Call me, Ishmael.

School started again. I'm in a situation I have been working toward for quite a while. I have the school humming along nicely and I get to spend my mornings, and many afternoons, teaching again. Since I took over the administration, New Year's of '07, I've had to concentrate on so many different distractions, I haven't been able to put much effort into the classroom side. Now, I have a 'class' of two adolescents.
They are both super smart and motivated, but it is the content of the class that I want to talk about (type about?).
We are reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Yeah, I read it about a hundred years ago too. If you haven't gotten around to it, let me give you the quick rundown...
The student finds a teacher who is an expert on captivity. The student is walked through a basic concept of humans being divided into two groups: Takers and Leavers. Basically, everyone was a Leaver until about 10,000 years ago. Somewhere around that time, Joe-Mo Sapien said (grunted?) "Things fall off plant, go in ground, grow back again, make more food." Or something to that effect, we haven't recovered the audio of that yet.
So, the Agricultural Revolution begins. This new race of people starts growing food. They settle down, they start to specialize in different areas. Their knowledge increases. The better nutrition increases brain capacity, and the species starts to be wildly successful. The freedom generated by agriculture gives us a sense of control over this world. For three billion years, we had been living in balance with nature as it worked. Our numbers were controlled by the same laws that governed the entire rest of the world, but we got too smart for that.
We built walls and better spears to better kill anything that threatened our safety. Which is, of course, a perfectly rational response to being attacked. However, after we stopped having to worry about anything being higher on the food chain than us, we had to start preying upon, and protecting ourselves from, one another. The huge food surplus had generated another effect to add to this advancement in thought and control. The population of Homo Sapiens started to multiply at an unprecedented rate.
Everywhere this race went, it wreaked havoc on the established nature, and it continued to increase its power over that nature. And they learned how to grow even more food. And that made more people.
And when the number of people got too big, they killed each other off. And on, and on. Except that in the process of this cycle of surplus to scarcity to surplus again, Man decided that he was put here to use the Earth in any way He liked. He decided that God had put him here, and given him all these resources to plow through and throw away. It became an adversarial relationship.
The whole reason for the mess we've made is because we stopped living by the Laws of Nature. We decided we could 'Take' as much as we wanted, not needed, wanted. The few 'Leavers' that still exist in the world are far enough into the jungle to still understand the Law, but we'll get us a mission'ry in there to stamp that out soon enough.
What's funny about reading Ishmael again after all these years is that I had forgotten that someone told me this stuff once. The book is such a part of the way I think, I couldn't even separate the story from my worldview.
Anyway, I'm about halfway through it with my class, so when we meet again, I'll probably need to say a little more about it.
In the meantime, see if you see any examples of Man being at war with the Earth.