Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (38 page)

The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 pointed to the difficulty that capitalism, a marvelous system of production, was never designed to accommodate shortage. For demand to exceed supply is supposed to be good for capitalism, leading to increased production and often to lower costs. Oil, however, is not really produced but extracted. In a way it is rationed by the oil companies and OPEC from an unknown but finite pool. Thus the oil companies, which we habitually perceive as competing capitalist producers, might more accurately be viewed as keepers of the commons.

America has seen commons problems before. Imagine a colonial New England town in which each household kept a cow. Every morning, a family member would take the cow to the common town pasture, where it would join other cows and graze ad day under the supervision of a cowherd paid by the town. An affluent family might benefit from buying a second cow; any excess milk and butter they could sell to cowless sailors and merchants. Expansion of this sort could go on only for a finite period, however, before the common pasture was hopelessly overgrazed. What was in the short-term interest of the individual family was not in the long-term interest of the community. If we compare contemporary oil companies with cowholdtng colonial families, we see that new forms of governmental regulations, analogous to the regulated use of the commons, may be necessary to assure there will be a commonsin this case, an oil poolfor our children.

The commons issue afreets our society in other ways. I write this chapter within sight of Chesapeake Bay in a year when the crab and oyster harvests are unprecedentedly low. A catch of 20,000,000 bushels in 1892 and 3,500,000 in 1982 fell to just 166,000 bushels in 1992. Fisherfolk have responded the way people usually do when their standard of living is imperiled: work harder. This means redoubling their efforts to take more of the few crabs and oysters still out there. Although this tactic may benefit an individual family, it cannot but wreak disaster on the commons. The problem of the bay is amplified in the oceans. The United Nations is struggling to develop a global system “to manage and repropagate the fish that are still left.” Since international waters are involved,

however, negotiations may not succeed until after many species have been made extinct.

Because the economy has become global, the commons now encompasses the entire planet. If we consider that around the world humans owned ten times as many cars in 1990 as in 1950, no sane observer would predict that such a proportional increase could or should continue for another 40 years.25 Quantitatively, the average U.S. citizen consumes the same resources as ten average world citizens or twenty-five residents of India.26 Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with a corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America's cause is the cause ofall humankind. Thus our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will never achieve our standard of living, for if they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it less likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.

Almost every day brings new reasons for ecological concern, from deforestation at the equator to ozone holes at the poles. Cancer rates climb and we don't know why." We have no way even to measure the full extent of human impact on the earth. The average sperm count in healthy human males around the world has dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past fifty years. If environmentally caused, this is no laughing matter, for sperm have only to decline in a straight line for another fifty years and we will have wiped out humankind without even knowing how we did it!28 We were similarly unaware for years that killing mosquitoes with DDT was wiping out birds of prey around the globe. Our increasing power makes it increasingly possible that humankind will make the planet uninhabitable by accident.

All these considerations imply that more of the same economic development and nation-state governance that brought us this far may not guide us to a livable planet in the long run. At some point in the future, perhaps before readers of today's high school textbooks pass their fiftieth birthdays, industrialized nations including the United States may have to move toward steady-state economies in their consumption of energy and raw materials. Getting to zero economic growth involves another form of the problem of the commons, however, for no country wants to be first to achieve a no-growth economy, just as no individual family finds it in its interest to stop with one cow. A new international mechanism may be required, one hard even to envision today. Heilbroner is pessimistic: “No substantial voluntary diminution of growth, much less a planned reorganization of society, is today even remotely imaginable.“29 If tomorrow citizens must imagine diminished growth, we cannot rest easily, knowing that most high school history courses do nothing whatever to prepare Americans of the future to think imaginatively about the problem. Continued unthinking allegiance to the idea of progress in our textbooks can only be a deterrent, blinding students to the need for change, thus making change that much more difficult. David Donald characterizes the ”incurable optimism“ of American history courses as ”not merely irrelevant but dangerous,” In this sense, our environmental crisis is an educational problem to which American history courses contribute.

Edward O. Wilson divides those who write on environmental issues into two camps; environmentalists and exceptionalists.!1 Most scholars and writers, including Wilson, are of the former persuasion. On the other side stand a relative handful of political scientists, economists, and natural scientists, several associated with right-wing think tanks, who have mounted important counterarguments to the doomsaying environmentalists. Julian Simon, Herman Kahn, and others compare today's world to the world of our ancestors and argue that although modern societies have more power to harm the planet, they also have more power to set the environment right. Hence modern technology may exempt us from environmental pressures. The exceptionalists point out that recovery time after natural disasters such as earthquakes or manmade disasters such as World War II is much shorter today than in the previous century, owing in part to the ability of our large bureaucratic organizations to mobilize information and coordinate enormous undertakings. Human life expectancy, one measure of the quality of life, continues to lengthen. Herbert London, who titled his book Why Are They Lying to Our Children? because he believes that teachers and textbooks overemphasize the perils of economic growth, points out that more food is available today than twenty years ago.

