What We Can Learn from Native American History

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about how pre-contact Native American cities had many practices from which we, in industrial society, can and must learn today, which corresponds to the last chapter of my book.

There are many things we can learn from Native American history, but in the video and book I focused on three things.

First, we could learn to live more sustainably. They had satisfactory and comfortable lives without making a big impact upon the Earth, over the long term. They practiced agriculture that we today call agroforestry, which requires less input of energy, chemicals, and labor than the “modern” agriculture we practice today. They did not do this because they were ecologically advanced but just because it was easier for them to leave the trees standing than to cut them down. The result was less soil erosion and fewer pests. They also lived sustainably because they allowed trees to keep their villages cool rather than, as we do today, cranking up air conditioning (which of course they did not have).

Second, they celebrated cultural diversity. They had to. There were five hundred different tribes, most of them with mutually unintelligible languages. No tribe was big enough to ignore all the others, with whom they had extensive trade networks. No wonder they were so good at sign language. They could live alongside other tribes who were different from them, which we seem unable to do today. They had wars, but not as many as Europe did at the time.

Third, they had a love of discovery. Modern politicians, and most other people, are boastfully ignorant of the natural laws of how the world works and our ecological impact on the planet. Modern people don’t know or care how to live on Earth. But if Natives had that attitude, there is no way they would have spread from Siberia to the tip of South America in about a thousand years, all the while figuring out how to survive in habitats totally unlike any they had ever encountered.

You can probably think of a lot more ways. I hope you read my book and think about this.

I Love Living in Alsace, A Socialist Paradise

 

I now live in the CeA (Collectivité européene d’Alsace), near Strasbourg in eastern France, just over the Rhine River from Germany. This region, like the whole country, is heavily socialist, which means that taxes are high and life is good. The Alsatian government spends a lot of money on things that make life better for people, including me.

Examples of government spending that makes life better for everyone:

• In 2024, Alsace spent 14.5 million euros on children (enfants);
• In 2024, they spent 28.3 million euros on seniors (aînés);
• In 2024, they planted 500,000 trees including at schools and creating cool, green zones (islands of freshness, or îlots de fraîcheur), which has health benefits and reduces the amount of air conditioning.
• In 2024, they installed 24,000 square meters of new solar cells (panneaux photovoltaïques). They spend a lot of money on energy conservation.
• Right here in the ville d’Hœnheim where I live, they just built a new school building, for 23.4 million euros.
• Every year they add more pedestrian and biking paths, which increase health and reduce the use of cars. As a result, despite high population density, the traffic jams are fewer and smaller than in most American cities.
• They even spend money on bilingual education, which includes, in Alsace, the Alsatian language (which is similar to but not the same as German).

However, these expenditures result in savings over time. The new solar panels will save 3.9 million euros a year, each year, after being installed. The new school building I mentioned above, which cost 23.4 million euros, generates more energy than it consumes.

The French government spends a lot of money to guarantee a minimum income for every citizen (which does not include me). The revenu de Solidarité active (rSa) is a French social welfare benefit that supplements the income of a person who is destitute or has few resources, in order to guarantee a minimum income. Poor people in France do not get project housing built for them; they get supplemental income with which to pay rent to private landlords, who are limited in the amount of rent they can charge.

There is one major difference between French rSa and American welfare. Recipients are required to work as part of their “insertion” into society and the economy. American conservatives starting with Richard Nixon used to call this “workfare” and promoted it, though it does not often occur in America. Well, it happens in France. As a result of expenditure on insertion, the government has reduced its rSa payments by 15 percent.

A lot of the work that needs to be done comes from volunteers. Nine thousand volunteers (bénévoles) collected 70 tonnes of garbage last year in Alsace. In contrast, in Durant, Oklahoma, where I used to live, once a year volunteers would gather for the “Trash-off” and clean up a few blocks, leaving many tons of garbage behind. I think that the retired teachers who run the French language class that I attend are also volunteers. That is, in France, as the Alsace website says, « L’état demande aux collectivités de plus en plus de dépenses sans les compenser » (The state asks communities to make more and more expenditures without compensation.)

Everywhere you look, you can hardly help but see sustainability and preparation for the future. While we were driving through the countryside on our way to visit a castle in the mountains, my son-in-law pointed to a big plastic tarp over a mound in a field. It was a mound of decomposing vegetation. The mulch released methane which is collected by pipes to supplement the natural gas supply (biogaz). As I told him, I think the technology was developed in America, but it is actually being used in France. In America, biogas is not worth it; all you have to do is frack some more. In contrast, in France, fracking is illegal.

