> Date sent: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 10:35:04 -0500
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Ecology and the American Indians
> Ricardo Duchesne:
> >An excellent source on the Mayan collapse is Culbert, T.P. If I
> >recall, he argues, it was environmental-overexploitation. My view is
> >the Mayan collapse should not be seen as a unique historical event,
> >since collapse has been a general happening among all pre-capitalist
> >civilizations. If a complex society expands via conquest, at
> >some point its expansionary limits will be reached, and decline will
> >be irreversible.
> >
>
> The classic Mayan civilization collapsed a thousand years ago and there is
> no proof of what caused it. All that one can do is speculate about it. Some
> think it was because of overexploitation of the soil, while others think it
> was from diseases such as yellow fever, invasions from the north or other
> factors. There is nothing to go by except hieroglyphs and soil samples. The
> reason that the "Mayans self-destructed because they were not ecological"
> argument is important to people like Simon Schama is that it serves to
> create an amalgam between the invader and the invaded. Why complain about
> wanton slaughter of the buffalo or DDT when the Mayans were just as
> self-destructive? The only problem is that we have eye-witnesses to 19th
> century American history, but none with respect to the Yucatan peninsula a
> thousand years ago. These arguments about how the indigenous peoples
> slaughtered the saber-tooth tiger into extinction and Mayan
> anti-environmental practices go hand in hand with the argument that disease
> killed most Indians rather than Spanish bayonets and American rifles.
> Hence, the genocide of the South and North American Indian becomes a moral
> non-issue. I can understand the importance of this for bourgeois ideology,
> since the recognition that American society is based on genocide is rather
> disquieting.
>
To accuse agrarian civilizations of ecological
malpractice is simply anachronistic. To say that they collapsed
because of over-exploitation of resources is another issue...
which fits quite well with the Malthusian-Ricardian thesis of
diminishing returns...but this thesis is incomplete if
we do not consider the technology these civilizations were using,
and that technology being pre-industrial had long reached its
optimum point of productivity...therefore conquest and tribute
were the basis of their expansion, so that after they reached their
expansionary limits, and the supply of labor and tribute ceased,
their decline was absolute and irreversible.
> >The reason for the Pleistocene extinctions was human hunting. Big game
> >animals were hunted to extinction by GROWING bands of hunters and
> >gatherers. Population pressure is indicated by such facts as
> >bands being forced to travel over longer distances for food, to
> >change from consuming large animals to smaller ones, to practice food
> >storage, etc. Eventually they were forced to adopt agriculture.
>
> This is just a bald assertion. What is the archaeological evidence for this?
>
The argument comes from Mark Nathan Cohen, Overpopulation and the
Origins of Agriculture (1977). Substantial archaeological evidence is
provided there. A problem in Cohen is that he underplays (actually
ignores) the role of "rationality"...and presents humans as passive
reactors to population pressure.
> >The question Proyect needs to answer is what ethical criteria he uses
> >to claim what the Europeans did was "terrible".
>
> The same criteria that is used to judge Nazis and other peoples who carry
> out genocide. It is immoral to steal people's land and murder them in the
> process. Just as it is wrong to enslave them. The United States and Western
> Europe can be characterized in the epigraph that precedes Balzac's "Pere
> Goriot": "Behind every great fortune there is a great theft."
How do you know it is "immoral"?
ricardo
> Louis Proyect
>
>
>
