The Quintessential American Way

The indigenous people who lived in this country before the advent of the white man coexisted with the bison herds for hundreds of years. For many nations (what we call tribes), their entire culture was built around the buffalo. They killed many of these animals for sure, but they did it in such a way as to ensure that the herds not only survived but thrived. They behaved in much the same manner in relation to the wide tracts of forests and other resources in the land of their ancestors. They knew that to do otherwise would damage the balance inherent in Mother Earth.

During the 1800s the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) was the monopoly interest in the northwest fur trade. The Brits who manned their chief trading post -- Fort Vancouver, the site of present day Vancouver, WA -- were wise stewards of the land. According to Bernard DeVoto in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Across the Wide Missouri, the HBC "farmed the fur country practicing conservation, taking only a calculated percentage from a given field and then letting it lie fallow till the animal population had been restored".

Unfortunately, once America had established herself as a nation to be reckoned with, the bison herds disappeared, the majority of the eastern forests were decimated and the bottom fell out of the fur trade in short order. How could this new brand of people lay waste to so much bounty? It is because of the quintessential American Way -- take want you want today without any thought of the morrow.

Of course, other peoples at other times have adopted this same mantra, but it is the Americans who have made it the central thesis of life. Our economic might was built on the edifice of extraction and we extracted with great fervor on our own continent and any other land we could get our grubby hands on. Wherever we went, we preached the sermon of extraction and, in no time at all, we won converts the world over. Today, extraction is the mantra of the world!

It now seems to touch every corner of the world. For hundreds -- if not thousands -- of years, the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest lived in a symbiotic relationship with their ecosystem. They honored the spirits who lived in their forests and they took from it only what was needed. Today, in those same forests, the ecosystem is being plowed under to extract what we can get from it in the short term.

But the problem with a culture built on extraction is that it comes at a steep price -- the future. Mother Earth only has so much to give, when you exhaust her, you place your own existence in peril. That is precisely where we find ourselves today -- in peril. We have taken too much without giving back and we are beginning to reap the nasty consequences of our selfish actions.