Environmental Compilations of Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson

Euro-American history has painted a picture of American-Indians as generally lazy people with b argonly a crude coitusship with the environment, and has painted Euro-Americans as sophisticated agriculturalists who entered Native California in the mid-nineteenth century and turned a wilderness into a thriving land of plenty. To the contrary, the essays illustrate and register American-Indians as sage and prudent caretakers of a land which they mute and treated with care.

Also, the essays were collected to fill a great breakout in the history of Native California societies in relation to the "paradigmatic transformation" of the study of "human adaptive systems." Those societies, for example,

are barely mentioned in a recent compendium of cover on the emergence of cultural complexity among hunter-gatherers. . . California's various rich, diverse, and conservatively managed habitats support (through the medium of an exceptionally effective extractive and storage technology) the highest population densities . . . in all of North America. . . . These sedentary population concentrations provided a necessary . . . condition for the development of . . . complex social, economic, political and ghostly cultural patterns (16).

These ideas form the essential points and conclusions of the book, which aims to right the historical a

For example, Bean and Lawton present ample turn out that " eager by northern California groups was a message of enhancing both plant and animal resources. . . . Deliberate extensive burning . . . had been a continuing feature . . . , non only for hunting, hardly to maintain desirable plant associations" (38). Documentation for such claims goes patronage as far as 1602 (38).

Anderson writes that the American-Indians in California developed a relationship with the land based on wise and pragmatic tenets such as "The quantity taken does not exceed the biological capacity of the plant population to reestablish or recover" and "Taboos, codes, or other social constraints are in place to discourage depletion or overexploitation and void waste---thus reinforcing conservation-minded behaviors" (170).

Blackburn, Thomas C.

, and Kat Anderson (eds.). Before the Wilderness. Menlo Park, California: Ballena, 1993.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, N.D.

on that point is no doubt that the cooperative institutional theory posited by Ostrom is a good one, nor that it would be effective in dealings with common-pool resource problems if implemented. She has convinced this reader of those basic points. However, her book lacks the turned on(p) and spiritual components which must be addressed if the society and its institutional leaders are to transform themselves to such a academic degree that they would be open to hear, much less implement, her work. Her ideas are supported by the handouts which argue that "Technology is not the limiting factor. policy-making will is the limiting factor" (handout 3). However, political will is instigated not by theory but be passion, which Ostrom's work distressingly lacks. The handouts suggest psychology, religion and aestheyics as doors to the engaging of human perception which must be fired up and nurtured before the kind of profound institutional and political transformations Ostrom calls for can be implemented. Institutions alternate dramatica
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