Man's Lack of Adaptive Qualities in American History

For centuries, man looked to the sky, and envied the birds; he eventually built the airplane and joined the avian creatures in the clouds. But the man looked also to the river, and envied the beavers; he quickly built dams all across America, dooming many of the aquatic creatures in the water, Marc Reisner details mankind’s conquering of America in Cadillac Desert, in which he focuses on the alteration of water in the West. In works such as Reisner’s, it becomes clear that Americans have long held a mindset of domination: they force nature to perform specific purposes instead of working within the earth‘s established natural systems For instance, man dammed, diverted, and leveed almost all rivers in the West to make the land suitable for agriculture and settlement and to stop flooding.

Man‘s distortion of nature for his purposes combines with his ignorance of complex ecological systems, resulting in unsustainable utilization of the American landscape.

The treatment of the landscape by European settlers contrasts sharply with Native American’s relationship with the earth; whereas Native Americans worked with the land and sought to understand it, Europeans tried to impose their way on an environment that they did not understand As evident in the history of the American West, in other words, man has long refused to adapt to nature, instead working with his limited knowledge to force the earth to submit to his needs, unlike this continent’s previous inhabitants, the Native Americans.

In so doing, mankind harms society and nature by depriving humans and the earth of diversity and adaptability in the face of looming global issues such as climate change.

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To fully understand the substantial impact that European Settlement had on the American West, it is useful, first, to examine the lifestyle of Native Americans, whose culture is deeply connected with nature, allowing them to live harmoniously with their environment, Ingram and Malamud—Roam in The West without Water state about indigenous peoples, “Their long history in the region had given them a deeper understanding that, though the floodplains could provide abundant rich soils and resources, they could only be safely occupied seasonally” (207). This illustrates two concepts that Native Americans learned: natural processes must be studied for long period of time, and adaptation is necessary for survival. Because they have inhabited the American landscape for many generations, Native Americans know that nature has formed its delicate balance over many centuries, even millennia, and so they realize that a disturbance of natural processes—for example, the building of a dam for flood prevention—can disrupt an ecosystem that has been adapting to particular conditions for time untoldt.

Therefore, Native Americans accepted that sometimes they must cede to natural forces, such as periodic flooding in the plains, and adapt their lifestyle to work with the environment Ingram and Malamud-Roam explain, Native Americans “survived by living in small, flexible groups, able to mobilize rapidly and relocate as conditions dictated” (207). Such adaptability means that Native Americans altered their physical environment less permanently and drastically than future settlers would. Overall, the indigenous peoples of North America, with their longstanding connection to nature, were willing to adapt to their environment and therefore had less of a disruptive impact on the land than European settlers did. In stark contrast to the balanced lifestyle of the Native Americans, European settlers advanced across the American West with a mindset of domination and conversion, forcing nature to adapt to their will instead of adapting to nature, Marc Reisner describes Western settlers as “a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent” .

As Reisner explains, “Manifest Destiny, , , was to become the rationalization for those excesses that its companion doctrine, Social Darwinism, could now excuse”. Reisner elaborates on the “excesses” of people in the West, from the rise of wasteful agriculture to the proliferation of dams, throughout his book. With such a mindset of wanton domination, settlers of the West rapidly altered a landscape, trying to “defeat nature, , t and make it do their bidding” instead of following the example of the Native Americans and working with the land. Whereas the “Native Americans knew better than to build permanent settlements in California’s Central Valley or delta,” European settlers believed that they could force nature to work for them, and so they set up cities and went to extreme lengths to bring water to their desert settlements (207). Western settlers’ refusal to adapt to nature is again evident in their use of eastern practices in the very different environment of the West, Reisner describes the settlement of California, in particular, as a “long series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions to western topography and climate”.

Damming worked in the east, so settlers tried it in the west in a desperate attempt to control water,, and water-intensive crops that could grow in the east were forced to grow in the west Overall, society did not adapt their methods of development to fit the western landscape; they forced the reluctant land to do their bidding instead of learning new ways to thrive in a new environment. Americans rushed forward in the taming of the West, failing to learn about the landscape which they were destroying Native Americans lived on this continent for many generations, giving them “an intimate knowledge of their environment and its resources” (Ingram and Malamud-Roam 207) With this understanding of nature, they were able to have a small impact on this land, while still thriving as a society. In their haste to conquer the landscape, settlers failed to learn the natural ways of the land that Native Americans so intimately understood For example, Reisner says of the Bureau of Reclamation in the golden age of dam building that, “by building so many projects in a rush, the Reclamation Service was repeating its mistakes before it had a chance to learn from them”.

In other words, instead of building gradually to allow for a project to be integrated into the environment and to observe the ramifications of the project, developers prioritized immediate results However, by not giving the projects enough time to reveal any environmental impacts or failures in their design, efficient, low impact projects were not developed Reisner explains, “instead of weeding out or discouraging bad projects, the ‘reforms’ [to the Reclamation Act] began to concentrate on making bad projects work” instead of taking the time to find sustainable solutions that would save not only the environment, but much money in the long run. Thus, by not learning about the landscape in the context of time and allowing the earth to reveal natural processes that could hinder, overthrow, and otherwise interact with man’s efforts, society simply rushed forward in its domination of a landscape it little understood.

Despite a desire to conquer the American West, man‘s failure to understand his target landscape meant that he could never completely control it, As Mark Fiege explains in Irrigated Eden, “A belief that humans should conquer and exploit the environment does not necessarily mean that they will actually achieve their objectives” (208), In the American West, this rings true, because although settlers came with a mindset of conquering and redeeming the landscape, they found this a remarkable challenge that they failed to overcome, While certain areas of the west, such as land that is now cities and agriculture was conquered, the majority of the land could not be reclaimed from the desert, despite the massive irrigation efforts by people and the government. The West “was a dynamic environment in which engineers and farmers seldom if ever achieved the control over nature that they desired,” Fiege also remarks.

Fiege goes so far as to say, “irrigators did not even attain their most basic objective: freedom from drought”. Therefore, as a consequence of his failure to understand the land, man could never figure out how to use the environment to its fullest potential and, through his ignorance, he cheated himself out of the full benefits of a dynamic environment. In addition to not fully conquering the landscape, through man‘s failure to understand and his subsequent drastic alteration of the landscape, he causes environmental damage such as land destruction and biodiversity loss that degrades the productivity and economic value of the land, Fiege says, “irrigators [in the West] tried various technological, economic, and institutional means to shape and systemize land, water, and organisms”. In trying to force the land to perform particular functions, such as water storage, or yield particular resources, such as agricultural products, timber, and fish, the environment inevitably loses value, For example, over-irrigation of a landscape that was not meant to sustain mass amounts of agriculture results in the loss of land’s viability.

Fiege describes the over-watering that resulted in the loss of farmland, stating, “Ironically, water had almost completely ruined the land that the [settlers] had originally sought, through irrigation, to reclaim”. Reisner describes another form of land destruction, salinity, that is caused by excessive irrigation; he says that in “the most productive farming region in the entire world,” the San Joaquin Valley, “A few thousand acres have already gone out of production” due to salinity issues. Besides losing viability for the particular function man has used the land for, the land often loses other functions, as Abramowitz explains in “Putting a Value on Nature‘s ‘Free’ Services.” For example Abramowitz explains, “The value of a forested watershed comes from its capacity to absorb and cleanse water, recycle excess nutrients, hold soil in place, and prevent flooding” . Abramowitz even estimates the value of a forested watershed’s ecosystem services, valuing them at $7 billion, at the least.

So, while a forest could simply be used for timber harvesting, there is an incredible amount of value in an intact ecosystem Vitousek et al. in “Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems” explain even more implications of destructive land transformation through agriculture, deforestation, and resource extraction: “land transformation represents the primary driving force in the loss of biological diversity worldwide”. The simplification of a complex ecosystem so that it can be exploited for one purpose results in many components of that ecosystem being lost; very often, these components are species that cannot survive in the new conditions created by man’s alteration of the environment. The loss of biodiversity “reduces the resilience of species and ecosystems while precluding human use of the library of natural products and genetic material that they represent.

When settlers were rampantly developing the land, they did not understand concepts such as salinity buildup and biodiversity loss, nor the implications of these occurrences for the economy and the environment. Thus, his lack of understanding caused man to exhaust the land instead of utilizing all of the services it naturally offers, causing economic harm to himself, and physical and biological harm to the environment, and, unfortunately, such exploitive practices still occur today, showing that man still has not learned to value his natural environment, Beyond simply failing to receive the full benefit from the American West, man’s unwillingness to adapt to his environment often subjects him to direct harm in the form of natural disasters. Reisner provides several examples of such disasterst For instance, a dam built in the late 19205 by William Mullholland, in an attempt to bring water to Los Angeles, collapsed under the last of the season’s rains, killing approximately 450 people.

