THE THIRD WAVE
The idea that humans should hold dominion over nature can be traced at least as far back as Genesis. Nevertheless, it was decidedly a minority view until the industrial revolution. Most earlier cultures emphasized instead an acceptance of poverty and the harmony of humankind with its surrounding natural ecology.
These earlier cultures were not particularly gentle with nature. They slashed and burned, overgrazed, and stripped the forests for firewood. But their power to do damage was limited. They had no great impact on the earth and no need for an explicit ideology to justify the damage they did.
With the coming of Second Wave civilization one found capitalist industrialists gouging resources on a massive scale, pumping voluminous poisons into the air, deforesting whole regions in pursuit of profit, without much thought about side effects or long-term consequences. The idea that nature was there to be exploited provided a convenient rationalization for shortsightedness and selfishness.
But the capitalists were scarcely alone. Wherever they took power, Marxist industrializers (despite their conviction that profit was the root of all evil) acted hi exactly the same way. Indeed, they built the conflict with nature right into their scriptures.
Marxists pictured primitive peoples not as coexisting harmoniously with nature but as engaged in a fierce life-and-death struggle against it.With the emergence of class society, they held, the war of “man against nature” was unfortunately transformed into a war of “man against man.” The achievement of a Communist classless society would permit humanity to get back to its first order of business once again—the war of man against nature.
On both sides of the ideological divide, therefore, one found the same image of humanity standing hi opposition to nature and dominating it. This image was a key component of indust-reality, the superideology from which Marxist and anti-Marxist alike drew their assumptions.
A second, interrelated idea carried the argument a step fur-er. Humans were not merely in charge of nature, they were the pinnacle of a long process of evolution. Earlier theories of evolution existed, but it was Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, brought up hi the most advanced industrial nation of the time, who provided scientific
underpinning for this view. He spoke of the blind workings of “natural se-lection’*—an inevitable process that mercilessly weeded out weak and inefficient forms of life. Those species who survived were, by definition, the fittest.
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