Two Thoughts about Traditional Knowledge

Professor Sunder’s intriguing paper demonstrates the continuing power of the related ideas of environmentalism and the public domain, but it also identifies some of the hazards of those metaphors. I have only two unrelated thoughts to add to her analysis. First, I was struck by the parallels between her argument and the historiography involving the displacement by British colonists of Native Americans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “Indians” of North America were commonly depicted as noble savages, living on but not altering their natural environment. This imagery underlay the most common moral justification for their displacement by Europeans: they weren’t productive. In the words of Chief Justice Marshall, “[t]o leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness.” Until recently, the main line of criticism of this vision and associated moral argument combined two related themes: first, it devalued the Indians’ nonacquisitive, natural, respectful way of living lightly upon the land while conserving it; and second, it fostered imperialism and unjust conquest. In his pioneering book, Changes in the Land, William Cronon introduced an entirely different line of criticism. The problem with the traditional account, he argued, is not merely that it prioritized aggressive, transformative uses of the land over conservation and harmony, but that it got the facts wrong. New England in particular, when the British arrived, was not a primeval wilderness, “a climax forest in permanent stasis,” respected and preserved by its sparse human inhabitants. It was instead cultivated and occupied, an enormous garden or pasture. Of the many ways that it had been modified by the Indians to suit their own ends, one of the most important was the removal of the underbrush. Early