Had Mullholland altered the landscape in more subtle ways, or with more thought and understanding, perhaps this disaster could have been avoided. In a more recent example, a spate of storms in California due to the El Nifio of the 1980s resulted in a dam collapse in that state. Other cyclical processes besides the El Nifio serve to remind man that he can never fully control the earth Cyclical droughts plague the West, and Reisner says of the California drought of the late 19805, “It wasn’t a man-made drought, but man made it very much worse” due to a failure to appropriate less water during a series of drought years, resulting in immense consequences. Some consequences of this drought, such as the impact on salmon runsiwhich subsequently impacts fishermen in other Pacific coastal states—could have been avoided if the reduced amounts of water had been properly allocated. Ingram and Malamud-Roam comment on these cycles of disaster, saying “with each drought or flood, the costs mount—both to the ecosystems that are collapsing and to the economy that reels with each disaster”.

These authors recognize that in such disasters, both man and nature are suffering losses. If man does not realize the dangers of trying to control nature without fully understanding it, he will continue to endure disasters and hardships in his environment; if he learns, however, to adapt his actions to nature’s ways—especially to relatively predictable natural cycles—he will find that working with nature has more benefits than simply trying to conquer it If man learns the value of adaptability from nature, he will have taken an important step toward sustainable living Ingram and Malamud-Roam state that “Reconciling human and environmental uses of water, and managing water more flexibly and responsibly lie at the core of a sustainable future”. Society must be willing to give to the environment, not simply take from it as the settlers of the West did.

However, extracting resources from the environment in sustainable ways and at sustainable rates will not be enough Man must allow nature the time to adapt to additions he makes to it, and he must make sure that his alterations to nature are not so extreme that nature cannot effectively adapt to them. Vitousek et all recommend the integration of such policies in order to avoid continued harm to the planet; they say we must “work to reduce the rate at which we alter the Earth system” and must “accelerate our efforts to understand Earth’s ecosystems and how they interact with the numerous components of human- caused global change” (71). The integration of these guidelines into public policy, and the public mind, would allow man to work with nature in harmonious ways and at a rate that allows nature to adapt to man’s influence. Only once people have an understanding of nature, however, can they effectively adapt to nature and begin to work with it, looking to nature for solutions to issues instead of trying to create their own.

For example, Ingram and Malamud—Roam state, “In the arid West, colossal dams were once thought to be critical to prosperity Today, there are alternatives that can achieve the functions provided by these dams, without the damage” (217), In other words, darns seemed like the best solution to provide water and energy to a burgeoning population as it dominated the landscape, but now, with an understanding of the ecology of environments, it is possible to create alternatives to dams that will have less of a negative impact on nature. Not only can knowledge of the environment help people work effectively in it, but it can even allow the discovery of natural solutions to mitigate issues such as ocean rising. Ingram and Malamud-Roam claim that as ocean levels rise, “some scientists suggest that the best protection from the dangerous combination of rising sea levels and extreme storms is what nature has already provided but we have nearly eliminated: tidal wetlands”.

This statement reveals a bittersweet truth: even as mankind harms nature through events such as climate change, the earth provides us solutions, if only man is mindful enough to look to his environment This idea provides hope for the future, because “a warming world will likely make the extreme events, particularly floods and droughts, even larger and more frequent,” but perhaps nature will help mankind persist through the growing dangers of the world. Nature can best provide solutions for man’s benefit only if it maintains its ability to adapt to emerging global changes; therefore, the integrity of ecosystems must be preserved by a society that lives in harmony with its surroundings, Ingram and Malamud-Roam suggest the following in The West without Water: “All current residents in the American West would also benefit from reflecting on the native cultures that came before us, that lived more in tune with their environment and understood by necessity the delicate balance between consumption and conservation”.

As Abramowitz points out “Too often, illogical and inequitable resource use continues i because powerful interests are able to shape policies by legal or illegal means”. Therefore, as Ingram and Malamud»Roam suggest, all members of society must reflect on their relationship with nature, because in a democratic society, the desire of the people is necessary before change can occur and civil involvement prevents corrupt groups from controlling the fate of the environment. When society becomes concerned with its natural environment and seeks out education regarding environmental issues, progress can be made on a large scale towards sustainable practices that will provide for future generations the “same level of nature’s services as we have today” so that future generations can continue working with nature, building upon the knowledge of their parents to improve their ways of interacting with the world, just as the Native Americans did.