Dispelling the myth?

I spent the best part of spring and summer '99 working on my anthropology dissertation, passionately arguing that anthropologists had been wrongly excluded from much of the earlier global conservation process. The rationale behind my several-thousand word essay was that the view of indigenous peoples as 'outside of nature', or 'a blot on the landscape', with no place in the growing world view of pristine, natural environments was wrong. There seemed to be, after all, plenty of examples of indigenous peoples living in harmony with their environments, and that humans weren't always a destructive force.

But maybe they were.

My three years at Sussex University studying a blend of development issues and social anthropology allowed me to carefully develop my thinking and combine two of my three passions in life (the third being technology). So, it is with great irony that almost a decade later I find myself reading a book which squarely blames indigenous peoples for many of the the mega-fauna extinctions in their environments. And the catalyst for this destruction? Technology.

In "Techno-Cultural Evolution", author William McDonald Wallace highlights the rise of hunter-gatherer kill-offs with the rise in the use of technologies - hunting technologies such as spears, knives and bow-and-arrows, and later guns. He also argues that "one of the reasons many people resisted the idea of human causes for the disappearance of the mega-fauna was a romantic notion". Perhaps there was a little of this clouding my judgement all those years ago, but is it wrong to think that it's possible for people to live in harmony with their environments? Whatever the case, we certainly seem further away from it today than we ever have been.

William McDonald Wallace also argues that we could be seeing a new environmental awakening underway today. With last weekends global Live Earth event, we could very well see this spearheaded by increased climate change awareness. Once again, the catalyst for our troubles has been a boom in technological innovation. It is quite astonishing how far we have come in just over a hundred years.

But are we now not in a truly ironic situation where new technologies are being rapidly developed to counteract the negative impacts of others? It just goes to show that, whether you are a small community in the 21st century about to lose your island home to rising sea levels, or a buffalo in the 19th century roaming the plains of North America, technology can't always be seen a good thing.