Earth's natural capital is running out

November 23 2008

Posted By GEORGEBEAVER Brantford Expositor

As a boy growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I remember hearing the great myth that anyone born in America could grow up to be the president.

It was not until I had read many history books that I came to realize that every president whom I read about, from George Washington onward, was a millionaire.

Washington got to be a millionaire by buying and selling Indian land. It's not a secret. It's there in the history books.

Much of the land that made him rich was Six Nations land. Before the American Revolution ended, he sent Gen. John Sullivan to burn the cornfields, orchards and villages of the Seneca, south of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. After the war, he and his fellow land-jobbers expropriated this excellent land and sold it to white settlers.

The homeless and hungry Seneca refugees were allowed a few tiny bits of their former territory to survive on as best they could. The rest of the Six Nations shared a similar fate. Even the Oneida and Tuscarora, who helped the Americans win the war, had most, or all, of their land confiscated.

Archaeologist Ronald Wright, in his book Stolen Continents wrote, "Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet."

By this he was referring to the "200- year bubble of affluence" that began with the Industrial Revolution.

He also said: "The Industrial Revolution was a product of the loot, land and labour of the new world."

The loot was the gold and silver stolen from the Inca Indians of South America by the Spaniards. The land referred to the earth's products, such as crops, trees, and the bounty of the lakes and rivers on the land. The labour referred to the Incas and other indigenous people, who were forced to work in the gold and silver mines, often until they died.

These precious metals were shipped to Europe by way of Spain for about a century. As this wealth flowed to other European countries, it enabled them to begin to build bigger factories and better machines. It was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when machines began to do the work of hundreds, and even thousands, of men.

This "revolution" made the countries of western Europe very wealthy. After the American War of Independence, the Industrial Revolution made the new Americans even wealthier than the Europeans. After all, they had even more "loot, land and labour" than the Spaniards ever had.

After European diseases had decimated the native people, there seemed almost no end to the amount of almost empty Indian land available in North America.

The land not only could produce good food crops, it also had new forms of natural capital, such as fossil fuel. First coal and then oil (black gold) made life easier for us. It represented much more wealth than the Spaniards got from the gold and silver of the Inca Indians.

Now there are signs that the "200- year bubble of affluence," as Wright put it, may be coming to an end. The earth has a limited amount of natural capital for us to use or waste.

We are now just about out of Indian land. Perhaps we also are running out of natural capital.

George Beaver is a freelance writer living on the Six Nations reserve. Our Town is a forum for news and views from some of the smaller communities in our area.

Article ID# 1312224