This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new
way oflooking at the natural world and our place in it, while
boldly challenging theassumptions that underlie the way we teach
and think about both history andtime. Calvin Luther Martin's "In
the Spirit of the Earth" is a provocativeaccount of how the
hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with
devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human
spirit.
According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged
during neolithictimes, as humans began to domesticate animals and
farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were
spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic
innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated
relationship with other living things and with theearth itself.
This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--thetechnology
that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in
theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically,
perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and
landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a
change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting
meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world--a new,
powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to
food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and
ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and
rulingelites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and
horrors of"civilization."
Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human
centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this
ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of
a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is
ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover
the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of
nature--aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than
historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a
return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we
lost--or left behind--in the distant past might bereclaimed and
used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace
withourselves.
"Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go
back To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true,
real context, thatis. "Homo" is still here on this planet earth,
abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its
fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really,
in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination,
an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so
thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us
re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that
this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care
of us--that "Homo's" citizenship, and errand, rest not with any
creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had
arisen.'"--from "In the Spirit of the Earth"
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