>From a review of Schama's "Landscape And Memory" in the Toronto Star, 4/8/95 PROPONENTS of "deep ecology" believe that Western civilization holds a warped attitude toward the natural world, regarding it as a realm simply to be exploited by mankind. Somewhere in history, these proponents believe, we took a wrong turn - although they are not agreed on precisely when. Was it at the outset of industrialism? The dawn of Cartesian rationalism? Was it, as historian Lynn White Jr. suggests, in the 7th century A.D., when the invention of a fixed-harnessed plow enabled peasant farmers to "attack the land"? Some hold that the wrong turn took place even earlier, when the Hebrew Bible taught that the human race had dominion over other species. There is even a school of thought that locates the fall from grace with the change from hunting-gathering economies to agriculture. Serious history, however, casts doubt on the thesis of a historical fall from environmental grace. Stone Age societies, it turns out, could also do serious damage to the environment… ===== >From a 1992 New Republic by Schama defending Columbus against pro-indigenous attacks: "Ah . . . Colon, they [meaning us] . . . live out your legacy, your destiny, more successfully and more grandly, if more terribly, than you ever could have dreamed." THUS Kirkpatrick Sale, to the shade of the Admiral. Sale is ready to convict Columbus for pretty much everything wrong with the planet from then until now, including the extinction of the Great Auk and for all I know the hole in the ozone layer, too. ===== >From an April 9, 1989 St. Louis Dispatch review of Schama's "CITIZENS: A Chronicle of the French Revolution" Moreover, he disputes the comforting thesis that 1789 was nice, but the terrorists took over later (1792 or 1793). Bunk, he remarks, there was plenty of mean and brutal violence from the start, ''bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.'' Schama concludes that the constitutional, property-respecting modernizers inspired the 1789 epiphanies, but the harsh facts were always dictated by a popular, anti-middle class revolt as violent as it was backward-looking. So we have here an almost reactionary work, reconfirming old conservative conceptions, written with exceptional fluency by one of the rising younger scholars of modern European history. This book should make a lot of waves. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
