Material from The Conquest of Paradise

(no name) ((no email))
Wed, 29 Apr 1992 11:05:43 PDT

The following material was received from another distribution list I belong to
called Earth Matters and I believe the content overlaps into a number of
different discussions being held currently on Native Net. I wanted to share
this with all of you. Palamia.
-----------
"No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the
systematic material progress of the whole human race;
no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of
life;
no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal;
no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be;
no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according
to its will;
no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquillity."

William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man, quoted in
The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy by
Kirkpatrick Sale (1990, Knopf).

From the jacket cover of The Conquest of Paradise:
"Looking through the lens of ecological history, Sale refocuses the Columbain
experience in a way that is especially relevant today. He shows Columbus as the
product of a sickly and dispirited Europe and its history of environmental
despoliation, and reveals how European attitudes toward nature transformed the
vast, hitherto unspoiled continents of the New World. And he also shows how the
Indian cultures that Columbus encountered lived on these continents in harmony
and balance, achieving on earth what the Europeans appreciated as
near-paradise.

The Discovery, Sale argues, started not merely the expansion of European power
and influence around the globe but also a process that changed the distribution
and mixture of life-forms more thoroughly than any since the Paleozoic Era two
hundred million years ago. Whatever the benefits, these events must be judged
in light of their profound consequences for the fate of our planet."