Living in Harmony with Nature

 

Eve iin the Garden of Eden; Rousseau le Douanier.

There is a pervasive and dangerous myth that before the coming of the European settlers, the First Nations of Canada “lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years’’ to quote a claim seen recently online.

I suppose “harmony” here might have different possible meanings here. No doubt the Iroquois did not sit around humming. But I think war is the clearer analogy. Nature was likely to kill them at any moment; not, perhaps, in the form of a large predator, but of starvation, hypothermia, or disease. It is almost certainly a myth, although a common one, that they lived largely disease-free until they were exposed to smallpox and other plagues to which they had no natural immunity by European explorers and settlers. Tuberculosis, the second-worst killer, has been found in Peruvian mummies from millennia ago. Smallpox actually seems to have first appeared in Europe and the Americas at about the same tiime; yet it was far more devastating in the Americas. During recorded history, new waves of smallpox and a variety of other illnesses seem to have swept the continent every two generations or so. It seems that, because their hunter-gatherer lifestyle forced low population densities, herd immunity to viruses could never be developed and maintained. Whether the Europeans came or not, there would be an inevitable epidemic of whatever viruses were circulating and a large die-off every few generations; as we see in many animal species.

And, of course, as hunter-gatherers, they lived by killing nature--by killing, raping, and pillaging nature.

Living in harmony with nature fits far better as a description of the European settlers. There is a reason why a farmer is called a “husbandman.” He is wed to the land, and faithful to it, in a reciprocal relationship. He reaps only what he sows; he must forever put back into the land what he takes out.

Not that such harmony is the necessary ideal. An engineer, an artist, or a technologist, at least in principle, improves nature. For they, in one way or another, transform pure nature into spirit, which is a greater thing.