He might have been a Catalan pirate, or a Jew fleeing the Inquisition. He was a religious zealot hoping to bring on the apocalypse. His miscalculation about the size of the earth was an error even the ancient Greeks had not committed. He mistook his location for the East Indies, and his ultimate role in history is one of slavery and genocide. He didn’t prove the earth was round, and he wasn’t the first European to come to Turtle Island, either, but where earlier European explorers had been too isolated or remote to make much impact on European society as a whole, the voyages of Christopher Columbus revealed the existence of an unsuspected New World. When Columbus set foot on Guanahani on 12 October 1492 and renamed it “San Salvador,” the Age of Exuberance began.

The “Food Race” that Daniel Quinn describes is very much like an arms race: it is impossible to “win,” because every time one side scores a “win,” it merely prompts a responding reaction from the other side. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could ever “win” their nuclear arms race, because every time one of them increased their arsenal, it merely meant that the other would increase its arsenal correspondingly. In the same way, every “win” in the Food Race, every increase in food supply, merely creates a larger population. Likewise, population cannot “win” over food supply, as starvation and disease immediately knocks population back down.

It’s the natural state of all animals to live at the limits of its own growth, an idea that ecologists refer to as “carrying capacity.” Populations rise to carrying capacity, and then stabilize in a dynamic equilibrium. This can be somewhat more convoluted for predators caught in Lotka-Volterra cycles, but the basic principle remains. The other variable involved in this is quality of life: more people can exist if all accept a lower quality of life, or fewer people can exist at a higher quality of life. For millions of years, humanity existed without a Food Race, with small populations fitting an animal that exists at such a high trophic level, and a high quality of life. The Neolithic changed all of that.

The Agricultural Revolution occurred in several places around the world at the beginning of the Holocene, as the end of the Ice Age created conditions favorable to such an odd way of life. It was not widely accepted, and it had great difficulty spreading and catching on, but a handful of groups independently picked up the practice in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Middle East. In Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond discusses the factors that separated these agriculturalist civilizations. The east-west axis of Eurasia allowed Middle Eastern wheat and beef agriculture to spread easily, while Eurasian domesticated animals exposed the Western civilizations to diseases and plagues unknown to the rest of the world. The toll of agriculture was enormous, turning the Fertile Crescent where it began into a desert. Thanks to the ease of spread along the east-west axis, though, the farmers were able to keep expanding, staying ahead of the consequences of their own destructive lifestyle. The Food Race was in full swing, and populations soared to meet the new carrying capacity provided by the inferior diet, widespread suffering, and generally reduced quality of life provided by agriculture. Yet even before the invention of writing, agriculture’s future became clear. As Plato wrote:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. … Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

Richard Manning puts Plato’s account in its proper perspective.

Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period.¹

Even as early as the Roman Empire, enormous birth rates were needed just to keep society afloat in the face of such catastrophic mortality.

Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population “grazed thin by death.” In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three. (Brown, 1988)

In the Middle Ages, the human toll of agriculture’s ecological devastation was even more oppressively bleak.

France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.”²

Such was the world Columbus came from: a world in which the Food Race had reached a certain limit, and there was simply no more land left to conquer. Medieval Europe was forced into a steady state for lack of any alternatives, and though on the brink of collapse, it had made that situation work for some centuries through massive mortality, plague, disease, death, and a generally nasty, brutish and short existence. Yet the New World, which had also seen its own Agricultural Revolution, suffered no such nightmare. Our mythology of the “pristine” nature of the pre-Columbian Americas is nothing short of fantasy, though. The quality of life enjoyed by Native Americans was not the product of their aloof detatchment from the “natural” world, but their engagement with it, and their inseperable place in it.

As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness—black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people “take only photographs and leave only footprints”—is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of “primeval forest.” It’s likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick. The first white explorers describe North America’s forests as open enough to drive wagons through. Two centuries later these agroforests had deteriorated to the black tangles immortalized by Whitman and Thoreau.

Wilderness may be merely a European concept imposed on a depopulated and abandoned landscape. The indigenous people of the Americas were master terraformers, using a hard-learned understanding of ecological processes to preserve the fundamental integrity of natural systems while utterly transforming the land into a place where humans belonged and could thrive. They were truly a part of nature, and likely did not make a distinction, as environmentalists do, between land where people belong and land where we do not. I’ll certainly agree that people carrying chainsaws and riding bulldozers don’t belong everywhere. But I’m beginning to think that gardeners, with gentle tools and sensitive spirits, have been and might again be the best planetary land managers the Earth can have.³

The population of Turtle Island was not smaller than that of Europe; on the contrary:

Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.⁴

And yet, Charles Mann, author of 1491, wrote:

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway.⁵

Of course, this trend is well-known: while many Europeans took off to join the Native Americans, the reverse is utterly absent in the written record. Instead, to “civilize” the “savages” required compulsion, force, and outright war—nearly all the First Nations eventually conquered by imperial powers fought fiercely, often preferring death to civilization. As J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer:

There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans! There must be something very bewitching in their manners, something very indelible and marked by the very hands of Nature. For, take a young Indian lad, give him the best education you possibly can, load him with your bounty, with presents, nay with riches, yet he would secretly long for his native woods, which you would imagine he must have long since forgot; and on the first opportunity he can possibly find, you will see him voluntarily leave behind all you have given him and return with inexpressable joy to lie on the mats of his fathers.

Or Benjamin Franklin:

No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies. … The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and fashionable Wants, the sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress’d for Want, the Insolence of Office … the restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them with what we call civil Society.

North America enjoyed a far superior quality of life because the flourishing societies of North America were not based on an inherently destructive foundation. European squalor was the direct consequence of European agriculture, and the Food Race they were locked in. In North America, affluence, health and prosperity were the natural consequences of their way of life: horticulture, or permaculture. The Amazon and the Great Plains were massive terraforming projects; the whole continent was a garden, as much the creation of Native Americans as any other species. Where agriculture debased an ecology to the lowest levels of succession, horticulture goaded its ecology on to higher levels of succession, with greater biodiversity and greater ecological health.

>The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson’s history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: “the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe.” Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader Roger Williams wrote, “they will not conclude of ought … unto which the people are averse.”²

The tangled thickets that Thoreau and Whitman found in “the wilderness” were essentially untended gardens—the remnants of a continental garden after its gardeners had been wiped out by disease. The Native societies Europeans encountered were the broken remnants and refugees that had survived a biological holocaust that swept 99% of the population before they ever saw a European face.

It was easy for Europeans to mistake North America for paradise. As late as 1813, James Audubon wrote of flocks of passenger pigeons that passed overhead, darkening the sky throughout the whole afternoon.⁶ Columbus, specifically and explicitly identified the New World as the Garden of Eden.

In his treatise The Book of Prophecies, which was influenced by the writings of earlier theologians, Columbus offers some insight into his views on the Garden of Eden and the second coming of Christ. In order for the return of Christ to come about, certain requirements would have to be met—namely, that Christianity must take root throughout the world; the holy lands and in particular Jerusalem, the birth place of Christ, must be wrested from the Muslims; a “last emperor of the world” must be established (Isabella and Ferdinand would seem, at least to Columbus, to meet this requirement); and, finally, the Garden of Eden would have to be found.

It is no wonder, then, that when Columbus first reached the craggy north-eastern shores of Venezuela (which he named “Isla Santa,” in the belief it was an island) on August 1, 1498, and looked upon the lush, verdant, paradise-like landscape before him, his initial impression was that he was looking at the Garden of Eden. In addition, the crags here in Venezuela fit with the Medieval notion that the Garden of Eden would have to have been at a high enough altitude to have escaped the Biblical floods that swept the Earth.⁷

With the discovery of the New World, the resources open to medieval Europe expanded enormously. The limits—their carrying capacity—was suddenly raised. A single sick soldier in Mexico sent shockwaves of smallpox through South America, wiping out most of its population. A sick, shipwrecked Frenchman who preceded the Mayflower was responsible for the depopulation of most of the northeast quarter of North America. In medieval Europe, ever-more virulent diseases had wracked the population decade after decade, as an ecological “corrective” to their marginal population. Only the strongest immunities had survived, and the diseases they carried with them were plagues of incredible virulence that ripped through North America in wave after pestilent wave, leaving little in their wake. What the Europeans found was a freshly depopulated world, perfectly suited to European expansion.

