This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new way of looking at the natural world and our place in it, while boldly challenging the assumptions that underlie the way we teach and think about both history and time. Calvin Luther Martin's In the Spirit of the Earth is a provocative account of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with devastating consequences for the environment and the human spirit. According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithic times, as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In the hunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth a reliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of our own curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with the earth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--the technology that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in the way we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, in the horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding of ourselves and the world--a new, powerful image of the self relative to plants and animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance of cities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and ruling elites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of ''civilization.'' Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human centered historical consciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel our sense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need to rediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature--a process that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writing and telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martin asks if some of what we lost--or left behind--in the distant past might be reclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace with ourselves. ''Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back! To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true, real context, that is. Homo is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamental and necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all of that only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act of imagination, an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so the corrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and its processes (even in our death) always takes care of us--that Homo's citizenship, and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substance from which he had arisen.'''--from In the Spirit of the Earth
