The North Coast times-eagle., December 01, 2003, Page 12, Image 12

P A G E 12
PLANT & ANIMAL
DESTRUCTION IN
ECONOMIC HISTORY
BY CARL ORTWIN SAUER
The annual tradition of several hundred million little fir trees dying
in the family rooms of the Western world prompts us to publish a
talk given by Carl Sauer. If he is correct in his conclusions about
“the agency of Man on Earth," then nature is indeed hopelessly
“artifact," which makes it certain that the human race can count
on no other wisdom than its own to save itself. The talk was the
Presidential Address at the 8th Special Science Research Confer­
ence of the Pacific Coast, and was given on March 24, 1938.
ILLUSTRATION BY HOKUSAI
Our Zeitgeist is congenial to debate and the planning
of our future by resolution. Perhaps such a mood marks the
beginning of a great era, but even though we might be far better
social engineers that I think we are, it is still most important to
keep track of the present as to its position on the long graph
of history, to see where we stand on the trend curves of social
change. We have neglected dreadfully, in our impatience to
get at universal, the “natural history" of man, which is also
expressed as Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht. Institutions
and outlooks have their origin in time and place; they spread
from one group to another; with lapses of time and shifts of
place they undergo change; they meet competition and resist­
ance. Origins, derivations and survivals are the basic determin­
ations of social dynamics. How much of social science have we
that has meaning apart from relations of space and time? We
are not metaphysicists, we know even the Logos only as a term
in culture history. Today’s triumph in social theory is tomorrow's
footnote to culture history.The facts we dig up may find perma­
nent place in human learning. The constructions we place upon
them, if they survive, survive as data of history.
In social science interpreted as culture history, there
is a dominant geographic theme which deals with the growing
mastery of man over his environment. Antiphonal to this is the
revenge of an outraged nature on man. It is possible to sketch
the dynamics of history on this antithesis.
We have traced the beginning of our direct lineage back
about 25,000 years, when Homo Sapiens makes his appearance
as an apparently finished product of evolution. More than half,
perhaps two-thirds of human history has passed before we come
to the tremendous achievement of plant and animal domesticat­
ion. This marks the major step forward by man* in his use of
nature. It is carried out for a long time without any disturbance in
the relation of man to his environment. Though growing steadily
in cultural grace and stature, man long remains in symbiotic
balance.
Perhaps as far back as Neolithic time, the first ominous
discordance develops. The dry interiors of the Old World, from
Cape Verde to Mongolia, are today a far more meager and more
difficult human habitat than was true in early Neolithic. We know
their deterioration is much greater than can be accounted for
by climatic change. Under similar physical conditions, the New
World steppes and deserts bear a varied and useful cover of
vegetation, whereas the Old World dry lands show tremendous
wastes of shifting sands and denuded rock surface. Moisture
*For the purposes o f this article please accept Sauer's use o f the
word “man" for humanity, which might be easier to accept when
realized that most of the egregous environmental errors cited
were made primarily by the male gender of the species.
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values are not at all minimal in some of the bleakest parts of the
Sahara and Arabia, for instance. There are successful drought-
tolerant plants aplenty in the Old World.The inference, therefore,
is that the discrepancy between vegetation and climate in the
Old World is due to cultural influence. Specifically, ancient
overgrazing by herding peoples is blamed for the barrenness
of much of the interior of the Old World.The damage developed
perhaps three or four thousand years ago. Lapse of time has
brought no repair of this destruction. The dry lands of the center
of the Old World are permanently and sadly diminished in their
utility.
The next major destruction of habitat values is associat­
ed with the Mediterranean lands and is assigned to the latter
days of Rome or to the disordered period immediately following.
Here again we know that modern productivity and known condi­
tion of land at the beginning of the Christian era do not coincide.
The upland landscapes of the Mediterranean are not in line with
the geomorphological situation. Bare rocks obtrude themselves
on slopes where they do not belong. Normal soil profiles are
wanting. The vegetation shows many characteristics of regres­
sion. Destructive exploitation damaged seriously and perma­
nently a great share of the lands about the Mediterranean. In
spite of the lapse of many centuries, we have no evidence of
significant regeneration of resource, but probably rather that of
continued physical degeneration.
With these two major exceptions, we know of scarcely
any record of destructive exploitation until we enter the period
of modern history, when transatlantic expansion of European
commerce, peoples and government takes place. Then begins
what may well be the tragic rather than the great age of man.
We have glorified this period in terms of a romantic view of
colonization and of the frontier. There is a dark obverse to the
picture, which we have regarded scarcely at all.
Much has been made of the disastrous impact of Spain
on the New World. The polemics of Las Casas were carried on
by Spain’s political rivals and this theme of the Spanish destruct­
ion of the Indies lives on in popular misconceptions of the Span­
ish colonies. The first half-century following ‘The Discovery' was
indeed destructive. Then a desolation of the Indies by depopula­
tion appeared imminent. These exceptions, however, were reali­
zed only in part, partly because severity of Old World epidemic
diseases diminished and partly because of increasingly effective
governmental protection of native populations and natural
resources. The Spanish government developed and applied
principles of conservative stewardship for which we find no
parallels in other colonials countries at the time.
In the late 18th century the progressively and rapidly
cumulative effects of European exploitation become marked.
They are indeed an important and integral part of the industrial
and commercial revolution. In the space of a century and a half
— only two full lifetimes — more damage has been done to the
productive capacity of the world than in all of human history
preceding. The previously characteristic manner of living within
the means of an area, by use of its actual "surplus," is replaced
at this time by a reckless gutting of resource for quick “profit."
The early outstanding illustrations are the wearing out of Virginia
by tobacco planting and the effects of the China trade.The west­
ward movement of Virginians was conditioned largely by the
destruction of the land through tobacco. The development of
the China trade via Cape Hom and the Chinese demand for furs
and other animal products led quickly to a spoliation of pelagic
mammals from the Falkland and South Orkney islands to the
Bering Sea The opening of the 19th century, with the initiation
of upland cotton planting, set our South definitely on its way to
the permanent crisis in which it now is. In 1846, Charles Lyell
described graphically the great gullies near Milledgeville,
Georgia, and stated that they had not been in existence 20 years
before. In 1864, George Marsh, distinguished jurist and forgotten
scientist, wrote the first description and analysis of the destruct­
ion of our basis of subsistence. In the early 1890s the washing
out of western grazing lands became notable a decade after the
last great herd of buffalo was exterminated At the outbreak of
World War 1 the last passenger pigeon was dead and the last
important stand of the white pine of the Great Lakes was being
cut. In the present decade (1930s) the topsoil of the wheat fields
of the Great Plains is being carried by dust storms as far as the
Atlantic. These are a few notes toward a history of the modem
age. The modern world has been built on a progressively using
up of its real capital.
The apparent paradox results that the lands of recent
settlement are the worn and worn-out parts of the world, not the
lands of old civilization. The United States heads the list of
exploited and dissipated land wealth. Physically, Latin America
is in much better shape than our own country. The contrast in
condition of surface, soil, and vegetation is apparent at the inter­
national border between the United States and Mexico. For a
reconstruction of upland soil profiles and normal vegetation of
California we must go to Lower California. Chihuahua shows
what New Mexico was like a generation ago. The other parts
of the world that have been opened to commerce in the last
century and a half show parallels to the destructive exploitation
of the United States. South Africa and Australia are well aware
of their serious problems of conservation. South Russia is now
becoming an active field for the study of soil erosion. Increas­
ingly troublesome dust storms are sweeping the pampas of the
Argentine, which is not characteristically Latin American in its
economy, whereas more primitive Uruguay still has its land
capital almost undiminished.
California is still in reasonably good condition as to
physical resource. On the debit side we can site the advanced
destruction of the redwood stands which are not able to restock,
the brief expectation of life of the oil fields, the abandonment
of unnumbered hillside farms in the coast ranges and the Sierra,
the worn soils of the old barley and wheat districts on the west
side of the Great Valley, and the general heavy loss of soil
through over pasturing in hill lands. An excursion through the
dairy country of Marin County, for instance, will show in almost
every pasture serious evidences of soil stripping. Fortunately the
primary agricultural resource lies in broad smooth valleys that
cannot wash away, and the safety of mountain forest lands is
assured in large measure by the great extent of public forest
land.California has sufficiently serious problems of conservation,
but they are not life-and-death matters as in many states, and
they can be solved without desperate expedients.
The overdraft on the young colonial lands has serious
implications for the older regions of the North Atlantic. These
depend on a flow of raw materials which probably cannot be
maintained indefinitely. They doubled their population in this
period of extreme commerce. Their own balanced agriculture
is balanced only because intensive animal husbandry is made
possible by the supply of overseas feedstuffs such as bran, meal
and oil cake, and of commercial fertilizer, which imply continued
extraction of resources overseas.The whole occidental commer­
cial system looks like a house of cards.
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503-325-3304
342 Industry, Astona, OR 97103 (at the Mooring Basin
next to the Red Lion Inn)
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