I believe, have cut down more trees in America than any other name!” boasted
John Adams. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War general, spoke for most
Americans of his day when he observed in 1792, “Civilization directs us to
remove as fast as possible that natural growth from the lands.” The Adams-
Lincoln mode of thought did make possible America’s rapid expansion to the
Pacific, the Chicago school of architecture, and Henry Ford’s assembly line.
Our growing environmental awareness casts a colder light on these
accomplishments, however. Since 1950 more than 25 percent of the remaining
forests on the planet have been cut down. Recognizing that trees are the lungs
of the planet, few people still think that this represents progress.
Anthropologists have long known better. “Despite the theories traditionally
taught in high school social studies,” pointed out anthropologist Peter Farb,
“the truth is, the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.”
(^50) Thus “primitive” cultures were hardly “nasty.” As to “brutish,” we might
recall the comparison of the peaceful Arawaks on Haiti and the Spanish
conquistadors who subdued them. “Short” is also problematic. Before
encountering the diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, many people in
Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas probably enjoyed remarkable
longevity, particularly when compared with European and African city
dwellers. “They live a long life and rarely fall sick,” observed Giovanni da
Verrazano, after whom the Verrazano Narrows and bridge in New York City
are named.^51 “The Indians be of lusty and healthful bodies not experimentally
knowing the Catalogue of those health-wasting diseases which are incident to
other Countries,” according to a very early New England colonist, who
apparently ignored the recently introduced European diseases that were then
laying waste the Native Americans. He reported that the Indians lived to
“three-score, four-score, some a hundred years, before the world’s universal
summoner cites them to the craving Grave.”^52 In Maryland, another early
settler marveled that many Indians were great-grandfathers, while in England
few people survived to become grandparents.^53 The first Europeans to meet
Australian aborigines noted a range of ages that implied a goodly number lived
to be seventy. For that matter, Psalm 90 in the Bible implies that thousands of
years ago most people in the Middle East lived to be seventy: “The years of
our lives are three score and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four
score, yet is their labor sorrow.. .”^54
Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief in progress makes