Day 8... a little late

But well before then, some similar pillage-the-earth-and-let's-have-no-nonsense-about-it nonsense had been rather surprising if such a belief had not arrived on these shores, considering that a good many of the earliest immigrants were debtors from English prisons, fur trappers, tobacco and cotton barons-to-be, and Puritan tradesmen. Such people tended to know enough about the natural world to exploit it, but not much more-- if indeed they knew next to nothing about how to get along with the people who did. As the old saying puts it, "They fell first upon their knees, and then upon the Indians." And then upon the landscape. As Luther Standing Bear, chief of the Oglala Sioux, described the situation:
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.

Today, thanks to this rather lopsided cultural foundation, we live in what is commonly described as a Materialistic Society. But that description is in error. Ours is in reality an Abstract Value society--one in which things are not appreciated for what they are so much as for what they represent. If Western industrial society appreciated the Material World, there would be no junkyards, no clearcut forests, no shoddily designed and manufactured products, no poisoned water sources, no obese, fuel-guzzling automobiles, nor any of the other horrors and eyesores that haunt us at every turn. If ours were a materialistic society, we would love the physical world--and we would know our limits within it.

The Te of Piglet (page 125-126)