Exerpt from "Landscape and Memory"
by Simon Schama (New York, Knopf, 1995)

Though environmental history offers some of the most original and challenging history now being written, it inevitably tells the same dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor. And while the mood of these histories is understandably penitential, they differ as to when the Western fall from grace took place.

For some historians, it was the Renaissance and the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that doomed the earth to be treated by the West as a machine that would never break, however hard it was used and abused. For Lynn White Jr., it was the invention, in the seventh century AD, of a fixed-harnessed plough that sealed the earth's fate. The `knife' of the new implement `attacked the land'; farming became ecological war. "Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature." Intensive agriculture, then, is said to have made possible all manner of modern evils. It gouged the earth to feed populations whose demands (whether for necessities or luxuries) provoked yet further technological innovations, which in turn exhausted natural resources, spinning the mad cycle of exploitation at ever more frantic revolutions, on and on through the whole history of the West.

And perhaps not even the West. Perhaps, say the most severe critics, the entire history of settled ( rather than nomadic) society, form the irrigation-mad Chinese to the irrigation-mad Sumerians, is contaminated by the brutal manipulation of nature. Only the Palaeolithic cave-dwellers, who left us their cave paintings as evidence of their integration with, rather than dominion over, nature, are exempted form this original sin of civilisation. Once the archaic cosmology in which the whole earth was held to be sacred, and man but a single link in the long chain of creation, was broken, it was all over, give or take a few millennia. Ancient Mesopotamia, all unknowing, begat global warming. What we need, says one such impassioned critic, Max Oelschlaeger, are new `creation myths' to repair the damage done by recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet.