The Genocide: the Earth becomes Environment

The The Genocide: the Earth becomes Environment:


Although for scientists the conquest of nature has a largely metaphorical meaning, it is only too literal for the appropriators of virgin lands, mining and logging companies, developers in general. We see the process going on all over the world today- for example in the virgin forests of Amazon, Malaysia, Alaska, Rain Bear Forest, BC, and so many. The civilized Man has exported his ideology of conquest everywhere, together with the technology and their god that makes it possible.

The most dramatic example of this process of transformation was the opening up of American West. It took place with a speed that amazed everyone and let us, today, knok-out in our big fat cars, our casinos, our gas stations, our bingo-halls as our dirty Indian bars, our strange churches. Into the abundant fertile lands moved relentless waves of speculators and settlers. Before them retreated the wilderness and the animist peoples who had lived so lightly on their sacred lands. In the 1860s, as the railroads reached out westward, meat was needed and there were buffaloes by the million. They were slaughtered wholesale or gunned down for pleasure; the supplies seemed limitless. Improved rifles were invented and more deadly methods of hunting. A great hide industry sprang up, and at its height, between 1872 and 1874, over 3 million buffalo were hunted to supply it. By 1880, though at first no one could believe it, the buffalo were gone. For a few years, their bleached remains were a source of profit as mountains of bones were shipped to glue factories and fertilizer plants. By the end of the century, fewer than a thousand of these animals survived in reservations, the pathetic remnants of the beautiful herds that only a few decades before had contained 30 to 50 millions of animal spirits...


"The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous".

(General W. Sherman, 1860)


Stripped of their stories, the lands sacred to the animists peoples were no longer a gift of the great spirit to be held in common; they became real estate. The conquered territory was divided up and bought and sold as private property. A new symbolic landscape was superimposed on the old. But whereas the old one was animistic, related to the spirit of the place, the new one symbolized the imposition of a rational order upon the untamed wilderness and its division reflected the human separation with the nature, inside as outside... Much the same happened in Australia, New Zealand and other territories conquered and settled by Europeans. It is still going on today, as forest are divided up on maps and then destroyed in rectangles. Today as yesterday the old animistic order is superseded as bulldozers move in and the new order is imposed on the face of the earth. The scientific and technological conquest of nature expresses a mentality of domination that had been widespread in the ancient world but was vastly increased in power by technology and amplified by the belief in unlimited progress. And now, like the buffalo hunters, we can hardly believe what we have become.

Atjecoutay: I will never be silenced, the forest is not wild to me it is my home and I will live to defend HER!!!

AKAtjecoutay
Photos by Atjecoutay