The economic contribution of New World colonies brought an end to the cycle of famine and plague that defined the Middle Ages. The ecological health of the New World that Native horticultural societies had so carefully nurtured was a vast savings that Europeans immediately set to plundering. The quality of the soil led to a quality of crop that Europe had not seen in ages.

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.⁸

For William Catton, author of Overshoot, the pattern of European response to Columbus’ discovery has clear parallels in the behavior of other animals, even animals as simple as algae.

When nutrients from decaying autumn leaves on land are carried by runoff from melting snows into a pond, their consumption by algae in the pond may be checked until springtime by the low winter temperatures that keep the algae from growing. When warm weather arrives, the inflow of nutrients may already be largely complete for the year. The algal population, unable to plan ahead, explodes in the halcyon days of spring in an irruption or bloom that soon exhausts the finite legacy of sustenance materials. This algal Age of Exuberance lasts only a few weeks. Long before the seasonal cycle can bring in more detritus, there is a massive die-off of these innocently incautious and exuberant organisms. Their “age of overpopulation” is very brief, and its sequel is swift and inescapable.⁹

In ecological terms, Columbus’ discovery increased the carrying capacity for Europe’s population. There is no such thing as an absolute limit of what constitutes overpopulation; several million may provide underpopulation for a continent, but represent massive overpopulation for your living room. Overpopulation is always relative to the resources available. The plagues, wars, and mortality of the Middle Ages were the ecological responses to overpopulation. The situation was not ended with significant losses of population, but before that could happen, a vast expansion of resources.

Discovery of the New World gave European man a markedly changed relationship to the resource base for civilized life. When Columbus set sail, there were roughly 24 acres of Europe per European. Life was a struggle to make the most of insufficient and unreliable resources. After Columbus stumbled upon the lands of an unsuspected hemisphere, and after monarchs and entrepreneurs began to make those lands available for European settlement and exploitation, a total of 120 acres of land per person was available in the expanded European habitat—five times the pre-Columbian figure!

Changelessness had always been the premise of Old World social systems. This sudden and impressive surplus of carrying capacity shattered that premise. In a habitat that now seemed limitless, life could be lived abundantly. The new premise of limitlessness spawned new beliefs, new human relationships, and new behavior. Learning was advanced, and a growing fraction of the population became literate. There was a sufficient per capita increment of leisure to permit more exercise of ingenuity than ever before. Technology progressed, and technological advancement came to be the common meaning of the word “progress.”

But the aura of limitless opportunity had another effect: further acceleration of population growth. To go into some details not shown explicitly in Table 1, between 1650 and 1850, a mere two centuries, the world’s human population doubled. There had never before been such a huge increase in so short a time. It doubled again by 1930, in only eighty years. And the next doubling was to take only about forty-five years! As people and their resource-using implements became more numerous, the gap between carrying capacity and the resource-use load was inevitably closed, American land per American citizen shrank to a mere 11 acres—less than half the space available in Europe for each European just prior to Columbus’s revolutionizing voyage. Meanwhile, per capita resource appetites had grown tremendously. The Age of Exuberance was necessarily temporary; it undermined its own foundations.

Most of the people who were fortunate enough to live in that age misconstrued their good fortune. Characteristics of their world and their lives, due to a “limitlessness” that had to be of limited duration, were imagined to be permanent. The people of the Age of Exuberance looked back on the dismal lives of their forebears and pitied them for their “unrealistic” notions about the world, themselves, and the way human beings were meant to live. Instead of recognizing that reality itself had actually changed—and would eventually change again—they congratulated themselves for outgrowing the “superstitions” of ancestors who had seen a different world so differently. While they rejected the old premise of changelessness, they failed to see that their own belief in the permanence of limitlessness was also an overbelief, a superstition.¹⁰

The Enlightenment followed the Age of Discovery, and with it, the notion of human history as a tale of “progress.”

