N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , DECEMBER 2003
Some of the losses that the world has sustained are the
following:
The first has been the extinction of species and varietal
forms.The extinction of large predators and grazing animals may
perhaps be checked off as failure to survive in environments
altered by economic needs. This does not apply, however, to a
long list of other animals. The seas and their margins have been
wantonly devastated of many mammals and birds without com
pensating substitutions.The killing off of sea otters, for instance,
has simply removed from our coasts the most valuable of all fur
bearing animals, whose presence would not diminish in the least
any fishing or other maritime activity of man.
The removal of species, moreover, reduces the possible
future range of utility of organic evolution.This may be illustrated
by the domesticated pants. Primitive plant breeders developed
a very wide range of useful plant forms from a great number of
wild ancestors. Our commercial plants are only a small fraction
of the primitive domesticated species and varieties. Commercial
corn growing, for instance, utilizes only two subspecies of maize;
and of them only a small part of the range of genes that have
been fixed by primitive plant breeding. Yet the qualities we have
standardized for present-day commercial corn growing may not
be the same as will be desired a century from now.
Meanwhile, the extension of commercial agriculture is
causing a rapid extinction of the primitive domestic forms. Many
species and far more numerous genetically fixed varieties have
been lost irrevocably in late years. Of the great varietal range of
upland cotton only a few enter into the commercial forms. The
extension of cotton in the United States, Egypt and India has
resulted in its disappearance over much of its primitive area of
cultivation in Mexico and Central America, where the full range
of varietal forms was developed. Yet these primitive forms hold
by far the greater range of plant breeding possibilities for future,
as yet unrecognized needs. Some years ago we secured from
Southern Mexico seeds of a type of cotton called Acala, that
made possible the current development of cotton growing in the
San Joaquin Valley.Had the plant explorer missed this particular
spot in the state of Chiapas or come a few years later, there
might not be a successful cotton industry in California. No one
knows how many domestic varieties of cotton survive or have
been lost.
In most domesticated plants and animals the greatest
range of genes lies in noncommercial varieties. Until the late
extension of commercial production the age-long tendency of
the native husbandry was to continue and expand this range.
Primitive husbandry was engaged in enlarging steadily the
evolutionary process. Commercial production has caused and
is causing a steady and great shrinking of forms, because
suddenly restricted standards of utility are introduced. Unfortu
nately, immediate and prospective utility may be very different
things. This applies equally in criticism of the effect of our
commercial civilization on wild and on domesticated forms
of life: in both cases we have drastically impoverished the
results of biological evolution.
The second major loss to the world has been the
restriction of useful species. Often we have affected local rather
than total extermination. There are still fur seals of one species
on the Pribilov Islands, but we know no means of repopulating
the many island rookeries from which they are gone. The east
ern white pine is not extinct in the Great Lakes region, but it has
been removed entirely from large areas where it once flourish
ed. Its reestablishment may cause uneconomic costs of seeding
or replanting, or may be economically impossible because its
place has been taken by inferior species that filled in the cut
over pine lands. Also ecologic associations, once seriously
disturbed, may be difficult or impossible to reestablish. Over-
grazing has caused sagebrush to increase hugely in the cooler
steppes of the West, and the equally unpalatable yucca and
sotol on the hot steppes of the Southwest. If overgrazing were
stopped at once on such lands, an indefinitely long time would
still be required for the grass to replace the useless brush even
if no damage to the soil has been done. Ecologic successions
often are slow; and once a degenerative plant succession has
set in, a restoration is uncertain. Fires, for instance, may reduce
for a long period of years the utility of a site by altering the
quality of the soil.
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Soil destrqction is the most widespread and serious
debit to be entered against colonial commercial exploitation.
Only a brief statement is made of this dreadful problem, for
which there is never an easy solution, and often none at all.
Under natural conditions — given a specific climate, vegetation,
relief and rock structure — there will be a characteristic soil as
to depth and profile for any position on a slope. Soil and slope
are in genetic relationship. Neither is static. Both are changing
naturally and slowly. In the majority of cases the slope gradually
grows less, and the soil on it weathers more deeply because it
forms a bit more rapidly than it is removed at the surface. Soil
formation and removal are either balanced or formation exceeds
removal; or more rarely, removal exceeds formation. Soils
develop slowly by weathering. The mechanically committed
rock flour of our glacial lands has acquired approximately
optimum characteristics in the course of about 25,000 years.
This does not include weathering that starts from solid rock,
but from the crushed materials of the glacial mill.
The Old World peasant agriculture, by placing animal
products first, has maintained an adequate absorptive cover on
the soil, as has the general farming/animal husbandry of north
western Europe and the northeastern United States.
Row crops and bare fields in the off season have
resulted in the diminution of absorptive organic matter in the
soil. The surface is exposed to sluicing of rains. Film after film
is stripped by rain, diminishing steadily the depth of the topsoil,
which is normally the most productive and absorptive part of the
soil, in some soils the only part that is fertile. Full soil sections
are almost impossible to find in the South. The red color of
southern uplands and of their streams is derived from the
subsoil, which is now widely exposed at the surface. Southern
farming is in large measure farming of the subsoil, made to yield
crops only by liberal dosages of commercial fertilizer. The Ohio
and Mississippi are becoming yellow rivers, which indicates that
the yellow subsoils of that part of the country are now widely
exposed. It is in the gradual and too commonly unnoticed loss
of the true soil that the greatest damage is effected. The product
of uncounted centuries of weathering and soil development is
removed by a few decades of farming. The much publicized
destruction of the land by gullying is only the final dramatic
removal of the surface. The major and irreparable damage is
done beforehand.
The loss of the soil horizon by rain wash is not confined
to steep slopes, nor is it even most characteristic of the hillier
lands. It has reduced many gentle uplands of the Piedmont and
the Coast Plain to briar-brown pastures. It has destroyed, in the
main, the old Black Belt of Alabama for cotton growing, with
minimal slopes, many of less than one-degree. It is invading
the Black Prairies of Texas, and has made amazing headway
in the past ten years on the smooth plains of central Oklahoma.
All that is needed is a slope sufficient for muddy water to run
on. Even the great Corn Belt is becoming badly frayed about
the edges. The once rich counties of northwestern Missouri
have been reduced to widespread distress. Serious damage
is claimed for one-fourth of the area of Iowa.
Wind erosion is not bound to slope at all; it operates
best, in fact, on level land The baring by the plow of the dry
margins of our farming land has resulted in rapidly accelerated
wind transport there whenever there is a marked dry spell.
These losses are in many cases irreparable. Engineer
ing devices are in the main palliatives that reduce the rate of
loss, but which under extreme weather conditions may increase
the risk. The saving of worn land requires more labor, more skill,
and more capital than the farming of good land, and then is of
uncertain results. If one could place the best farmers on the
worst-used land, some headway could be made The cycle of
degeneration is extremely difficult to break, and there is no
salvation by any brilliant device.
To this summary review of the suicidal qualities of our
current commercial economy the retort may be made that these
are problems of the physical rather than of the social scientist.
But the causative element is economic; only the pathologic
processes released or involved are physical. The interaction of
physical and social processes illustrates that the social scientist
cannot restrict himself to social data alone. We cannot assume,
as we are prone to do, an indefinitely elastic power of mind over
matter. We are too much impressed by the large achievement
of applied science. It suits our thinking to rely on a continuing
adequacy on the part of the technician to meet our demands
for production of goods Our ideology is that of an indefinitely
expanding universe, for we are the children of frontiersmen.
We are prone to think of an ever ample world created for our
benefit, by optimistic anthropocentric habits of thinking
Let us admit for the moment that the supplying of the
world with primary goods is simply a matter of the expenditure
of energy, and that there is no lack of energy and no loss there
of Even this optimistic assumption encounters the difficulty of
the geography of population Two billion inhabitants of the world
have an unequally localized distribution It is going to be bitterly
hard to arrest the declining capacity of many well populated
areas, for instance, our Old South
It is going to be difficult to find the means of shifting
large numbers of people from crisis areas into areas of oppor
tunity Our Resettlement Administration had no trouble discover
ing crisis areas, but it had slight success finding areas that were
ready to receive immigrants in number. The current national
P A G E 13
attitudes toward foreign immigration proceed in large part from
a lately hardened conclusion that the resident populations are
adequate to make use of the national opportunities. This attitude
has become well-nigh worldwide. Decline in productivity is
becoming characteristic of larger and larger areas.The general
ization that the total productivity of the world might be maintain
ed or raised gives no comfort to the increasingly large numbers
of people who are trapped in lands of fading economic resource.
India may be suggested as an example, on a huge scale, of a
country in which occidental political economy stimulated popula
tion growth and in which an overdraft on land resources will
develop a major population crisis. What is to be done about
such specific maldistributions?
Let us accept once more the view that the physical
scientist will be able to make the requisite synthesis of matter
to provide laboratory-made substitutes for the exhausted natural
resources. There still remains the problem of the cost of distribu
tion imposed by the geography of land and sea and climate.
Freight must continue to be hauled, and costs incurred in the
movement of goods. The dream of the growth of staggeringly
great laboratories to give us synthetic products will require
also great changes in comparative advantage of location. If we
appeal to the sun for our salvation, we must build our visionary
factories in deserts, along mountain fronts, and in great tidal
bays, which fail to coincide with present distributions of dense
and advanced populations, and which introduce additional
changes in transport of power and goods.
The easy denial of our dilemma by referring it to the
technologists is in large measure wishful thinking It derives
mainly from the successful, and relatively easy, experience in
synthesis of hydrocarbons. We expect a lot from the laboratory
technicians when we ask them to supply the great range of
biochemical compounds for which we are destroying the natural
plant and animal laboratories, or even if we expect them to
come near to meeting their cost of production from natural
sources But we demand a good deal more. Actually we ask that
chemistry become alchemy, that it achieve the transmutation of
elements. The classical but far from singular illustration is the
problem of phosphates. Phosphorous is well known to be a
minor constituent of the Earth’s crust, too rare as a primary
mineral to be recoverable in quantity. The loss of accumulated
and available phosphorous from soils by destructive cropping is
enormous and forms one of our most acute problems We are
getting along by cleaning up the last of the guano deposits,
which have been under exploitation for a century, and by using
up the secondary mineral phosphates. The latter are highly
localized fossil accumulations in certain ancient marine grave
yards. These are pretty well known as to occurrence, and the
reserves are not large What then? The question, sharply asked
by Cyril Hopkins, as to how civilization will survive the dissipat
ion of this element critical to animal life, remains unanswered
The doctrine of a passing frontier of nature replaced by
a permanently and sufficiently expanding frontier of technology
is a contemporary and characteristic expression of occidental
culture, itself a historical/geographic product. This “frontier”
attitude has the recklessness of an optimism that has become
habitual, but which is residual from the brave days when North
European freebooters overran the world and put it under tribute
We have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.
We do not like to be economic realists.
Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889-1975) was the head of the
geography department at the University of California at Berkeley
for more than 30 years. He was one of the world’s foremost
historical geographers, combining research into several sciences
to present an ecological history of the human race. Humanity,
he said, determines its own destiny; the understanding of the
agency of Man on Earth’ is a principle obligation and oppor
tunity of geographic scholarship. He pointed the way toward a
land ethic, “a responsible stewardship of the sustaining Earth."
At his death he was considered the “unchallenged dean of
American environment and cultural geography,” and his insights
into the human and humane use of landscape had long been a
vital part of the modern environmental movement He was said
to be “a man so routinely correct about matters so fundamental
that a popular movement never caught up with him.” His last
book, Seventeenth Century North America French & Spanish
Accounts, published by Turtle Press just before his death,
completed a 50 year study of early American land and life
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