Going West: An Ecological History of American Colonization

——Read "Under the Western Sky"

The significance of nature lies in its independence; without nature, only humans remain.

A tightly manipulated nature no longer makes people feel at ease. We increasingly feel that we are in prison, and what imprisons us is the technology we use to control nature.

The history of any place begins with nature, and all history ends with nature. That is to say, whether it is regression or success, nature always plays a core role in historical development.

These are the passages that I felt most deeply when I recently read the American environmental historian Donald Wurst's "Under the Western Sky-Nature and History of the American West". The above-mentioned views are all based on this book. The manuscript narrates the evolution of the relationship between man and nature during the process of American colonization of the West, the history of nature being changed by human behavior, the records of natural deaths, and the forcing of the Indians who have lived here for thousands of years. The tragedy is that people finally lose their homes.

I had previously read his "Natural Economic System - A History of Ecological Thought", and then read his "Dust Storm". He is a scholar who is good at analyzing and criticizing ideas.

"Under the Western Sky" is a regional thematic history. Often the history of the American frontier is also called the history of the Westward Expansion. Worster uses a frank and serious attitude to examine the process of violent invasion by American immigrants who seized land from indigenous peoples. American settlers ignored the experiences of indigenous peoples and people of color and the social and environmental costs of western development. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, white people colonized the western frontier and rapidly developed animal husbandry in the western United States under a capitalist economic model, causing the devastating impact of animal husbandry on wild animals and damage to vegetation. Immediately afterwards, irrigation projects in the western water conservancy industry were developed again, which led to the pursuit of scale and profits by western farms, leading to the concentration of power in the water conservancy industry and the intensification of environmental damage.

The special topic of the article focuses on a detailed description of the litigation process for the ownership rights of the Black Mountain land by the indigenous Indians in South Dakota, showing the rejection of the indigenous peoples' land claims in contemporary American society.

Subsequently, the special topic detailed the history of the development of oil extraction in Alaska and compared the differences between the energy use of indigenous people and the fossil fuel economy of white people. Demonstrates the environmental destructiveness of modern economic irresponsibility.

Nature has become a pure object for human beings to control with technology, and it has long existed in name only. Nature no longer plays an important role in our lives except for its practicality. So, we are separated from nature. In instrumentalized reason, nature is nothing more than a list of raw materials to be made into useful products. It no longer has its own logic, order, or intrinsic value. The conquest of nature has become the main hobby of modern society.

In short, he used a rigorous argumentation method to truly describe the cyclical nature of history - prosperity and decline, victory and defeat, and neither humans nor nature have complete control over each other. The scale of our interference with nature corresponds to the scale of our failure. Every corner of the earth is under human plunder, and there is no independent, original, uncontrolled nature on the earth.

The Dust Bowl that broke out in American history in the 1930s was known as the Dirty Thirties. It was one of the most serious ecological disasters in American history. The main cause of sandstorms is the reclamation of grasslands and the development of large-scale modern agriculture, which regards land as a tool for making money and passes the crisis to the entire environment and society. People destroy grasslands to produce more crops, and each wave is followed by a new round of sandstorms. Sandstorms are a man-made crisis.

It can be seen that although humans can transform nature, they cannot completely conquer nature. The efforts to conquer nature will inevitably lead to self-destruction. Only by adapting to the nature of the relationship between man and earth and complying with nature can we coexist with nature.

In the past years, the West seemed to have a special quality that could strengthen the tendency to escape from reality and imagine. The West was especially a place of dreams and dreams, a land of fantasy and nostalgia.

It has only been more than 100 years since colonization and westward expansion, and the chance of realizing the dream has been completely shattered. The west is not a region that has steadily grown from a long and continuous history, but a region full of drastic changes, endless movements and extraordinary ruptures. place. The previous life of hunting, fishing and trapping, which was almost entirely based on renewable resources, will be replaced by a life based on a commodity economy and non-renewable resources.

There’s plenty of room in the West—the rocks, the soil, the climate, the scenery are as harsh and rugged as the gods of old, yet now the West is filled with parking lots, highways, gas stations, and rental car dealerships. , motels, restaurants, shopping malls, traffic lights, these infrastructures that symbolize the automobileized United States connect the city together in a chaotic manner.

Modern people seem to be tired of these same things. They long for mountains far away from the hustle and bustle of the world and get a new life. They can wake us up from fatigue and degradation, enable us to discover the divine order in nature and realize the talents of nature. It is the spiritual home. The people are tired of human machine civilization and long to return to the pristine and unexplored wilderness.

The strong awareness of human beings deeply rooted in natural cycles and forms in the western environment has once again become the world's nostalgic and recalling of the rugged appearance of the western world. At the same time, human beings have a unique understanding of the western scenery. Psychological effects create fascination.

Don’t be an enemy of nature, but follow nature and adapt to nature, because nature will not adapt to humans. Unconsciously we were conquered by the wilderness we conquered.

If everything on earth becomes an artifact in some way, it brings with it the flaws of our human nature. Is nature really over? One of the hallmarks of modern ecological disasters is that the associated technologies are vast and complex, far beyond the imagination of a single person. We have never escaped ecological evil and its consequences; it has been ingrained in our genes a million years ago. Indifference to nature has become a habit of our lives.

Ecological historians are bound to look for the cultural roots of the increasingly serious environmental crisis. As an environmental historian, I study the interaction between humans and nature in history, look for development trends, explore the roots of existing problems, and listen to the ancient dialogue between humans and the earth.

If the world becomes completely artificial, it is indeed in line with Western civilization’s long-standing desire to completely turn every corner of the earth into a cultural landscape. Now that this has been fully realized, we have ended what, to modern man at least, is a characteristic of nature alone, its isolation from human society.

How to learn to reintegrate with nature is to discover that people’s environmental awareness is always carried out unconsciously and often indirectly, forming a web of nature, technology, and people’s psychology. into an intricate network. Nature affects our lives in a very real way - climate, soil, water, landforms, ecosystems, light and color, animals, these things have penetrated into our technology, clothing, architecture and landscape design. In particular, those local and regional material cultures are often able to survive the impact of conquering and homogenizing economic forces.

Let me end this book review with the words of Vorster: The root of the human predicament is a simple fact: although humans are as imperfect, unreliable, and have a thousand shortcomings as ever, we are still Stubborn pursuit of unlimited freedom and power. Clearly, if we want to stop our destructive activities on the planet, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow humans, we must find ways to limit both of these things (freedom and power).