Teglin K’s Reviews > Land and Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History > Status Update

For Marx, the “fundamental condition of all history”: before humans can build cathedrals, pyramids or create laws and legal institutions, or new technologies, they first of all must find ways of obtaining basic necessities of life. Marx argues that the particular economic organisation of human society, the way that society gets these basic necessities, determines the nature of the society that can be built up on it.

ch 7: "rise of the peasant and the shaping of the modern landscape." History of humans' complex manipulation of the soil, how slash and burn agriculture was transformed using the plough. First part of chapter gives history of how British landscape was changed by agriculture and destruction of forests. most of British landscape is not natural, but "the world around us is the product of centuries of human interaction."

Chapter 6 on the Americas looks at the varied lives of the pre-Colombian peoples such as the Aztec and the Montagnais in Canada -- as well as what happened to them during and after European contact in 1492. European settlers, soldiers and explorers helped alter the ecology of the continent. The indigenous people found themselves dominated by completely different ways of viewing the world around them.

discussion of Maya "collapse." The popular explanation of 'unintended ecological suicide' as Jared Diamond has written about, is an oversimplification. "Understanding the complex interaction of environmental factors with social and economic changes is crucial to understanding the decline of the Maya, as well as the impact of environmental crisis on other civilisations, including our own."

earliest forms of farming, slash and burn cultivation, deforestation, permanent agriculture and the rise of class society, women's oppression, and discussion about ancient civilizations and environmental crisis.

Humans and Nature, Early Human History, Hunter-gatherers