material abundance - an accident of fossil-fuels permitting complex technology, starting in England and producing ghastly inequities and sufferings there which then were globalised and continue to burgeon - with some kind of evolutionary progress of the species (which I find an absurdity) - could we pretend that the amount of waste and destruction in our culture was justified. That is, however, a widely held belief, marketed as an excuse for grossly interfering with peoples' rights in non-industrialised countries.

My view is by no means some kind of cultural cringe about what was imposed on my ancestors; it is a political view I have formed through the experience of testing Anglo-capitalist associated democracy and trying to make the system live up to the values that Tim believes it embodies. The capitalist Western Culture simply doesn't actually follow through on the democratic and kindness values that it markets itself under. The only reason a shrinking proportion of those under its sway still believe that it does is because they have not tested those values and because they happen to remain a part of the shrinking circle of beneficiaries. There are many countries out there which are actively revolting at the cost they bear for provisioning Western capitalist culture Inc.

This comment is also not some kind of defense of communism or socialism, which, as far as I can see, had their roots in an opposition to capitalism and classically attempt to operate on the same dehumanising scale. It looks as if Western capitalism is now going the same way as Soviet communism, but now Russian capitalism is on the rise - and for one reason only - fossil fuel possessions. As Western fossil-fuel sources deplete, Russian and ex-Soviet sources are still comparatively well stocked.

I think there is a conflict in the anti-population movement between those who have not sufficiently explored the fossil-fuel connection between wealth, technology and mass propaganda and those who look at thermodynamic underpinnings of culture and social systems.

With regard to Michael Creighton (a favourite author of mine) and his comments about the Eden myth and popular romanticism of less complex cultures, my own opinion is that Creighton romanticises his own complex culture. I think he has bought the commercial myth that all our ancestors laboured in misery and cruelty until the industrial revolution brought them out of their torment. That's the myth of Industrial Eden. I look forward to Creighton writing a new science-based novel on the role of fossil-fuel reserves on capitalism and the relationship or non-relationship of capitalism with democracy.

By the way, Creighton's ideas for strengthening and depoliticising the funding of scientific research are very interesting. Take a look here.

I would be interested to see Tim Murray look into his Icelandic origins to find out more about the traditions of kindness, responsibility, altruism and friendships with animals there. As I have probably made clear, I think that capitalism simply stole kindly ethics from herding and other cultures and now wears those ethics like a false badge.

Were "Intact Aboriginal Cultures" really good "environmental custodians"? Not in North America Mate

james wrote:

Whilst I agree with nearly everything written by Tim, I have to take some
exception to what has been said of First Nations. Whilst one shouldn't overly romanticise aboriginal cultures, it needs to be acknowledged that, on the whole, these societies, where they have been left intact, have been good custodians of the environment. The fact that many North American Inuit, whose societies have been corrupted by our rampant 21st century free market growth capitalism, are now also engaging in ecological vandalism, does not negate this fact. James S. 18 June 08

Some myths just won't lie down and die. It doesn't matter how many facts are thrown at them. Facts like:

1. According to microbiologist Peter Salonious the agriculture of the North American indigenous peoples was not sustainable and a population crash would have culled them if a European conquest hadn't.
2. There are examples of how indigenous peoples wasted resources. Buffalo jumps, the stampeding of hundreds of animals over cliffs far in excess of tribal needs that strata examination shows were carried out centuries before European arrival. The extinction of horses before the Spaniards re-introduced them. The comment by David Suzuki that the only reason why the Haida did not chop down more Douglas Fir is that it took a full week to chop down a single tree with the axes they had. It was technology, not a spiritual reverence for nature, that constrained them.
3. Indigenous peoples in North America were tribalists like the Europeans. Go forth and multiply or a rival tribe will outbreed you and destroy you. Their numbers were limited by war, famine and shortage. But not by respect for limits.

