A Short History Of Progress

by Ronald Wright

Tim Flannery has called human beings the “future-eaters.” Each extermination is a death of possibility.24

“A culture,” said W. H. Auden, “is no better than its woods.” Civilizations have developed many techniques for making the earth produce more food — some sustainable, others not. The lesson I read in the past is this: that the health of land and water — and of woods, which are the keepers of water — can be the only lasting basis for any civilization’s survival and success.

The collapse of the first civilization on earth, the Sumerian, affected only half a million people. The fall of Rome affected tens of millions. If ours were to fail, it would, of course, bring catastrophe on billions.

The invention of agriculture is itself a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around.

This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering.

the New World’s true conquerors were germs: mass killers such as smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, and measles. These arrived for the first time with the Europeans (who had resistance to them) and acted like biological weapons, killing the rulers and at least half the populations of Mexico and Peru in the first wave.11

Despite their guns and horses, the Spaniards did not achieve any major conquests on the mainland until after a smallpox pandemic had swept through. Before that, the Maya, Aztecs, Incas, and Floridians all repelled the first efforts to invade them.

socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Of course, a full belly and a fair hearing won’t stop a fanatic; but they can greatly reduce the number who become fanatics.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking.