Environmental Management
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Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians, a collection of essays compiled by Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson, is an enlightening, troubling, and at least minimally hopeful investigation of the management of natural resources by American-Indians in mid-nineteenth century California. It is enlightening because it turns on its head the common misperceptions that American-Indians were a crude people who had developed no system of dealing effectively, efficiently or wisely with the environment, and that Euro-Americans were responsible for establishing the beginning of such a system. It is troubling because it makes the reader realize that he has been duped by the biased educational system into believing such misperceptions, and because the land still suffers from what the "settlers" and their successors have done to the ecology of California. And it is hopeful---at least moderately so---because a number of the essayists argue that the approach to the use and preservation of natural resources developed and utilized by the American-Indians can still be applied to our diminished environment today.The essays were collected in order to pay honor to the respectful, effective and efficient relationship of American-Indians with the natural environment of Native California and to lead to a growing recognition that the rigid and rather monolithic conceptual dichotomy traditionally drawn between the seemingly passive 'food procurement' lifestyle of 'hunter
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season, but also of the long-term future. Today, and for many decades now, the powers-that-be in California and in Western civilization in general have taken as much as they could take from the land with minimal regard for the future and the sacred nature of the land. The anthropological approach to the material in these essays gives the reader an idea of what to do and what not to do if we are to return our approach to land management to a respectful (even religious) and pragmatic form.
The question raised by the handouts is whether we are capable of such a restoration of a healthy relationship between human beings and the natural environment. And the answer is that, yes, we are: "We are already quite capable---technologically---of living in harmony with the earth, feeding everyone well, saving most species of plants and animals, etc. Technology is not the limiting factor. Political will is the limiting factor" (handout 3).
How, then, can we restore this harmony? The essays give us the hope---minimal though it may be---that we can use the wisdom and reverence of the American-Indians in their land management as guideposts to lead us back to that state of environmental harmony. In fact, some signs exist which indicate that such a
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Approximate Word count = 2454
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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