Such optimism gives economist Mishan faint comfort: “From the mere fact that humanity has survived to the present, no hope for the future can be salvaged. The human race can perish only once.”3 In short, we are in a huge debate. If the majority of books and articles and the arguments in this chapter seem skewed to favor the environmentalists, perhaps the potential downside risk if they are right makes this bias appropriate. But for textbook authors simply to join the chorus of doomsayers without presenting arguments from the exceptionalists would be intellectually negligent. Authors could show trends in the past that suggest we face catastrophe and other trends that suggest solutions. Doing so would encourage students to use evidence from history to reach their own conclusions.

History reveals many previously vital societies, from the Mayans and Easter Island to Haiti and the Canaries, that irreparably damaged their ecosystems.34 “Considering the beauty of the land,” Christopher Columbus wrote on first seeing Haiti, “there must be gain to be got.” Columbus and the Spanish transformed the island biologically by introducing diseases, plants, and livestock. The pigs, hunting dogs, cows, and horses propagated quickly, causing tremendous environmental damage. By 1550 the “thousands upon thousands of pigs” in the Americas had all descended from the eight pigs that Columbus brought over in 1493. “Although these islands had been, since God made the earth, prosperous and full of people lacking nothing they needed,” a Spanish settler wrote in 1518, after the Europeans' arrival “they were laid waste, inhabited only by wild animals and birds.”" Later, sugarcane monoculture replaced gardening in the name of quick profit, thereby impoverishing the soil. More recently, population pressure has caused Haitians and Dominicans to farm the island's steep hillsides, resulting in erosion of the topsoil. Today this island ecosystem that formerly supported a large population in relative equilibrium is in far worse condition than when Columbus first saw it. This sad story may be a prophesy for the future, now that modern technology has the power to make of the entire earth a Haiti.

On the other hand, Julian Simon has pointed out how most short-term predictions of shortages in everything from whale oil in the last century to food in the 1970s to silver in the 1990s have been confuted by new technological developments.56 Moreover, environmental damage has been undone: some American rivers that were deemed hopelessly polluted forty years ago are now fit for fish and human swimmers. Human activity has reforested South Korea.57 Textbooks might also present these adaptive capacities of modern society.

Ironically, textbooks that assure us that everything will come out right in the end do not report any of the reasoning or evidence marshaled by Simon and his ilk. Instead they exhort students to accept on faith that they need not worry much about where we are going.33 Their endorsement of progress is as shallow as General Electric's, a company that claims, “Progress is our most important product,” but whose ecological irresponsibility earned it a place on Fortunes list of the ten worst corporate environmental offenders.59 Not one textbook brings up the whale oil lesson, the Haiti lesson, or any other inference from the past that might bear on the question of progress and the environment. In sum, although this debate may be the most important of our time, no hint of its seriousness seeps into our history textbooks.

If textbook authors revised their closing pages to jettison the unthinking devotion to progress, their final chapters would sit in uneasy dissonance with earlier chapters. Their tone throughout would have to change. From their titles on, American history textbooks are celebratory, and the idea of progress legitimates the celebration. Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of Yankee usurpation and Negro debauchery fits with the upward curve of progress, for if relations were bad in Reconstruction, perhaps not as bad as in slavery but surely worse than what came later, then we can imagine that race relations have gradually been getting better. However, the facts about Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in many ways race relations in this country have yet to return to the point reached in, say, 1870. In that year, to take a small but symbolic example, A. T, Morgan, a white state senator from Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from New York, and was reflected.40 Today this probably could not happen, not in Hinds County, Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to conclude that black Americans have no legitimate claim on our attention today because the problem of race relations has surely been ameliorated.

A. T. Morgan's marriage is hard for us to make sense of, because Americans have so internalized the cultural archetype ofprogress that by now we have a built-in tendency to assume that we are more tolerant, more sophisticated, more, well, progressive than we were in the past. Even a trivial illustration Abraham Lincoln's beard-can teach us otherwise. In I860 a clean-shaven Lincoln won the presidency; in 1864, with a beard, he was reelected. Could that happen nowadays? Today many institutions, from investment banking firms to Brigham Young University, are closed to white males with facial hair. No white presidential or Supreme Court candidate has ventured even a mustache since Tom Dewey in 1948. Beards may not in themselves be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking, but we have reached an arresting state of intolerance when the huge Disney corporation, founded by a man with a mustache, will not allow any employee to wear one. On a more profound note, consider that Lincoln was also the last American president who was not a member of a Christian denomination when taking office. Americans may not be becoming more tolerant; we may only think we are. Thus the ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism.

Not only does the siren song of progress lull us into thinking that everything now is more “advanced,” it also tempts us to conclude that societies long ago were more primitive than they may have been. Progress underlay the various unilinear evolutionary schemes into which our society used to classify The United States was founded in a spirit of dominion over nature. “My family, I believe, have cut down more trees in America than any other name!” boasted John Adams. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War general, spoke for most Americans of his day when he observed in 1792, “Civilization directs us to remove as fast as possible that natural growth from the lands.” The Adams-Lincoln mode of thought did make possible America's rapid expansion to the Pacific, the Chicago school of architecture, and Henry Ford's assembly line. Our growing environmental awareness casts a colder light on these accomplishments, however. Since 1950 more than 25 percent of the remaining forests on the planet have been cut down. Recognizing that trees are the lungs of the planet, few people still think that this process represents progress.