3. Ecological Sustainability

Ecologically, most pre-colonial societies were far from being sustainable. There is a tendency to attribute sustainability to societies which may never have conceptualized their own behavior that way.²⁰ Such attributions are, for the most part, aided by the lack of comprehensive accounts about pre-colonial societies, thus creating a permissive environment for making sweeping claims without providing evidence to support them. Confronted with these imagined accounts, which may be equated to a second Enlightenment, the modern man, or woman, becomes the new “savage” – unfamiliar with “primitive” traditions and cultures, which, paradoxically, have now come to be seen as humankind’s possible exit from self-destructive development activity.²¹

The idea that pre-colonial societies lived within their ecological means is the most compelling argument sustaining the indigenous sustainability thesis. It is true, as Palmer-Jones and Jackson note, that traditional farming methods are especially coveted because of their low dependence on external inputs as well as their energy efficiency.²² It is also true, as Emmons has pointed out, that pre-colonial societies were able to live within their ecological means because of the low level of technological development, the low population density, their spirituality, the reliance on local inputs, a subsistence-based production culture, and aesthetic considerations.²³

These claims, however, are problematic in a number of ways. The fact that the low level of technology did not degrade the environment in a manner comparable to modern technology does not mean that indigenous societies did not degrade the environment at all. It is now beyond dispute that humanity’s ability to exploit resources has steadily increased since the Stone and Iron Ages.²⁴ This, coupled with the growing evidence that environmental degradation is not limited to industrial societies and the realization that the environment is capable of naturally recovering from degradation, makes it difficult to determine the level of historical degradation. The correlation of improvements in technology with the increase in human ecological footprint supports the hypothesis that low population, low level of technological development, ecological limitations, and other natural constraints, rather than indigenous knowledge, explain the limited ecological footprint of indigenous people.²⁵

Proponents of indigenous sustainability have argued that pre-colonial societies were able to sustain themselves for centuries because of their ecological ethic. For example, such proponents argue that pre-colonial peoples were ecocentric rather than anthropocentric.²⁶ They contrast this ecocentric ethic with the modern “technocratic, elitist, and inherently globalizing Cartesian tendency,”²⁷ which relies on science and which they blame for unsustainability. Indigenous peoples’ inborn ecological wisdom, they say, explains their limited impact on the environment.²⁸ It is fallacious, however, to assume that pre-colonial people were only ecocentric and never anthropocentric. Pre-colonial peoples’ reliance on animals and plants for survival and their plunder of forests to make way for human settlements were themselves a product of a preference for human survival over other species’ survival – in short, an anthropocentric ethic.²⁹

Another problem is the assumption that the ecocentric ethic, which is attributed to indigenous societies, is assumed to be an innate characteristic, while anthropocentricism is seen as learned from the industrial culture.³⁰ To suggest that humans learned anthropocentricism after industrialization, or in conjunction with it, not only attempts to vindicate the era of feudal lords, but also overlooks the fact that humans could not have marched from the cave to modernity without the desire to privilege their existence over other species. Humans’ quest for better technology, from the pre-Stone Age to today, has been triggered and sustained by the anthropocentric ethic – the belief that in so doing, human beings will become better, whether in real or imaginary terms.³¹

Foster also has found that ecological degradation preceded the industrial revolution. Kimmerer & Lake’s finding that the “presettlement landscape was strongly influenced by indigenous land management to enhance productivity” corroborates Foster’s, Rudd’s, Faust’s and Smardon’s findings but also demonstrates that ecological degradation is not confined to industrial society.³² Migration data provides further insights on the impact of low technology, technological limitations, and technological change as societies moved to new areas. Sustainable communities recognize an obligation to reduce and minimize their ecological footprints and the commitment to working to achieve a high quality of life for their residents with the smallest footprints practical.³³

The concept of ecological footprint has become an important conceptual and practical tool for adding up these effects and providing a sense of their order of magnitude. The ecological footprint of Americans is approximately ten hectares per person (about twenty-four acres),³⁴ or some five times the global average. Pioneered by Rees and Wackernogel (1999), the ecological footprint is an expression of the land area needed to produce the food, energy, and materials to support our lifestyles.³⁵

We are consuming both at levels that increasingly exceed the capacity of global ecosystems to regenerate and at levels that far exceed any “fair share” of the global commons. The United States is less than five percent of the world’s population consuming one-quarter of the world’s resources, generating some one-quarter of global carbon emissions.³⁶ Furthermore, there is growing evidence that these consumption levels are exceeding the regenerative capacities of planet Earth. The recently issued 2002 Living Planet Report, produced by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and a comparison of ecological footprint trends and trends in biological capacity, suggest consumption is already “overshooting” regeneration by about twenty percent.³⁷ This report’s gloomy projection is that by 2050 the earth’s nine billion people will “require between 1.8 and 2.2 Earth-sized planets in order to sustain their consumption of crops, meat, fish, and wood, and to hold CO2 levels constant in the atmosphere.”³⁸