Truffula

Nature and Consumption - and Myth

sustainability

The mind boggles. Looking at the American myth of colonisation— the idea that people colonised the country to bring some kind of "second creation" to an imperfect and more-or-less uninhabited place, improving it with their amazing technology and establishing freedom— it becomes painfully clear how powerful this image still stands in parts of the American psyche. It is called upon to justify all kinds of behaviour, exceptionalism, racism, and corporate/military imperialism. But it goes beyond the treatment of the first nations, and other nations which have more recently been 'liberated' by US occupation, into the ideas of nature itself, as something to be tamed and subjugated, a resource to be exploited, a wasteland of uninhabited and uninhabitable forests and plains to be turned into lumber and productive farmland.

And yet, here we are in Australia, the narrative is slightly different, with convicts and coastal colonisation rather than the westward frontier, but the themes are still the same: denial of the humanity of aboriginal peoples; razing of forests for establishing farmland; the crazed pursuit of various forms of mineral wealth resulting in the desolation of landscapes; bandits and mining towns; intrepid explorers; continental railways, technology such as stump-jumping plows, and the glories of war all have their place in the Australian myth and they continue to shape the way we see ourselves— and our relationship with nature. We also took on the ideology of wilderness, with the establishment of great swathes of semi-tamed national parks.

The question is, for how long will we retain the myth — the idea that destroying a forest produces a net profit; the notion of digging up riches; the denial of past atrocities against the original inhabitants of the land?

This post is a response to:

8.1. David E. Nye, 'Technology, Nature and American Origin Stories', Environmental History, 8 (2003), pp.7-24.