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Our
Quest for Paradise Always Appears to Result in Eviction or Genocide
by
George Monbiot
August
9, 2003
It
is surely one of the most brazen evasions of reality ever painted. John
Constable's The Cornfield, completed in 1826, and now hanging in the National
Gallery's new exhibition Paradise, evokes, at the very height of the enclosure
movement, a flawless rural harmony. Just as the commoners were being dragged
from their land, their crops destroyed, their houses razed, the dissenters
transported or hanged, Constable conjures the definitive English Arcadia. A dog
walks a herd of sheep into the deep shade of an August day. A ruddy farm boy
drinks from a glittering stream, his donkeys browsing quietly behind him. In
the background, framed by great elms, men in hats and neckerchiefs work a field
of wheat. Beyond them a river shimmers through water meadows. A church emerges
from the trees to bless the happy natives and their other Eden.
In
the midst of the rural hell, Constable invents his heaven. It is a glittering
lie, and we should not be surprised to read in the gallery's brochure that this
is "one of the nation's favourite paintings, reproduced countless times
and in thousands of homes." [1] For what Constable
has done is what human beings have always done, and continue to do today. Confronted
by atrocities, we invoke a prelapsarian wonder. We construct our Gardens of
Eden, real or imagined, out of other people's hell.
The
timing of the exhibition is good, as it is in this season that we leave our
homes in search of paradise. In doing so, we immiserate other people. It is not
just the noise with which we fill their lives while pursuing our own
tranquility. In order to create an Eden in which we may disport ourselves in
innocence and nakedness, we must first commission others to clear its
inhabitants out of the way. Like Constable, we are adept at hiding this truth
from ourselves.
The
Yosemite Valley in California was set aside by Abraham Lincoln as the world's
first public wilderness. As the historian Simon Schama records, "the
brilliant meadow floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden
was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian
occupants." [2] The first whites to enter the valley
were the soldiers sent to kill them. [3] Eden, in an
inversion of the Biblical story, was thus created by Man's expulsion. The
colonists redefined the Ahwahneechee's managed habitat as wilderness in order
to assert both a temporal and spiritual dominion over it.
America's
Garden of Eden, in other words, is in fact its Canaan, the land of milk and
honey whose indigenous people had first to be eliminated before the invaders
could claim it as their birthright. The Mosaic doctrine of terra nullius (the
inhabitants possess no legal rights to their land), which permitted the Lord's
appointed to "smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of
Sheth" [4] has become the founding creed of the
usurper all over the world. It continues to inform the land seizures in modern
Israel, seeking now to turn itself into a walled garden; it continues to guide
the expropriations upon which much of the global tourism industry is based.
In
the second half of the 20th century, as the cost of international transport
fell, governments discovered a powerful financial incentive to create, from the
lands of the poor, a paradise for the rich. All over east and southern Africa,
the most fertile lands of the nomads and hunter-gatherers were declared
"primordial wilderness." [5] The inhabitants
were shut out; only those who could afford to pay were permitted to enter
heaven. You can read about the Maasai Mara reserve on the Kenya Tourist Board's
website, under the heading "Wilderness". It informs you that the
indigenous people, the Maasai, "regard themselves ... as much a part of
the life of the land as the land is part of their lives. Traditionally, the
Maasai rarely hunt and living alongside wildlife in harmony is an important
part of their beliefs." [6] What it does not tell you
is that the Maasai have been extirpated from the "wilderness" in
which they lived in harmony with wildlife, because the tourists did not expect
to see them there.
The
government of Botswana has just completed its expulsion of the Gana and Gwi
Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, on the grounds that their
hunting and gathering has become "obsolete" and their presence is no
longer compatible with "preserving wildlife resources." [7] To get rid of them, as Survival International has shown,
it cut off their water supplies, taxed, fined, beat and tortured them. [8] Bushmen have lived there for some 20,000 years; the
wildlife is not threatened by them, but the freedom of the diamond mining and
the tourism industries might be. Having expelled the Bushmen from their
ancestral lands, the government now invites tourists to visit what its website
calls "the Last Eden". [9]
The
precursors of these game reserves were the deer parks and other earthly
paradises the aristocracy built for itself in Britain. In Stowe gardens in
Buckinghamshire, landscaped by Capability Brown in the 1740s on behalf of the
Whig politician Lord Cobham, is a valley called the "Elysian Fields",
the paradise of the ancient Greeks. Hidden in the trees in the heart of
paradise is a church: the only remaining evidence of one of the villages
cleared to make way for the estate. You can scour the National Trust's
literature for any reference to the people who lived there or in the other
places which were turned into the grand estates it preserves, but you will be
wasting your time. [10] Britain's biggest NGO recounts
the history of heaven, but shields its eyes from hell.
We
deceive ourselves by precisely the same means in building our virtual Edens.
Paul Gauguin sought his garden of innocence in the South Pacific, but found
instead a society ravaged by French colonisation and venereal disease. Like
Constable he painted paradise anyway: the tableau displayed in the National
Gallery was largely copied from a frieze in a Javanese temple, into whose
implausible Eden Gauguin inserted his ethereal Tahitians. [11]
Perhaps the most disturbing painting in the exhibition is Francois Boucher's
Landscape with a Watermill. In the French countryside in 1755, the peasants
were living on husks, grass and acorns, but Boucher has plump maids in white
linen sauntering through their tasks, while boys lounge in bucolic splendour on
the riverbank. The painting appears to have been produced to grace the walls of
a landowner's home. Today, we find such lies repeated on our television
screens, in the travel and wildlife programmes which seek to persuade us that
all is well in the white man's playground. The BBC's only recent series on the
Congo, filmed in the midst of the massacres there, informed us that "the
Congo may once have been known as the 'heart of darkness' - today it seems more
like a bright, beautiful wilderness." [12] It
ignored the killings altogether.
Paradise
is the founding myth of the colonist. Unable to contemplate the truth of what
we do, we extract from our fathomless collective guilt a story of primordial
innocence.
George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at
the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of
Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly
column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The
Age of Consent (Flamingo Press), puts forth proposals for global democratic governance. His articles and
contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com.
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References:
1.
Sheena Stoddard, 2003. Paradise. The National Gallery.
2.
Simon Schama, 1996. Landscape and Memory. Fontana, London.
3.
http://www.nps.gov/yose/nature/history.htm
4.
Numbers 24, 17.
5.
Bernhard Grzimek, Michael Grzimek, E L Rewald, 1965. Serengeti Shall Not Die.
Collins, London.
6.
http://www.magicalkenya.com/default.nsf/doc21/4YGEX3ADMY6?opendocument&l=1&e=1
7.
http://www.gov.bw/basarwa/background.html
8.
Survival International, 22 February 2002. News Release: Botswana Leaves Bushmen
In Desert Without Water; Survival International, 14 February 2002. News
Release: Botswana Tortures Bushmen, Then Prosecutes Them; Survival
International 30 January 2002. News Release: Botswana: Government Plans To
Destroy Bushman Tribes.
9.
http://www.gov.bw/tourism/foreword/foreword.html
10.
See for eg http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/places/stowegardens/index.html
11.
Sheena Stoddard, ibid.
12.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/tv/congo/