France is not really a socialist paradise. I just wanted to get your attention. But it comes pretty close, in terms of environment and education.

Changing the World? Another Prairie Festival at the Land Institute

I went to the Prairie Festival in September 2019. This year’s festival is virtual, due to the pandemic.

The Prairie Festival is an annual celebration at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. It is part scientific meeting, part artistic celebration, and part barn dance. The scientific presentations, which drew experts from all over the country, spoke to a crowd in a big barn with sides open to the weather, which is often nice just before and after the festival but usually tempestuous during it. I sat on the dirt floor to listen to the presentations.

The Land Institute has the modest task of saving the world’s agriculture. The standard farming practice of much of the world—planting crops that only live one year, and which require megatonnage of fertilizers and pesticides—have long been causing immense soil erosion and pollution. The Land Institute scientists are busily making discoveries that can allow a transition to an agricultural system that uses perennial crops and in which crop biodiversity can reduce or even eliminate the need for chemicals. These are not just theoretical questions. They have also bred perennial edible grains such as kernza that have market value, that is, unless the big corporations that make money from wheat and corn bury it under layers of misinformation.

The Land Institute also knows that you cannot have an agricultural transition without having cultural support. The hundreds of attendees loved being there. We carry the good news of ecological agriculture back to our homes and lives (I teach university students about it). Hence the barn dance: this event has to be fun.

Some of the best scientists and environmental activists were there. Amory Lovins, founder and director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, presented mounds of facts (all of them easy to understand, but there were lots of them) that the transition to sustainable energy, leaving behind fossils fuels, is not only possible but profitable, and not someday but right now. If left to themselves without political pressure from the Trump worshipers, citizens and utilities alike will favor energy efficiency. Another major speaker was BillMcKibben. The “minor” speakers were also amazing, such as the quietly confident evolutionary-scientist-turned-environmental-educator Ana Luz Porzecanski from the American Museum of Natural History.

But I cannot imagine that their effort will ultimately be successful. I know they will continue their efforts and enthusiasm—for the alternative is for us to give up and die.

Here are some of the things that make me less confident than ever that the efforts of sincere and intelligent environmentalists will change the world enough and in time to avert disaster.

I have always told my students that global warming itself is not going to kill anyone. It is the consequences, such as agricultural collapse, that are dangerous. I tell them that we simply cannot afford global warming. But Bill McKibben told about a place in the Middle East where the daytime temperaturesexceeded 129 degrees F in 2019. At this temperature, a human will die in three hours. (Be warned that every news outlet that covers this story requires you to enable ads or in some cases to subscribe before you can even look at their website.)

Unlike many of the attendees, I came away from the Festival with an action plan: to continue doing what I already do, which is to teach undergraduates about the problem. It fits right into general biology and general botany; indeed, it would be unethical to omit it. But for many of the others? I glanced over at a woman’s notes. There was very little specific information on them. She wrote, “Need dramatic change.” (She wrote Δ instead of change. In which case, maybe she was a science teacher who will make a difference.) “Must think in new ways,” she also wrote.

Bill McKibben spends much of his time protesting in ways that get him arrested. He is a professional jailbird in this sense. This includes protests against Trump anti-immigration policies. Why? Because many of these immigrants are environmental refugees, for example from drought-blighted farms in Honduras. I teach my students that there will soon be environmental refugees; India already has fences up to keep flooded Bangladeshis out when, someday, they lose most of their farmland. But apparently it isn’t someday; it’s now. But it is fortunate that McKibben gets arrested up in the Northeast, because if he protested in Texas, he would be guilty of a felony and face up to ten years in prison. This law took effect on September 1, 2019.

I have also always assumed that correct information about what is going on in the world is readily available. But I have recently found that many legitimate news sites require you to either enable advertisements to be downloaded to your computer, or that you subscribe. Perhaps the only news you can get is (overwhelmingly) from Trump-worshiper websites or (much less) from flaming liberal websites. Where is this wonderland of information promised by that new-fangled internet?

Whenever I leave a Prairie Festival, I feel good that so many sincere and intelligent people are at work on these vital problems. But as I drove back down into Oklahoma, and saw the hundreds of pieces of garbage on the roadside, my enthusiasm was drowned in the reality of the utter self-centeredness of the majority of people.

Somebody had to invent terraces

Human history has largely been the story of destructive human impact on the natural world. Deforestation is at least as old as civilization and is specifically mentioned in Plato’s dialogue Critias. There is indirect evidence for salt buildup, resulting from irrigation, that damaged the grain fields of Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. Since the explosion of both human technology and population, our impacts have become extensive enough to alter the entire ecosystem of the Earth, ushering in a new geological age, the Anthropocene (the epoch of humans).

Nature will eventually clean up our mess. The problem is that this cleanup can take such a long time that our civilization will not be able to persist while the Earth cleans up our mess. We are like the massive dinosaurs that, at the end of the Cretaceous, required daily masses of food. When the asteroid plunged the world first into a pizza-oven fire and then into darkness caused massive disruption of food chains, life recuperated, but the dinosaurs, who could not persist through this interruption, did not.

Occasionally, however, human cultures have invented technologies that reduced our impact on the Earth. One of the best examples of this is terraces. Agriculture always causes soil erosion, the loss of the very soil on which agriculture depends. But this erosion is greatly reduced by the use of terraces. As the rain water runs downhill, it slows down on each terrace and lets the soil settle before proceeding further down the hill. Sometimes terraces wash away, but they have had the overall effect of reducing erosion. Terrace agriculture, especially of rice, can continue for centuries.

We cannot simply relax and assume that somehow human culture will solve our environmental problems. Terraces reduce soil erosion, but somebody had to invent terraces. Terraces may have been invented over and over in separate locations. It required human creativity and will.

Whoever invented terraces did not do so in order to save the Earth. They did so because they wanted to save their own farmlands from the ravages of erosion. The long-term and widespread effect was to help save the Earth.

Today, one of our biggest challenges is global warming. What can we do about it? We can invent new technologies that allow us to use less energy in order to achieve our goals or find new sources of energy that do not emit carbon dioxide. Human technological creativity has given us a dazzling array of such inventions, from wind generators to LED bulbs to solar power.

But these things do not simply happen. Somebody has to do them. And it requires an initial investment to get the technology started. In modern society this occurs best with government support of invention and application. And many countries are doing a much, much better job of this than the United States. Western European countries, China, and Japan are examples of places where the government invests heavily in new energy technology. Already, the people in these countries are reaping the benefits of these investments. That is, the taxpayers that supported these projects are seeing the benefits of their tax money. In contrast, the American government seems hostile toward alternative energy development. This has been the case for a long time. Most wind generators come from China and Denmark, not because Americans can’t invent good wind generators but because China and European countries have invested in wind generator development. This is part of a general Trump Administration hostility toward science. Republicans see basic scientific research (e.g., into ecology and evolution) as a threat to their beliefs, and they actively oppose applied research into alternative energy as a threat to the oil companies who give them so much money.

It is as if, thousands of years ago, ancient governments actively opposed the adoption of terraces and insisted on the continuation of soil erosion.

What I Learned in the Forests of France: About Humans and Nature

France Part 5.

Our entire July 14 hike (see previous essay) was inside of a national park, the Parc naturel régional des Vosges du Nord (Northern Vosges Regional Natural Park). With a name like that, you would expect such a park, if it were in America, to consist only of natural areas and trails, with limited development, by contractors, to accommodate visitors. In America, a National Park (Department of the Interior) excludes human economic activity as much as possible. National Forests (Department of Agriculture) allow logging and recreation (such as ORVs) other than hiking. In America, you find nature and only nature (for the most part) inside of National Parks.

Meanwhile, outside the National Parks in America, the private land is often being destroyed in an unsustainable fashion. Not only that, but if you trespass on private land, you risk getting shot. This is as true of wolves as of humans. The federal government has re-introduced wolves into federal land, but the moment a wolf strays onto private land it can be, and probably will be, shot dead.

In America, there are usually absolute and hostile lines between the human world and the natural world.

But in France, the Regional Parks (at least this one) embrace humans as a part of nature. First of all, why not? Humans have been farming and ranching and living in villages in France for thousands of years. There is virtually no place left of “unspoiled nature” in France. When you look at the fir forests ear the tops of the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, the trees appear to be lined up: they are not forests, but plantations. The Regional Park area has not only been transformed by human cultivation and habitation, but ravaged by war, as shown by the World War I cemetery in this photo.

Therefore when the French government established this park, they did not drive out the humans. The old farms and pastures for dairy cattle are still there, and they are productive. And I don’t mean just a nominal amount of economic activity. This park is actually the highlands of the Muenster Valley, the place of origin of the famous French cheese, about which I will write more in a later blog essay. And it was beautiful. The small towns, such as Pairis (not Paris!) and Orbey, were as picturesque as any “undisturbed” forest.

This has happened for two reasons. First, it reflects a faith in forest succession. No matter what happens, the forests will grow back. Most of the forests of Europe and North America were destroyed just a few thousand years ago by glaciers. They have all grown back. When Longfellow wrote (in his poem Evangeline) about “the forest primeval,” he was actually referring to a forest that was only about ten thousand years old. If you stop abusing the forest, and instead use it in a sustainable fashion, the forest will grow back into a beautiful, functional entity, even if not entirely natural. As a result, the forests of the Vosges Mountains supports, and has supported for centuries, pastures and villages. Everywhere we went, we found great stacks of firewood that had been harvested from the forests with no apparent damage to it. Timber harvest, but no clear-cutting!

Look, folks, it can be done. Don’t let anyone tell you that the timber companies have to clear-cut. In France, there are plenty of firewood and paper products without clear-cutting. A quick online check will show you that the paper products industry in France is very much alive and profitable. Nor do ranches have to have soil erosion! Look at these pictures—do you see any? But these farms are profitable!

Second, private landowners are required to simply accept the fact that hikers will be walking right past their houses and cutting across their lands. In America, signs may warn that “we shoot first and ask questions later” but in France, private land owners must accept the proximity of hikers on their land. Private driveways are marked as “privée,” and hikers stay away from these places. But if hikers were to trespass (which I never saw them do), there is no danger of them being shot. What I did, by walking right through fields and past houses, crossing private land, is virtually unthinkable in America.

The integration of humans and nature in the regional parks not only works but is a major source of enjoyment and income. There were at least a dozen people in our group, and we encountered lots of other hikers. None of us said, “This place would be beautiful if it weren’t for those ugly pastures.” And one of the major aspects of the local economy is for the farms (les fermes auberges) to host the visitors for sumptuous meals (and/or spartan accommodations). In order to gain the right to call themselves fermes auberges, the farms must raise all of their own milk, meat, and vegetables. (They can import things such as coffee and chocolate that cannot grow in France.) Many people drive to the inns, but we hiked for hours to get to one of these inns, where we spent as much time eating as we had hiking. And then we hiked back down.

Patrick Gennetay led and treated us to a wonderful feast at Le Musmiss, a ferme auberge in Orbey.

Hikers are not supposed to walk into people’s orchards or yards to eat domesticated fruit. But all along the path there were wild (or planted?) fruits for hikers to stop and eat along the trail. Hiking makes those fruits taste so good! We ate lots of wild cherries and raspberries. And right near the top, in the subalpine meadows, the trail was lined with wild blueberries (Vaccinium myrtillus, les myrtelles), which are smaller and tastier than the domesticated blueberries (les bleuets). We were a little bit early in the season for the wild hazelnuts, but if they had been ripe we could have munched on them almost the entire time.

Vaccinium myrtillus, a subalpine blueberry in the Vosges Mountains

Humans and nature can live together not only peacefully but enjoyably. I thought about this the entire time I was hiking, and it gave an extra dimension to my joy. It occasionally happens in America, too. Birdwatchers who visit the Arcata (California) bird sanctuary often do not realize that this wetland is the municipal sewage treatment facility for the city of Arcata. But it requires a shift in attitude among private land owners. The land owners have to realize that they are stewards of the beautiful Earth, which they share with nature and with other people. In order to establish such a park in America, private land owners would have to unlearn the little song that Garrison Keillor set to the tune of This Land is Your Land:

This land is my land

It is not your land

I’ve got a shotgun

And you ain’t got one…

Stumbling toward Collapse

It is now 10 Vendémiaire on the French Revolutionary calendar. This past weekend, two friends and myself participated in the Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Each year, the Prairie Festival is part scientific meeting and part celebration. The formal presentations, mostly by scientists and economists, are not in a climate-controlled room at a conference center, as they are at most meetings, but inside of a big, old barn. People sat on folding chairs or, in my case, on the dirt. Swallows flew in the rafters. The wind swayed one of the big barn doors, as it has at least since I began attending the Festival about 1995, and I keep wondering when it will finally collapse. The celebration part was a Friday night barn dance (in the same barn, sans folding chairs) and folk singers, including the incomparable Ann Zimmerman. There is a newly-constructed fire circle, and many of us sat by a bonfire until long after the stars appeared on Saturday night.

The Land Institute scientific staff gave us an update on their work. They continue to make progress in breeding wild wheatgrass (which they have renamed “kernza”) and wheat-wheatgrass hybrids, so that in the future the world might be able to produce grain without having to plow the soil or use chemicals. (This is because kernza is a perennial.) At the Saturday evening dinner (eaten outside by people sitting on the ground or bales of hay), we got to eat some of the kernza. Not as delicious as wheat, but certainly sufficient. The staff scientists are also breeding wild prairie silphium into an oil crop, and making sorghum-Johnsongrass hybrids. If they do produce perennial sorghum, it will be a benefit not only to American agriculture, but to African agriculture, according to a Ugandan graduate student who was one of the scientific presenters.

But there were also presentations by economists. I will share insights from John Fullerton and Lisi Krall. Fullerton is the founder of the Capital Institute, which promotes sustainable and responsible spending and investment. Fullerton was one of the inventors of complex derivatives, but he could see that such financial practices would lead to collapse, so he got out of the stock market in 2001, long before these financial practices caused the financial meltdown of 2008. He was a very rich man who walked away from his golden pig. He demanded that CEOs apologize for the willful misconduct, violation of trust, and arrogance that led to that meltdown; I’m not aware that he received any response to his demand. He even wondered if the misconduct of the CEOs of big financial corporations were guilty of crimes against humanity. Krall is an economist at SUNY Cortland.

Fullerton had some bad news for us. (There is a reason that economics is called the “dismal science,” and it is not just because of the lingering legacy of Thomas Malthus.) The ecological reality is that we live in a finite world, something that even today many or most economists will not admit. Fullerton said that all economic models begin with the assumption of three percent growth per year, which cannot continue in a finite world. There are several proposals for how to fix the economy and fit it into ecological reality, including carbon taxes and impact investing by conscientious rich people. (There are more conscientious rich people than you might think. They are quiet about their good work promoting sustainable development.)

Krall had even worse news for us. Before we can do anything, she said, we have to look into the black hole and admit our problems. Our economic system is built upon the premise that we can ignore “externalities” such as pollution, global warming, and soil erosion. Another premise is that profitability comes from reducing labor costs. Therefore, our economic system leads to job elimination and lower pay. Resource depletion, global warming, job loss, and lower pay are therefore what come out of our economic system when it is working the way it is supposed to. These unacceptable outcomes are the result of what we usually consider sound business practices. Therefore we cannot solve the problems of the world by means of our current economic system. We need a new system. Of course, we are in denial on this point. There are (mostly Republican) global warming denialists, but most of us (including progressives, especially the green-tech optimists) are economic denialists. Since our economy even when it is working right is unsustainable, we have a failed economy. It hasn’t collapsed yet—Congress is working hard to make this happen—but we already have the terminal disease metastasizing. (This last sentence is mine, not Krall’s.) She ended by saying that we live in the waning days of our economy; we can only choose the manner in which we will participate in its closure. “Is there enough of the wild left in us to do this?”

But Fullerton also had some good news for us. But even this good news is rooted in bad news. Of the 60,000 top corporations in the world, only 1,000 have half of the wealth. And each of these corporations has a few major investors. He said that there are only about a thousand investors in the world who really matter in shaping the future of the economy. So we could solve our problems by convincing these thousand investors. Some, like Warren Buffett, are already convinced; some, like Donald Trump, never will be. But we don’t need to convince all one thousand. If we convince maybe a hundred, we can cause a shift in the economic landscape, resulting in a surprisingly quick transition to a sustainable world. We need an economy with resilience—and resilience, he said, does not mean having to keep getting bailed out by the government. The 2008 federal bailout was, by its very existence, evidence of the failure of our economic system.

In my view, if our economy were working as it was meant to work, we would be striding toward disaster. Congress has created an artificial crisis that totally consumes their attention and diverts it away from solving long-term problems. As a result, we are now stumbling toward disaster.

Someone asked Fullerton what the new generation, people under thirty, should do. His answer did not satisfy anyone, least of all himself. He said that World War Two gave his father a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Those of you who are under thirty will face economic disruption, and the one thing about it is that it will give you a sense of purpose. Gee, thanks a lot, I thought; the Donner Party had a sense of purpose (I wonder if I can eat the sole of that shoe? I wonder if that corpse has been dead too long to eat?). I’m 56 years old, but my daughter is under thirty; behold the world we bequeath you, Anita.

I expect that conservative commentators would have a lot of misinformation to provide about the Prairie Festival. They would certainly label the presenters as socialists and usurpers of the American tradition of rulership by the Rich, and would probably even call the fire circle a pagan wiccan ceremony.