The Most Important Story in History: And Interpreters Positioned to Tell It

Part 1 of 3: Interpreters and the Big Story

The Most Important Story in History: And Interpreters Positioned to Tell It

WARNING: To read this column, you need to stand on a ladder, one tall enough to see out at least 200,000 years, sufficient to see the enormous power the Big Story has over our lives and culture.

Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago that invented a remarkable style of agriculture. It would become the most productive in history, generating surpluses unlike any humanity had seen before. Awash in calories, the tribe experienced a population boom. Soon it could no longer fit its new numbers comfortably in its space, shouldered up against surrounding tribes, each with their own culture and way of life. With more people to feed, they launched a campaign to acquire more land. As they took that land, they cultivated more food and their population increased, so they needed more land. Their neighbors, largely hunter-gatherers, were indeed impressed — less by the new technology than by the conquering attitude their agricultural neighbor had adopted.

Before long these agriculturalists had engulfed their neighbors, silencing their complaints and their cultures. Over the next several thousand years, the fortunes and failures that evolved from this single culture would become our own legacy in the Americas, China, India, Europe, Africa, almost everywhere. You might recognize the facts from the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the Fertile Crescent, modern day Iraq, but this interpretation you won't learn in school. It is not even a story many people in our civilization care to hear.

Daniel Quinn, author of the best-selling book Ishmael recounts how this “totalitarian agriculture” spread out across the planet, converting ever more land for its crops and people. After several thousand years, its adherents knew only this way of life, and believed it to be the one right way to live. That justified their furrowing under other cultures and biological communities. From this lifestyle a new vision was born, one that drives our civilization, both East and West, in planetary conquest. Unfortunately the resulting overcrowding and the fervor to control have precipitated wars, plagues, corruption, economic instability, revolts, and cultural collapse.
But here's what we were likely taught in school: Before the Agricultural Revolution, only brutish, primitive, hairy caveman tribes wandered the harsh, short, uncertain life of hunter-gatherers. Then, 10,000 years ago, the “real” human history began. With the birth of agriculture, humans started an inevitable march of civilization building, technological and social development, launching them toward their destiny to eventually take control of the world God had created for them. Earth however has resisted our control, so we must apply more and more technology to bring it under control and forge the paradise that will be our own.

These are two versions of the Big Story of our civilization, our culture. Quinn notes that this culture is just one of 100,000s and it started so recently in human history that it is almost laughable to anyone standing on a ladder high enough to look back 200,000 years to the birth of Homo sapiens or three million to the birth of humanity (H. habilis). There is another story, another way to live that is compatible with the biological community, a way tested by countless millennia. Read Ishmael and its sequel The Story of B to learn about it and forget my unjustly brief summary.

Quinn's books illustrate to what extent stories control our culture, actions, and thoughts. Consider the story that built the pyramids, drove Hitler's war machine, or wages the War on Terrorism. If you accept that our world suffers mounting problems and that our actions connect to a cultural story, then take the next step with me.

Interpreters, foremost among professions that use stories, already embark on changing people's stories about natural and cultural heritage. If you have ever tried to sway a person who squashes a bug or walks blindly by a famous painting, you have tried to alter their story that explains their relationship to the resource. Fellow interpreters, we already engage in story change, but we often do it very imperfectly. That is, interpreters have a conservation streak that pulses deep within the psyche. Indeed, conservation is a necessary condition for resource interpretation. Unlike historians who can interpret resources gone by, we interpret existing resources, parcels of living heritage whether Native American pottery or dinosaur bones. There can't be an interpreter in NAI who wouldn't fight to protect the resources he or she interprets.

Even though resource interpretation is explicitly for people, it is implicitly for the resource itself. Yet we often do not consider ourselves, or our work, conservationist. We are often not trained to see the big story, into which fit all the little stories we interpret daily. The big story is divinely multi-disciplinary and requires a high ladder to see. To do all that, we need support, professional support.

NAI is already a solid organization doing many great things. But imagine how wonderful it would be if an organization could provide interpreters both the technical skills and leadership through conferences and trainings to interpret and protect our resources and also facilitate a global social change vision so that interpreters could interpret the most important messages in history.

Right now, NAI serves us well as interpretive professionals, but with this vision - overarching principle, credo, manifesto, or declaration - NAI could support us in a role not on the outskirts but nearer the center of society. Interpreters have all the technical capacities and are positioned more than any other profession to interpret our culture's most consequential natural and cultural story, now all we need is the vision. Societal success goes to those who interpret its vision.

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