Michael Williams’ book, Deforesting
the Earth, describes humankind’s 10,000 year raid on the planet’s
forest cover. Readers are taken on a world
tour of deforestation through the ages.
Ports of call include Greece, Rome, China, India, the Amazon, and
others. We discover the regional
variations of forest mining, from the first frontier clearings to the lumber
guzzling industrial societies.
The saga of the forest molesters begins in the Stone Age, on
an embryonic scale. Many imagine that all
Native Americans lived in perfect harmony from the dawn of time. Compared to the white colonists, they indeed
lived far lighter, but many tribes altered their ecosystems over time via
periodic burning, which prevented forest regeneration. They left some footprints on the land.
In the Old World, the experiment in agriculture had been
thrashing soils and forests for centuries.
But in America, many imagine that similar slash-and-burn techniques
somehow caused no injuries. Williams
disagreed. He described extensive
deforestation and soil depletion in corn country. Note that large-scale agriculture in the
eastern U.S. was just 500 years old in 1492, and they lacked metal axes, plows,
and draft animals. In Mexico, where
large-scale farming existed since 2000 B.C., there was abundant evidence of
serious damage — bigger footprints.
Our dependence on wood makes Homo sapiens an unusual species. Without the warmth provided by burning wood,
our ancestors could have never left the tropics. Deforestation was civilization’s shadow. Until the temporary blip of fossil energy,
wood was our oil. Wood enabled the
manufacture of metals, bricks, mortar, glass, and ceramics. It enabled long-term survival in snow country.
The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas developed big bloody empires
without plows, iron tools, or domesticated herd animals — but deforestation kept
them on life support. Gold, silver,
diamonds, and iron were not necessary for becoming victorious conquerors, but the
march to domination required food, water, and wood.
In medieval Europe, the new religion had driven a wedge
between humans and nature. Earth was
created for us. We were partners with
God, and our job was to put the finishing touches on creation. “A wild landscape not hallowed by prayer and
asceticism was said to be in a state of original sin, but once it has become
fertile and purposeful, it was transformed.”
So, the forests had to go, along with the savages and outlaws that
lurked within them.
In theory, wood is renewable.
Societies with light footprints didn’t kill trees; they gathered dead
wood instead. For rising civilizations,
on the other hand, wood was more like pure crystal meth. When you had access to it, life was a fantastic
amazing rush. You built ships, cities,
fortresses, temples, trade networks. But
when the wood was gone, you were a burned out, toothless, walking dead tweaker.
Wood addiction was a vicious cycle. Deforestation led to expanded cropland and
pasture, which led to growing population, which led to further deforestation,
and so on. Eventually, the Ponzi scheme
encountered limits. Endless growth is
impossible. Simple societies that saw
their forest as sacred were helpless sitting ducks for loony societies possessed
by an insatiable addiction to wood and wealth.
Why practice enlightened self-restraint when you can grow like crazy?
Forests are finite. Perpetual
deforestation is impossible, as they discovered on Easter Island. Today, it’s growing at an exponential rate. Listen to this: we’ve cleared more forest
since 1950 than in all previous time, and the extermination continues. Consumers encourage rainforest destruction by
buying pet food, fast food burgers, soy-based products, foods containing palm
oil, and so on.
Williams mentioned the winter of 1695, when the king of
France sat at his dinner table, bundled in furs, his glass filled with frozen
wine. Before iron stoves, heating was
extremely inefficient. The metropolis of
Paris was importing firewood from up to 200 kilometers away (124 miles). In the winter of 1709, wood was scarce, and
“people died like flies.”
At about this time, folks began seriously fooling around with
coal, a nonrenewable source of energy.
Before long, coal became the new meth.
It threw open the doors to the Industrial Revolution, and a new vicious
cycle of exponential growth and resource depletion. Two hundred years later, we slipped into the
petroleum nightmare, civilization went viral, and we are now skyrocketing
toward bad juju oblivion.
Previously, I thought that the biggest impact of riding the
downslope from Peak Energy was the transition to muscle-powered agriculture, a
massive shift that we are entirely unprepared for. But what about heating? In 1695, when the king’s wine froze, the
planet’s population was just 600 million.
Today, there is far less forest and far more people. Today, almost half of humankind uses wood for
heating and cooking, and they are burning twice as much as 20 years ago. Imagine the day when wood is the only source
of heat for Boston or Chicago, and the chainsaws, trucks, and trains are
rusting in the snow.
Williams’ book is a grand banquet of information. Readers get to spend many hours studying
charts, graphs, and tables of statistics, observing reality through the mind of
a geographer. He described how, why, and
when the long process of deforestation has proceeded, but paid little attention
to the ecological impacts of forest clearing.
He advocated conservation, based on wise management. The rate of cutting should not exceed the
rate at which new wood grows. Therefore,
efforts to preserve old growth ecosystems were dumb, because mature trees grow
slower than young ones.
Williams disliked critics of deforestation. Those youngsters were feeble-minded alarmists
who spewed exaggerated hysteria — obnoxious eco-fascists determined to make our
lives miserable. For him, deforestation
was a necessary evil, “In fact, the clearing of the forest… over much of western
and central Europe was one of the most dramatic changes made to human
landscapes anywhere and can be regarded as one of the great achievements of the
medieval age.”
Williams was born in 1935, and grew up during the zenith of
the British Empire, the petroleum blip, the high tech revolution, and the
population explosion — an era of staggering chaos. Yes, deforestation was a bummer, but it was a
sacrifice required for our joyride to wonderland. Like the worldview of the dominant culture in
which he was raised, the book vibrates with cognitive dissonance. Our advanced standard of living must be
preserved, at any cost, for as long as possible, by any means necessary.
Reading the book with ecology-tinted glasses is most
illuminating. It describes a chain
reaction of catastrophic mistakes, made with good intentions, spanning
thousands of years — mistakes that continue to multiply at a head spinning
rate. We are given a detailed map of the
path we took to disaster, including the wrong turns. We can never comprehend genuine
sustainability until we identify and understand the mistakes. We must discover our history.
Immense imagination is needed to elevate our consciousness
far above the reeking cesspool of pathological illusions. There may come a day, after the storms, when
we have a chance to start over again.
How could we do it differently — and wisely — next time around? It’s time for good people with hearts and
creative gifts to contemplate these issues.
It’s time for new lessons, stories, songs, and paintings. It’s time to remember who we are, and come
home.
Williams provided a vital clue. “If sustainable societies existed, then they
depended on very low population densities, abundance of land, and little or no
involvement in a market economy, local or regional, all of which were rare.” I agree.
Williams, Michael, Deforesting
the Earth — From Prehistory to Global Crisis, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment