Manifest destiny, my ass!

The title is proof that commas are valuable implements to be used wisely.

I woke up today with the “This Land is Your Land” song in my head. Things of this random nature happen to me sometimes. Okay, they happen to me all the time. I was singing it in the shower when I realized how utterly depressing this song is. It’s about manifest destiny – the idea that the land (in the States in particular) is “ours” through destiny. Through fate. Assigned to us by a superior being. “Made” for us to use and enjoy as we see fit.

Of course, there were many versions of the song, some of which were clearly politicized to show a disinterest in privatizing property. The idea that the land was something that belonged to everyone was a novel concept, perhaps, when the song was written. What about the novel idea that the land belongs to no one?

I read the song in two principal ways: either the land belongs to everyone, meaning that (1) no one can lay claim to particular resources because everyone has some kind of right to the resources, or, (2) since the land belongs to everybody, nobody can lay claim to those uses without universal consensus.

This is assuming of course that when you say this land belongs to “you and me” it’s referring to human-peoples rather than the plants and animals that live with the Earth rather than on it.

State history has usually (and predictably) followed version #1: if the land is not privately owned, then everyone has some kind of right to the resources within. Option #2 is laughable – when has humanity ever, as a species (or even a country) had the foresight to agree on land use options? Over-exploitation was the legacy of public land until fairly recently, and its roots still have a strangle hold in some areas. Take my beloved Oregon: in the southeast arid land of the State cattle grazers still think that the land there is appropriate for cattle even though over 30 years of scientific studies show that cattle destroy riparian habitat, seriously damage sage-steppe ecosystems by contributing to soil loss, and encourage the spread of invasive species that are not palatable to native grazers. Since this kind of practice is going on right now in what is typically considered a “green” state, it’s no surprise that this kind of folk song is celebrated in the States – land use and land exploration was one of the founding principles of the “American Spirit”. All the worse for us, I say. Manifest destiny cripples us because most people can’t move past the idea that conquering land, and people, and nature is a good thing. Destruction and overuse are nothing to be proud of. Why not conquer health-care problems, or education problems or cruelty to children and animals?

My guess is that those things don’t inspire the proper frontier spirit. I mean, dealing with such things means paperwork. And compromise. And lawyers. Are you shuddering? Most people do. But people don’t shudder when they think of a cowboy out on the range, or a farmer standing behind his plow. American Spirit has been, and still is, defined by sweat and blood and the spirit of exploration and overcoming the wilderness – whether that wilderness is actual or metaphorical!

Land users still have this perception that the land is there for them to use until it is used up, because if they don’t use it and capitalize on the resources, someone else will benefit. This is the Tragedy of the Commons, and it’s still very much alive today. And forget the famous field-and-cattle analogy – the Earth is the “commons” that we are all rushing to use for our immediate gain. Whoever gets there first and fastest has become whoever uses the most and fastest. Add on top of that unchecked human population growth and the tragedy of the commons is more than the tragedy of overuse: it’s resource-rape. The “Quiver-full” movement is a perfect example of the extreme side to the Tragedy of the Commons. In fact, I’ve had people tell me it’s a good idea to have children and fill up the Earth, because if you don’t do it first, someone else will take the resources meant for your cluster of cells. The essay is called a “tragedy” for a reason, folks. Garrett Hardin saw how open land use leads to exploitation. It’s never discussed directly in his essay, but there are underlying themes of human greed, inability to cooperate and lack of foresight. There is also Garrett Hardin’s perception that regulation is needed to control human activity on public land, which I think speaks to how ingrained the right for individual use and exploitation (for economic gain in particular) is in this country. I can’t speak for other countries, but I suspect this is a theme of human existence and land use everywhere.

Steens Mountain — public land in Oregon!

The problem with this is that “getting there first” creates a relationship with the land that is use-based. Use the resources and move on, manifest destiny tells us. Conquer the world. Back when the United States was young the Earth was a huge place. Or so they tell us in the history books that romanticize the frontier spirit. They did not have the foresight to realize that as human population exceeds our planet’s generously calculated carrying capacity, the Earth’s resources become slim. And I’m just talking about resources specifically for human consumption – forget “aesthetic” (oh how I loath that distinction) resources like wilderness. Goodbye, manifest destiny; there is nothing left for you to conquer.

In summary: humanity, you suck. Please find a way to destroy yourself without destroying the Earth as well. Seriously, I wish you all the luck in the universe to that end.

In the alternative, my second solution would be to support more government regulation. That is, until I remember the government is run by humans as well. This flaw is easy to see in the history of public land management: a history of overuse in the form of timber harvesting, mining and exploitative grazing. Even the Taylor Grazing Act of 1834 did not solve the problem, even though it was largely written to tighten the use of public lands to prevent overgrazing. Range lands throughout the United States are still overgrazed, damaged, and unsuitable for wildlife and native plants. In fact, ranchers receive a subsidy to graze their cattle on federal land. To this day, fences, reservoirs, dams and seeding the land with non-native grasses are called “improvements” in our land management statutes. More proof that the concept of manifest destiny is still very much alive in the very framework of our government.

Perhaps the best solution would be to bow down to a robot overlord. We have created robots who can teach themselves to shoot a bow and arrows, or adjust their flight path to changing conditions, or visit Europa, or play chess. We have also created machines that have outgrown and surpassed their parents — they even commit patricide.

Let’s create something worthwhile for a change: a super intelligent ecosystem manager robot. Something that can regulate population growth and make laws that would protect the land without being prone to political wrangling or damaging human concepts like manifest destiny or religious puffery. Any robot who uses science – or is at least is programmed to err on the side of ecosystem protection when the science is unclear – would do a better job of land management than the system we have now.

And it would have to have lasers of course.

The Human Problem

I have a serious problem with humanity. It is a problem that I feel we all have, and need to fix if we want to survive ourselves. I recognize that writing this will label me as a hypocrite in many eyes—no less because I enjoy my indoor plumbing and gas stove. Over my limited years of life I have made many observations of how people work and operate in their world and out of it. The conclusions I have come to are not always well-formed or complete thoughts, but they are conclusions just the same. I’m going to make an argument that humans aren’t natural, because we have severed our ties with nature.

Bear with me. Think on these things yourself. If you think I am wrong, argue your case.

My first observation: we don’t know where anything comes from anymore. The children I have taught don’t know where that steak they had for dinner came from, they don’t know where the water comes from when they turn on the hose, or the textbooks they lug to school each day. What is more horrifying is that they don’t care.

Why has nature become something that we have to drive to? At what point did humanity become separate from the natural world, and why would this be desirable?

I think the root is in the fact that history has set us up this way. If Anthropology 101 taught me anything, it was that agriculture drastically changed the course of human culture. Before agriculture was popularized we were hunter-gatherers. There were not many of us (limited food meant a finite number of children survived) but all fossil indications point to a robust and healthy kind of man. As an aside, the remains of hunter-gather women have been found with injuries likely sustained in hunts. This kind of lifestyle was difficult but rewarding—we still existed within in the natural law and those individuals who were fit were more likely to produce young.

With the advent of agriculture we started living in large stationary groups and our population burgeoned with the increased but unvaried food supply. When people aren’t starving more tend to survive, even if said children aren’t fit, because such a society allows for radical specialization of talents.

Allow me to postulate with the help of an example: a family of agricultural people lives with several other family groups—their large groups size becoming more of a necessity as more people need to be fed and protected from bands of other people trying to steal their goods. With this stationary lifestyle, the “town” begins to evolve. Women, who are not useful to work in the fields while pregnant, begin to take on more responsibility towards the children, sick and old. The divide between genders widens. Because the old and the crippled are more likely to live now that their caretakers have the time and the advantage of not being on the move, they can contribute to caring for the young even more, so even the sick survive to breed.

However (fossil evidence supports this) because of agriculture, people are now eating one or two types of food instead of the varied diet they had as hunter-gatherers. Physiologically, humans are built for that varied diet of plants and meat, and they suffer under the new diet. Bone density goes down, illness and plague run rampant (also a symptom people living in close proximity), and everyone is generally more unhealthy. Still, there is plenty of food to go around, and they continue to breed despite being far unhealthier than their hunter-gatherer counterparts. In the end they out-compete the hunter-gatherers because there are more of them.

This sets the stage for the rest of human history. Even in situations where there weren’t “more” of us, we steamroller everything because our technology gives us power beyond ourselves. The natural population controls are fought against. The advent of war, which came hand-in-hand with agriculture (we had territory to defend), is a bloody compromise.

Repeat this pattern throughout the years and eventually humans are able to separate themselves from their natural roots, at least in an illusionary sense. Today we don’t even have to watch the weather as it pertains to our crops. Agriculture has been evolving too, and we have been moving away from the natural order as we follow it. This drive is fueled by the need to fuel our biomass, which continues to grow.

Agriculture was a step back from nature because, to a certain degree, we protected ourselves from the ebb and flow of natural patterns by being able to store food and protect ourselves with our numbers. As hunter-gatherers, our adaptation to this would have been to be nomadic and dynamic to the natural fluxes—and yes, people would have died. But death is part of the natural order.

In conclusion, this process has drawn us away from our ties with the land. Through technology and advanced farming techniques the land has become something we farm, something we live on, not with. Our fear of global warming is warranted, because we fear things bigger than ourselves (perhaps another explanation for the population surge?). I don’t think it is a fear or horror at what we might have done—the responsibility lies with a faceless other and not individuals to most of us. I think this is another symptom of our separation that we cannot recognize how everything we do affects the world around us. Multiply that by six billion? Well, I’m sure you can guess where my thoughts on that lie. In a hunter-gatherer society, such selfish and unnatural ways of living would have killed you outright. Today, the consequences are the same, but drawn out over a longer period. The stakes are higher though, because now we are destroying the livelihood of every other living thing on Earth.

But, as one of the children I taught said (with a smile on his face): “I want to go out with a bang!”

He was the one whose parents packed him pre-cut-and-packaged apples in his lunch. He didn't even eat them.