Columbus’s voyage of discovery also had another important result: it contributed to the development of the modern concept of progress. To many Europeans, the New World seemed to be a place of innocence, freedom, and eternal youth. Columbus himself believed that he had landed near the Biblical Garden of Eden. The perception of the New World as an environment free from the corruptions and injustices of European life would provide a vantage point for criticizing all social evils.¹¹

From Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” to equally utopian endeavors, the New World was romanticized by Europeans as a chance for a fresh start, an opportunity to reclaim the Edenic existence that humans had enjoyed in the Golden Age, before the troubles that defined medieval life. From this unbounded optimism, a new picture of human history began to emerge: one defined by progress, rather than degradation. Robert Nisbet highlights the pre-modern roots of this notion.

As I have shown, the Western idea of progress was born of Greek imagery, religious in foundation; the imagery of growth. It attained its fullness within Christianity, starting with the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. Central to any genuinely Christian form of religion is the Pauline emphasis upon hope: hope to be given gratification in this world as well as the next. Basically, the Christian creed, its concept of Original Sin notwithstanding, is inseparable from a philosophy of history that is overwhelmingly optimistic about man’s estate in this world and the next, provided only that due deference and commitment to God are given.¹²

Yet the prevailing ecological reality of European agriculture promoted the primitivist tendencies in Greek and Christian thought—the notion of the Fall or the Golden Age, and the conviction that humanity’s present state is inferior to its past. For the Middle Ages in Europe, there was significant truth in this assessment. By contrast, the Enlightenment was a philosophy born of the new ecological reality, the Age of Exuberance that Columbus’ journey had created. The Enlightenment defined humanity as unique for its faculty of Reason, and celebrated that Reason as the seat of mankind’s “redemption” from its state of ignorance and savagery. The Enlightenment promised an optimistic future, where humanity triumphed over every obstacle in its way thanks to the unstoppable power of Reason.

Inevitable progress is an idea that has survived Condorcet and the Enlightenment. It has exerted, at different times and variously for good and evil, a powerful influence to the present day. In the final chapter of the Sketch [for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind], “The Tenth Stage: The Future Progress of the Human Mind,” Condorcet becomes giddily optimistic about its prospect. He assures the reader that the glorious process is underway: All will be well. His vision for human progress makes little concession to the stubbornly negative qualities of human nature. When all humanity has attained a higher level of civilization, we are told, nations will be equal, and within each nation citizens will also be equal. Science will flourish and lead the way. Art will be freed to grow in power and beauty. Crime, poverty, racism and sexual discrimination will decline. The human lifespan, through scientifically based medicine, will lengthen indefinitely. (Wilson, 1999)

We hear many of these same promises even today, and they remain unfulfilled. Yet such idle dreams were not simply baseless. They served a purpose.

During the Age of Exuberance, Utopian thinking was adaptive, to use ecologists’ jargon: it encouraged people to think big at a time when imperial expansion, technological progress, and soaring availability of fossil fuel energy made explosive growth pay off. As the Age of Exuberance ends around us, the equation is reversing. In a world of political and economic regionalization, technological stasis or regression, and dwindling supplies of all nonrenewable resources, those who move with the curve of industrial decline will be just as successful in the future as those who rode the waves of industrial growth were in the past. It’s time, and past time, to learn again how to think small—and that process will be much easier if we say farewell to Utopia and focus on the things we can actually achieve in the stark limits of time and resources that we still have left.¹³

We have mistaken as permanent the transitory consequences of Columbus’ discovery. Today, our higher level of complexity allows us to bear even denser populations than Europe could in the Middle Ages, but the basis of all our complexity remains irrevocably unsustainable. The ecological reality has changed again. The Age of Exuberance is over, and our idle fits of technophilic fantasy will not serve us any longer. This case seems to illustrate the way in which our philosophies are functions of our environment. Nisbet highlights the pre-exuberant roots of the notion of “progress,” yet they remained buried until the ecological reality shifted to support such an idea. Today, the ecological reality is shifting again, as we run up against new limits to growth, limits that are far harder to escape than simply finding more land to plow. As it shifts, so will our philosophies, and ways of understanding the world that are today scorned will become accepted truths.

Works Cited

Brown, P. (1988). The Body & Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.

Catton, C. (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Wilson, E.O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage.