First time. We are the oldest Historical Society in america dating back to 1791, independent Nonprofit Institution dedicating to publishing and sharing our nations history for the past 221 years, and amazing collection including papers of other us president s. We are working on a covid19 initiative to record the experience of a Diverse Group of people who live through these unusual times and make it available to future generations of researchers which weve taken hosting virtual programs, programs plan through the summer. Next week we will be hosting a talk on the allocation on 19thcentury you can find more information on this program and our other programs, consider joining us. We are looking at a new book, laid waste which examines the mobilizing process in america and europe that puts together science and technology, political democracy and Competitive Capitalism and produced unimaginable wealth to material comfort to some but also brought the environment to a Tipping Point. A timely publication and discussion will be led by the author of the book, Professor John larson. John larson is professor at purdue university, before coming to purdue he served as director of research at pioneer settlement, his earlier books include John Larry Forbes and western development, internal improvement and the promise of popular government in the early United States. Market revolution in america. Before we begin our presentation i will run through a couple slides, how we use zoom, so if you comment or concern or complement feel free to reach out to me or the program coordinator, programs masshis. Org or you can support the massachusetts Historical Society, this is an image of our covid19 website if youre interested in joining that conversation. We use two functions for people to participate in the program on zoom. The first is in the q and a function at the bottom of the screen and as the Program Wraps up i will read the questions typed into q and a 2 hour speaker and try to answer as many as we can. You can also raise your hand which allows you to raise your hand. Once you do that, we will try to call on a couple people who raise their hand but you should remember you have to unmute yourself. Without further a do, we can have john larson join us. Welcome to the mass Historical Society. Thank you very much. All these openings here. Thank you, gavin kleespies. Are we ready to go forward . Guest yes. Host okay. Guest let me get the program up here. Share screen. And there. How does that look to you . Host looks great. Guest okay. Off we go. Thank you for setting this up and to all my other friends at mass historical. My hope was to do this in person. That is the next best thing in the strange days of social distancing and quarantine and all the rest. Im delighted to be here and have this opportunity to share some thoughts about this book that came out last november and got swallowed up by covid19 like Everything Else going on these days. Let me start, it is no longer news that we have degraded our environment in the name of progress. We are not alone. The western world has done a good job with this. The size of an exhausted earth and resulting social and cultural destruction are all around us. For some people this has come as a surprise. And unexpected disappointment at the end of a terrific run of progress that goes up 250 years or so yet hidden in the familiar tale of how this land was conquered and transformed by our ancestors lies another narrative. A closer Study Reveals how ideas, perceptions and choices are made by generations past contributed to what i call a culture of exploitation that shaped and guided modernization in the new world. This alternative narrative leads relentlessly to the present Environmental Crisis. It is not a surprise but the logical outcome of this narrative but also it is possible the same new history can suggest ways to approach the critical century ahead. Rather than a doom and gloom book im trying to reframe the past that might give us insight into a way forward. Laid waste the culture of exploitation in early america talks about the culture of exploitation reaching back to early modern england and the book exposes the dark side of discovery and development by settlers in the new world. Celebrating freeman from limits and constraints left behind in england, settlers in north america, teams in their language and lay the foundations for american power. All the while european americans crafted a triumphal narrative in which they play the leading role promoting individual liberty, enterprise and industry, technology, innovation and capitals development, and individual freedom and limitless progress became so embedded in our stories that we see them as natural and essential to our freedom and progress. This is simply not true. Modernization generated american wealth and power but at a price paid by environmental ecosystems by the rest of the global population. Populations in north america and abundant resources, found hundreds of thousands of africans in slavery not just to satisfy basic needs but to magnify their desires. Exploitation through wind powered sailing ships, state sponsored progress, and a tragically new form of racial slave labor set the stage for industrialization. Powered by the use of fossil fuels to drive big machines industrialization transformed material life in european and western societies resulting in the modern capitalist world order. The story told by the victors naturalize these patterns of exploitation and established what economists call free Market Forces as if they were laws of nature can to gravity or thermodynamics. The process of modernization has brought the Global Environment to a Tipping Point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. Our children and grandchildren have learned as much from the story of the lorax by dr. Seuss, many intelligent adults refuse to reflect historically on the ideas and practices that made us rich and powerful. In truth the, quote, Natural Forces driving modernization rely on axioms every bit as arbitrary as the bases of decimal arithmetic or the euclidean geometry. History abounds with examples of axiomatic assumptions we managed to abandon in pursuit of more satisfying ways to understand the world. Early generations of smart people believed political legitimacy depended on divine right monitoring. If you do not have a monarch appointed by god you could not have a stable state. We have learned to believe otherwise. In the 1500s Eastern European people discovered their wealth and power could be magnified by enslaving african laborers. For 300 years this conviction Reigns Supreme and within 50 years it fell from favor in much of europe and america. To accommodate the realities of Climate Change in the Global Crisis in the 21st century, we must imagine a paradigm shift of similar magnitude. We must notice there is a paradigm, modernization is not nature itself but is a story we tell about how nature works. We must find its roots in history and challenge his truth claims, learn to celebrate intelligent Resource Management and planetwide sense, sustainability and optimization must replace individual profit is the measure of economic value. A holistic concern for human populations in their neighborhood ecosystems, something that was once common among primitive cultures must supersede narrow claims about private rights and gains as if it outweighs the common good of the planet. Long ago terms like liberty, equality, ambition, even natural law seemed dangerous and disruptive until in the eighteenth century they found their way to common discourse, hopes, printss and philosophers who denounced freemarket is dangerous antisocial until they were redefined in the Nineteenth Century as ideal and incorruptible. My goal in this book is to show another paradigm shift is achievable and survivable. Let me offer a quick tour of the argument and it will be a very quick synopsis. Almost 300 pages if you want to read the whole thing. I start with a chapter called stability. Our colonial forefathers came from a culture the cherished stability. Inequality defined the social and Economic System but it was inequality tempered by reciprocal obligations. The wealth and power of a few obligated them to guarantee subsistence for the many who served and obeyed them. The appearance of scarcity justified these any qualities. Individual agency in the world of stability was restricted to a tiny class of inmates and even among those, ambition was stifled and suppressed by social and religious expectations. They treat that as a starting point before the world changed. It is called abundance, the world of stability, encountered in unexpected world of boundless resources. This launched the colonial project that became european settlements in the new world and the introduction of an imagined abundance profoundly upset the framework of stability, men of reckless ambition found reward and few restraints and institutions designed to impose inequality and force reciprocity, individuals flourished, individualism flourished in the prospect of improving ones station in life replaced the objective of simply staying safe in place. The colonies became a new arena for unbridled selflove, a link which they used a great deal in the seventeenth century. Chapter 3 turns to the matter of achievement. Colonization proved difficult and dangerous. Anyone who has been through junior high knows about starving times but through the application of labor and exploitation of atlantic markets american settlers found themselves safe, secure and increasingly wealthy and then surveyed their own achievement and took credit for it is ignoring the windfall represented by the environment itself and the contributions of cosmopolitan britain in maintaining profitable markets. Chapter 4 takes up the issue of liberation. After 1765 our colonial ancestors staged a rebellion against another country recasting their pride in the achievement of the recasting their pride in this achievement in new revolutionary clothing as if their good fortune was but a prelude to the great work of preserving liberty as they said from old world corruption. This reshaping required fancy rhetorical exercises by our revolutionary leaders but they managed to recruit enough support among the people by promising liberty, equality and selfgovernment. To all who would help them win. With independence firmly in hand, liberated americans turned to assess their own future. Coastal settlements showed serious wear and tear by the end of the eighteenth century giving rise to some calls for agricultural reform, resource husbandry and economic restraint but if one listed ones gaze to the west unimaginable abundance stretched quite literally across the continent. Such bounty free for the taking, why would a free people impose limits and restraints on themselves, seemed to make no sense. Real progress lay in front of them in the form of better exploitation of land, labor and resources. The key to this next chapter, improvement, the application of industry and ingenuity to a Resource Base to magnify its productivity so inventory showed them the boundless Resource Base and improvement will give them the key to taking advantage of it. Technology took a leading role in the Nineteenth Century story, giving ambitious entrepreneurs new tools and techniques to develop their wilderness, they participate in economic free for all and that is the stage for an dust realization and agrarian conquests of american material. Chapter 7 takes up the question of destiny which every high School Textbook has a chapter on manifest destiny. The astonishing progress of material success in antebellum america seemed to be proof enough that the United States was blessed with a world Historical Mission driven not by greed or gain but by destiny, americans marched across civilization across gods forgotten wasteland. After an embarrassing pause that we call the civil war, to purge the shame of slavery and establish an unchallenged system of free labor and Free Enterprise posted for americans returned to the business of mastering their systems as they had launched them before the war. As the encountered frustrations in the form of eric lester lands, timberland, extravagant spaces to be covered or urban industrial pollution as we get into the end of the Nineteenth Century, there ingenuity and Technological Prowess seems capable of solving all these problems. Objecting to the juggernaut of industrial progress. Indeed there were. Chapter 9 reviews some of them, starting with pharrell and emerson and ending with a look at teddy roosevelt. The birth of the 20th century saw the rise of our first through Conservation Movement and primarily preserving natural wonders like the National Park system and perpetuating natural Resource Base for modernization into the future. Because the existing literature on environmental history so richly chronicles the 20th century story i chose to stop at this point, roughly 1900 or 1910 or so and turned to an epilogue designed to sum up the point and return to the central message of the book. The central message lies in the problem of the common good thus we returned to modernization in the common good. Its my belief that selfcentered selfrighteous, selfcreated, self governed, self obsessed individuals simply did not foster community. An actual desert of atomistic individualism is a hobbesian dystopia marked by suspicion. The utopian side of the American Experience originally contained the commonwealth ideal and support for terms like sufficient, adequate, satisfactory. To this day, for states still call themselves commonwealth, including massachusetts, even if honored in the breach restrictions on the sin of everest were commonplace in the cultures of our ancestors. They survive and ethical creeds from secular humanism to bahai committed jesus sermon on the mount. In the culture of exploitation backed up by classical economic claims about the virtue of greed as the one true human motivation these words are dismissed as childish sentiments without a place in the real world. We can embrace that commonwealth tradition while standing inside our history and our heritage, the central claim i want to make toward the end here. We dont have to be different. We dont have to leave the american experiment in order to do differently in the 21st century. The far left provocation to launch the worlds first new selfcreated nation. I think we have an even better impulse to want to do so again. Sorry, too many. There we go. The works of dr. Seuss in that story the greedy one slur cut down the trouble with trees to knit needs of things so useless and attractive the market grew exponentially. Speaking for the trees and the living things that love them, the were asked begged him to stop, only when the last tree was filled the factory shut down leaving a barren landscape with bad air foul water and no living things. In sorrow and discuss the lorax of ascended into heaven hoisted himself without a trace. This is clearly a redemption story. The point at which our children recognize without effort so that the high priest of orthodox economic liberalism. One such spokesman for liberalism put together a recent attack on a website called abexplaining exactly what dr. Seuss got wrong. In that argument he says, no capitalist would exhaust his Raw Materials simply put. Counterintuitive. Of course, can imagine that this could ever possibly happen, even though it happened almost endlessly throughout 300 years. The second argument he made come up private ownership wouldve prevented the exfoliation of the forest, according to dk williams, the only reason the abwas because it wasnt private property he had owned before as he wouldve taken better care to husband. Williams also argues that fleets could not be useless by definition because people bought them. The definition of a useful product is if people buy it. One wonders what he would make of mood rings and pet rocks. Personal liberty is essential purpose of life, according to this economic dogma. So that the concerns of the war ask simply contradictory to the point of life which is individual freedom. Reciting this catechism will not alter the judgment of the scientists, the reckoning is here. Business as usual, its not an option, or at least not a viable option. Simple denial seems comforting and remains popular. Especially if we watch only monthly or Quarterly Earnings reports. One of the greatest problems with the culture of exploitation is its tendency to look at the various shortterm and not the longterm. The problem is, denial guarantees ultimate tragedy of the commons in a state of denial we must grab the last tree before those who have cheated, those we have cheated, cheat us back. Whats required . Im arguing in this book. It is a new mental framework without which our efforts were not coherent. We need a new metrics that capture the commons, not just the tragedy of the commons. We need new models, personal and national interest. We need to cover the more utopian side that founded the country. With luck, cooperation and real ingenuity we can address the climate and Environmental Crisis of the coming century. We can reimagine the gift of liberty and the meaning of american freedom. I believe we can try once more in the words of tom payne to make the world a new. Go and read again. The lorax of dr. Seuss. Thank you thank you john. Its a very thoughtprovoking presentation and i think certain