Robert Whelan said it best. “We now know that native peoples can be as destructive of their environments as anyone else, and that historically aboriginal tribes often changed whole ecosystems by the repeated burning of forests and by hunting animal species to extinction. The noble eco-savage is a white , Western artifact. When policy issues, such as land rights, are decided on the basis of this misconception, it leads to disappointment…” (Wild in the Woods)

What it also leads to is a false sense of security. And this what makes this issue so important. So dangerous. Why? Because Aboriginals are being used. Just as environmental NGOs lead people to believe that the environment has a watchdog to look after it, Canadians believe that when Machiavellian logging and mining corporations name Aboriginals to their boards and form partnerships with them to strip the boreal forests that somehow the land will be protected because natives are genetically or culturally endowed with inborn wisdom to manage it. They believe this because they are taught by politically correct sociology professors and Green rhetoricians to think that is so. That is why it is important Anthropology 101 is not taught by Kevin Kostner, or that our image of natives is not conditioned by Hollywood movies like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, and Dances with Wolves.

The repercussions of this romantic attachment to the myth of the noble eco-savage are the death of our planet. The boreal forest is being clear cut because these “noble wise stewards” are serving as PR front men for corporations who are doing it. The methane gas released by this logging will keep being released for the next 10 years and it is one of the worst GHG going. Must admit, it was a clever move for the companies to bring the natives on board. As Brishen Hoff shrewdly pointed out, it was very much the same as their trotting out Greenpeace founder Dr.Patrick Moore as a representative or spokesman to prove that their project is “green”. In British Columbia, Moore appeared for the big logging companies as a spokesman for the “Share the Stein Coalition”, and using the same formula, he has appeared as the token green voice for the nuclear industry.

To attack the native-corporate partnership is to also expose native complicity and greed. But political correctness will not permit us to do so. False anthropology has affixed a halo on their heads that we cannot knock off. The myth of their inherent ecological nobility is the political kryptonite which keeps the would be critics, the biologists and scientists of Environment Canada and maverick environmentalists at bay. Two attempts were made to challenge the myth. One was made in Canada by myself and Brishen Hoff in our article “The Myth of Wise Aboriginal Stewardship”. But the Thought Police saw to it that it was never published. Even conservative media ran for cover.

But in America, the First Amendment still prevails. And finally there is man who, I think, has knocked that halo clean off. A comment follows.

#FirstAmericans" id="FirstAmericans">First Americans, First Ecologists?

By Michael Medved, 18 Jun 08 (original at www.townhall.com)

Political correctness portrays untamed America before European invasion as a natural paradise, where Indians maintained an exquisite ecological balance, living in a harmonious, idyllic relationship to the natural world. According to conventional wisdom, this pre-Columbian Eden flourished for peaceful millenia until brutal disuprtion by thoughtless, menacing and mercenary white colonists. Stewart Udall, one-time Arizona Congressman and later Secretary of the Interior for President Kennedy, became an early advocate of this point of view in his influential 1973 article, “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists,” urging modern citizens to follow the native example of treating the landscape with love and respect.

Udall's arguments received powerful support from the popularization of the moving speech of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish elder who addressed a meeting in 1854 in the raw settlement in Washington Territory that ultimately took his name. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” Seattle supposedly told his listeners. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.” Later, the aged sage assaulted the insensitive ways of the new arrivals. “There is no quiet place in the white man's cities,” he lamented. “The clatter only seems to insult the ears…I've seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a train.”

Actually, it's unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw even a single buffalo, either rotting or otherwise, or ever looked at a train for that matter, since buffalo never lived in his verdant corner of the Pacific Northwest, and railroads (along with “the clatter” of white the man's cities) only arrived several decades after the alleged speech. His poetic remarks (immortalized in a bestselling children's book, “Brother Eagle, Sister Sky”) represent an internationally influential hoax-- a more or less whole-cloth invention by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a now-forgotten 1972 TV documentary, based very, very loosely on an account in a Seattle newspaper (twenty years after the kindly chief's death) of a real talk he may (or may not) have delivered in his largely indecipherable native language to the drenched but respectful pioneers.

In the same era that school kids learned to memorize the bogus words of Chief Seattle, another aged Indian emerged in the pop culture with the sacred purpose of protecting the North American environment, and cementing the widespread image of Indians as eternal guardians of the sacred landscape. In 1971, a brilliant “Keep America Beautiful” public service announcement offered an eloquent plea for ecological consciousness, with the tag line “people start pollution; people can stop it.” The commercial showed garbage thrown from a speeding car landing at the moccasined feet of an elderly native in traditional garb who looks toward the camera with a fat, glistening tear flowing down his weather-beaten cheek. The actor featured in the commercial, a Hollywood veteran with the marvelous name “Iron Eyes Cody,” became famous for those few seconds of video, which easily overshadowed his more than 200 films (including Indian roles in “The Big Trail” with John Wayne (1930), “A Man Called Horse” with Richard Harris (1970) and many more. Iron Eyes became an impassioned advocate for Native American causes and a regular on TV talk shows before his death at age 95 in 1999. Only with his obituaries did the truth emerge about the cherished Native American symbol “Iron Eyes Cody” – whose parents (Antonio De Corti and Francesco Salpietra) both immigrated to the United States from Sicily, and possessed no hint of Indian blood.

The cherished notion of Indians as ecologically enlightened protectors of the natural order actually carries no more authenticity than Chief Seattle's ruminations on rotting buffalo or the purportedly Cherokee identity of the Sicilian-American “Iron Eyes Cody.” In a densely researched 1999 monograph from Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs (“Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Eco-Savage”) Robert Whelan blasts the popular but puerile proposition that before 1492, Native Americans lived as blissful stewards of pristine environments they cherished and protected.

The truth is that native peoples, like all other aboriginal societies on the planet, did anything and everything to their surroundings that might help them to survive. “There is now a very considerable body of research,” Robert Whelan writes, “which demonstrates conclusively that the Indians made a massive impact on their environment before the arrival of the white man, and that much of this impact was damaging and showed no conception of a conservation ethic.”

For example, to hunter-gatherers who lived in temporary structures, trees constituted an impediment that separated them from the animals they wanted to eat. As forests grow, “The open savanna that once supported bison, elk, deer, antelope, beaver, bears, birds and wolves becomes the closed boreal forest inhabited by squirrels, ravens, and pine martens, but little else.” So naturally, the Indians (particularly on the Eastern Seaboard) did whatever they could to get rid of the leafy interlopers. Early white settlers expressed surprise to see vast tracts of forest deliberately wiped out: “The Savages are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a year, vixe at the spring and the fall of the leafe,” recorded the Puritan Thomas Morton (an outspoken admirer of the Indians) in 1637. Lewis and Clark reported in their 1805 diaries that “Indians in the Rocky Mountains would set trees alight as after dinner entertainment; the huge trees would explode like Roman candles in the night.” In response to a 1992 earth summit, BL Turner and Karl Butzer researched the environmental impact of Native Americans, and found that “Deforestation in the Americas was probably greater before the Columbian encounter than it was for several centuries thereafter.”

In fact, in their pursuit of succulent suppers, Indians did a great deal of collateral damage, even driving some species extinct. In 1998, our family accepted an invitation to spend a few days at an historic Wyoming ranch where the couple that owned it took us on an unforgettable tour of their property. They brought us to a red-earth outcropping that rose like a wedge from the surrounding terrain. “This was an Indian Buffalo Run,” they explained. The local tribes developed a means to frighten huge herds of buffalo and to direct their stampede &endash;right off the edge of the cliff into a heap of meat more than a hundred feet below. There, awaiting tribesmen could collect as much of the carcasses as they could eat and preserve. They left the rest to rot, creating a mountain of bones still visible (and formidable) below us. Continued…

In 1989, the Vore family donated a similar Buffalo Jump to the University of Wyoming, and scholars have been poring over the scene ever since. In the 1970s, during construction of Interstate Highway 90, “less than 10 percent of the site was unearthed at that time, but the analysis revealed at least 20 bone layers which extend about 100 feet across the sink hole and nearly 25 feet down.” Because the bones had been preserved by annual layers of sediment called varves, scientists can precisely date the Indians' feasts, and easily glean information about artifacts, weather, and their dining habits.

Shepard Krech III, professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, describes the Olsen-Chubbuck buffalo run excavation in southern Colorado where, five thousand years ago, two hundred bison “of a species one-third larger than today's” produced 50,000 pounds of meat&endash;and a total waste of the 25% of animals squashed in the bottom of the heap. “Archaeologists who excavated the site found skeletons massed on twisted skeletons, wedged in massive piles against piles and against the steep banks of the narrow gulch. The event probably happened in a flash.”

Tribes displayed neither tidiness nor restraint in harvesting various animals for food. University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years sifting through the bird bones in a Native American dump near San Francisco Bay. “From 2,600 to at least 700 years ago,” a University press release announces, “native people hunted some species to local extinction,” and the animals only rebounded when the Indians became decimated by disease. Broughton's earlier research on Indians' quest for “anything big and juicy” turned up similar fates for fish such as sturgeon, as well as local varieties of elk, deer, geese, and ducks.

Anthropologist Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona thinks the arrival of the first peoples to North America in prehistoric times meant the end for several big animals: “The basic facts are clear. People established themselves, colonized and spread into the New World at least by 11,000 years ago, if not earlier. And, at this time, large animals&endash;camels, and extinct species of horses, ground sloths, saber-tooth cats, in addition to mammoths and mastodons, and a dozen or two dozen more genera of large animals&endash;all go extinct at roughly the same time.”

Calvin Martin, in his fascinating Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships in the Fur Trade, explains that Northeastern Native Americans (Objiwa, Hurons, Micmac, League Iroquois, Cree, Montagnais) developed religions that ascribed spiritual powers to all animals, including beavers, and held that each creature existed in a sphere parallel to that of man. The process of hunting, then, became far more than the physical mechanics of trapping and killing, but involved a spiritual interchange of consent and mutual respect. After fur trading began, when natives began to perish in great numbers due to disease, Indians assumed the beaver were exacting retribution against the humans for the plundering of their pelts&endash;leading to the conclusion that the natives could protect themselves only by securing the rodents' elimination. “By 1635, for example, the Huron in the Lake Simcoe area had reduced their stock of beaver to the point where Father Paul LeJeune, the Jesuit, could flatly declare they had none,” Martin writes. In a matter of several years, the beaver had been slaughtered to near extinction, as well as moose and other furbearers. Martin concludes, “The game which by all accounts had been initially so plentiful was now being systematically exterminated by the Indians themselves” with a desperate, cultic, religious fervor.

The baseless myth of indigenous peoples living in respectful balance with their natural surroundings and making no mark on the space they inhabited for thousands of years plays an important role in most allegations of Indian genocide, because it reinforces the image of Natve Americans as childlike innocents, no more capable of protecting themselves than the noble beasts they supposedly revered. This vision supports an image of explorers and colonists as intruders, despoilers and mass killers, with nothing to offer the pure, proud peoples of the New World except for disease and exploitation, corruption and decadence, and feeds the toxic argument that Americans should feel guilty about the very origins of our civilization.

Original at www.townhall.com

Michael Medved's article documents rather thoroughly that Native Americans as “stewards of the environment” is a useful myth. Worldwide, in fact, one has few examples of people becoming conservationists until their way of life is utterly threatened and conservation becomes a matter of survival. Some, such as the Easter Islanders, have not made the transition in time. The Pacific Island Yapese, by contrast, did begin to conserve and limit population size and fertility, but only after a long period of famine.

Europeans and European-Americans are as early as any to become low fertility conservationists. Indeed, in abolishing slavery and founding societies for the Protection of Animals they have gone farther, extending a level of compassion for all humans other species, that seems unique in world history.

I have one further observation. In my youth, I made contact with many members of the Communist Party of Canada. Some of them were former members of the American party who fled the United States during the McCarthyist persecution. I asked them why they became Communists, and they all talked about the obvious inequity and brutality of 1930s, and how socialism offered a superior alternative. I was very sympathetic to their attitude to life until I asked them about the Soviet Union as it was now (1970s). Surely it disappointed them. Not at all. They not extolled its virtues, but more than that, they denied any grave injustices under Stalin. And obviously, during the 1930s, they refused to entertain the notion that their utopian alternative was not entirely utopian. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a lot about mentality. It finds its analogue among Christians who must believe in a paradise beyond this world. No criticism can touch this vision, for people have a desperate need to hold on to it. Michael Crichton spoke of environmentalists requiring a belief in an unspoiled “Eden” that existed before we corrupted it and will again exist once we have had our comeuppance. My thought is that the belief that Aboriginals were noble eco-savages falls into this same category. The Platonic need to believe in perfection. In greener pastures, a measuring stick against which we can hold this society to account. It is very demoralizing to learn, alas, that there are no greener pastures. We are oh so much alike. Every culture seems to be flawed. All of us programmed to push the limits. If you show me exceptions, they are far too inconsequential to matter. What humanity requires, perhaps, is a predator. I have never observed the local deer population standing around discussing how to effect Limits to Growth. They have delegated that task to the local wolves. Tim