The Conquest of Nature

What is today the Sahara Desert was once a lush green land. Between 40,000 and 23,000 B.C.E., herds of elephants, waterbuck, ostrich, and giraffe roamed North Africa. Soil samples from 12,000 to 4,000 B.C.E. suggest a rainfall of 300-400 mm per year where today there is only 10 mm. In this wetter climate, as Brian Griffith writes in his history of desertification and cultural change, rivers flowed across North Africa and the landscape of antelope and big cats probably looked much like the national parks of Kenya do today.

Rather than a wasteland of harsh bare rock and dunes of sand, the Sahara was then not only a base for gathering and hunting. With the invention of agriculture, farming became possible. But by 3000 B.C.E., a period of aridity had set in.

Some of the desiccation of the region was due to climate changes. Using a large computerized data base correlating information on climate change over thousands of years with archaeological data, geographer James DeMeo has mapped these changes in the great desert belt he calls Saharasia (extending roughly from north Africa through the Middle East into central Asia). He found that gradually what was once a garden of plenty became a barren, cruel land.

But climate change was only part of the story. As Grifith writes, when the land grew drier, farming became impossible, and even raising and herding livestock grew more difficult. As the drought advanced and vegetation became even more sparse, human agency itself became a cause of desertification.

Because the herders grazed their goats and sheep in the same areas year-round, grasslands receded further. Trees were felled to open up more grazing land. As trees and plants disappeared, there was even less rain, as happens when forests are decimated to our day. And, as herds overgrazed more and more pastures, soils became even more barren.

These cycles of land exploitation led to ever greater scarcity, as nature’s life support systems were gradually exhausted. But the cycles of domination and exploitation were not confined to nature. In this ever harsher environment, habits of domination and exploitation became routine.

Some groups began to fight others for access to grassland and water. And as men increasingly relied on brute force for a livelihood, women lost status and power.

As Griffith writes, “The original tamers of sheep and goats were quite possibly women. After hunters had killed a wild mother goat, perhaps they caught the babies and brought them home, and women decided to raise the little orphans. Such keeping of domesticated animals would have been mainly women’s work, as it often is today in India or China.” But while women undoubtedly continued to tend domestic animals and perform other economically valuable tasks, as pastures grew sparser and farther apart, men took a more active, and very different role. Now it was their role not only to travel farther and farther with the herds, but also to defend the herds from raiders and to engage in raiding themselves. With time, men’s economic contributions – and specifically their use of force to make them – began to be seen as primary and women’s work became devalued.

Griffith notes how “scarcity promotes coercion as a means of meeting basic needs.” And gradually, as the use of coercion became part of the culture, raiding and killing spread from the deserts to the more fertile areas.

This same conclusion was reached by DeMeo in his geographical review of human behavior and social institutions. There was historically, he writes, a correlation between a harsh environment, the rigid social and sexual subordination of women, and the equation of masculinity with toughness and warlikeness. He also presents data indicating that, as the severest environmental changes took place, incursions by nomadic pastoralists into the adjoining areas intensified.

As they traveled further, the nomadic tribes of the wastelands coveted the wealth and security they saw in watered lands. So these nomadic herders and raiders began to encroach on the more fertile areas, first in occasional incursions and later as conquerors who imposed their rule.

When they settled in the Fertile Crescent, the nomadic rulers brought with them their habits of domination. To them, the women of the conquered regions were booty to be appropriated as concubines or slaves, or just raped and killed at will. As the invaders settled in, the situation of “their” women, too, deteriorated further.

Griffith writes: “Back in the desert, these women had often been regarded as a primarily sexual commodity, but at least they had been free to wander and work in the open country. Now they became a jealously guarded sexual commodity to be isolated from their surrounding community.” As their warlord husbands secluded them from contact with the conquered people, their restricted status soon became the ideal for the general population. Women were now confined to special quarters and had to be veiled to go out, as also happened later in India after the nomadic Aryan invasions.

The laws and customs of the conquered lands also changed radically, as women became male possessions. “In early Sumer down to 2371 B.C.E.,” Griffith notes, “laws concerning marriage and property were quite equal for men and women.” But by the time of Babylon (starting circa 1750 B.C.E.) and Assyria (starting circa 1200 B.C.E.), male control over women became draconian. Women who stole from their husbands could be executed. Women who did not wear the required veil would be flogged with staves. Women who sheltered a runaway wife would have their ears cut off. Women who aborted themselves were impaled in stakes to slowly die.

Everything was now geared to conquest and control – of women, “inferior” men, and the land. The subjected people were ruthlessly exploited. Even the irrigation systems needed to feed the population were neglected to fund ever expanding raids, which, as in the old nomadic days, became a major source of wealth.

The Assyrians’ brutal conquests built an empire supported by exorbitant annual tributes. The conquered farmers knew they would be slaughtered if they failed to pay. So they grew crops year-round, and exhausted their soil. None of this mattered to the rulers, since as Griffith writes, the Assyrians seem to have seen their empire as a huge raiding ground. When one region was depleted, they could just expand their conquests, “like nomads chasing ever scarcer pastures.”

This conquest mentality – of nature, women, and other men – was also the trademark of the later Persian King Darius. During his reign (circa 500 to 328 B.C.E.), he milked the Middle East for astronomical sums to support his armies and court. Again, he did not care that there were huge environmental costs from pushing the people so hard. Having to pay taxes worth up to half their crops so the king could hire more mercenaries, farmers had little choice. They were forced to till the soil without letup to comply with annual production quotas. Not only that, since expenditures for war were the first priority, water conservation and irrigation systems were often left to fall apart. As Griffith writes, the cycle kept repeating itself: “disiccation begot warlords, and warlords begot disiccation.”

And this cycle is far from over. These habits of domination continue to our day. Only at our level of technological development, they threaten not just one region but our entire ecosystem. Scientists urge us to shift from conquering and exploiting nature to caring for our natural habitat. Report after report warns that our present course is not sustainable.

The 2005 United Nations-sponsored Millennium Ecosystems Assessment reports that over the past 50 years human activity has depleted 60 percent of the world’s grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers, and lakes. Compiled by 1360 scientists from 95 countries, this assessment of the damage to our natural habitat also reports that a fifth of the world’s coral reefs and a third of its mangrove forests have been destroyed in just a few decades.

Emissions from cars and power plants are responsible for higher temperatures that are melting polar ice so fast that glaciers on Greenland are slipping into the ocean twice as fast as they were just five years ago, polar bears are drowning, and many other species are threatened with extinction. Yet these emissions continue to release more than 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year – leading to scientific warnings that rising seas may engulf coastal cities in just a few decades.

Another 2005 report by scientists from the British Royal Society documents that our oceans are turning acidic. This report warns that chemical reactions to industrial emissions that produce carbonic acid are adversely affecting all organisms that have skeletons or shells. They are irrevocably harming marine life on which we and other species depend for food.

Indeed, almost every day another study details the insanity of our present course. But so deeply embedded in our economic models, policies, and practices are the old habits of domination and exploitation, that these warnings go largely unheeded.

It’s as if nobody cares – at least not those in a position to do something to change this irrational course. Corporate giants and the governments they control continue to destroy the Earth’s rainforests, pollute our air and water, and create artificial scarcity by diverting resources into weapons and wars. The plunder of nature, now aided by powerful technologies that cause terrible harm in a matter of years or even months and days, continues unabated.

Yet none of this is inevitable. It can be changed.

Excerpted from The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Riane Eisler