Topsoil and Civilization

Outside the entrance of the glorious Hall of Western History are the marble lions, colorful banners, and huge stone columns.  Step inside, and the popular exhibits include ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Gutenberg, Magellan, Columbus, Galileo, and so on.  If we cut a hole in the fence, and sneak around to the rear of the building, we find the dumpsters, derelicts, mangy dogs, and environmental history.

The Darwin of environmental history was George Perkins Marsh, who published Man and Nature in 1864 (free download).  Few educated people today have ever heard of this visionary.  Inspired by Marsh, Walter Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, grabbed his camera and visited the sites of old civilizations in 1938 and 1939.  He created a provocative 44-page report, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years (free download).  The government distributed over a million copies of it.

Lowdermilk helped inspire Tom Dale of the Soil Conservation Service, and Vernon Gill Carter of the National Wildlife Federation, to write Topsoil and Civilization, published in 1955 (free download).  Both organizations cooperated in the production of this book.  Following the horror show of the Dust Bowl, they were on a mission from God to promote soil conservation.

Dust Bowl photo gallery:  Washington D.C. dust storm 1935.  Approaching dust storm.  Dust Bowl farm yard.  The aftermath.

The book’s introduction gets directly to the point, “The very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.”  Civilized man had the tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great part of the plant and animal life around him.”  He excelled at exploiting nature.  “His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”

Readers are taken on a thrilling tour of the civilizations of antiquity.  We learn how they developed new and innovative strategies for self-destruction.  Stops include Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean basin, Greece, China, India, and others.  No society collapses because of a single reason, but declining soil health is always prominent among the usual suspects — no food, no civ.

The civilization of Egypt was the oddball.  It thrived longest because of the unique characteristics of the Nile Valley.  Then, in the twentieth century, they strangled the golden goose by building dams, which ended the annual applications of fertile silt, led to soil destruction, and shifted the system into self-destruct mode.

Mesopotamia (Iraq) was home to a series of civilizations that depended on irrigation.  Creating and maintaining irrigation canals required an immense amount of manual labor, which legions of slaves were unhappy to provide.  At the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, deforestation and overgrazing led to growing soil erosion, which flowed downstream, regularly clogging the canals.  Eroded soils have filled in 130 miles (209 km) of the Persian Gulf.  Today, the population in this region is only a quarter of what it was 4,000 years ago.

Over the centuries, the region of Mesopotamia was conquered and lost many, many times.  For the most part, replenishing soil fertility with manure and other fertilizers was a fairly recent invention.  In the old days, an effective solution to soil depletion was to expand into less spoiled lands, and kill anyone who objected.  Throughout the book, the number of wars is stunning.  The tradition of farming is a bloody one.  It always damages the soil, sooner or later, which makes long-term stability impossible, and guarantees conflict.

Rome, Greece, and other Mediterranean civilizations were all burnouts, trashed by a combination of heavy winter rains, sloping lands, overgrazing, deforestation, soil depletion, and malaria.  The legendary cedars of Lebanon once covered more than a million acres (404,000 ha).  Today, just four tiny groves survive.  “Deforestation and the scavenger goats brought on most of the erosion which turned Lebanon into a well-rained-on desert.”  Much of once-lush Palestine, “land of milk and honey,” has been reduced to a rocky desert.

Adria was an island in the Adriatic Sea, near the mouth of the Po River in Italy.  Eroding soils from upstream eventually connected the island to the mainland.  Today, Adria is a farm town, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, and its ancient streets are buried under 15 feet (4.5 m) of eroded soil.  In Syria, the palaces of Antioch were buried under 28 feet (8.5 m) of silt.  In North Africa, the ruins of Utica were 30 feet (9 m) below.

Even now, in the twenty-first century, there are dreamers who purport that China provides a glowing example of sustainable agriculture — 4,000 years of farmers living in perfect harmony with the land.  Chapter 11 provides a silver bullet cure for these fantastic illusions.  “Erosion continues to ruin much of the land, reducing China, as a whole, to the status of a poor country with poor and undernourished people, mainly because the land has been misused for so long.”

The authors aim floodlights on the fundamental defects of civilization, and then heroically reveal the brilliant solution, soil conservation.  Their kinky fantasy was permanent agriculture, which could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years — a billion well-fed Americans enjoying a continuously improving standard of living.  Their vision went far beyond conservation, which merely slowed the destruction.  Their vision was about harmless perpetual growth, fully developing all resources, bringing prosperity to one and all, forever.  Oy!

At the same time, they were excruciatingly aware that humankind was ravaging the land.  “The fact is that there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as a whole during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year period.  There are many reasons for the recent rapid acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the world has more people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable of destroying the land faster.”  The book is more than a little bit bipolar.

For readers who enjoy the delights of mind-altering experiences, I recommend reading Topsoil and Civilization, a discourse on soil mining.  Also read its shadow, a discourse on forest mining, A Forest Journey, by John Perlin.  Your belief system will go into convulsions, and then a beautiful healing process begins.

You will suddenly understand that the stuff you were taught about the wonders of civilization was an incredibly delusional fairy tale.  The real story is one of thousands of years of accelerating population growth, ruthless greed, countless wars, enormous suffering, and catastrophic ecocide.  Suddenly, the pain of baffling contradictions is cured, the world snaps into sharp focus, and the pain of being fully present in reality begins — useful pain that can inspire learning and change.  Live well.

Soil erosion photo gallery: Gulley erosion.  Alabama cotton field.  Iowa sheepwreck.  Iowa sheet erosion.      

Carter, Vernon Gill and Dale, Tom, Topsoil and Civilization, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1974.  [First ed. 1955]

Other reviews of books on soil and agriculture: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Against the Grain, Farmers of Forty Centuries, and Pillar of Sand.

The Great Warming

Recent decades have been a golden age for archaeologists.  New technology has provided tools for better understanding the past.  Researchers can now identify the climate trends of past centuries by analyzing the layers in tropical coral, tree rings, glacial ice packs, and lakeshore and seabed sediments.

Climate has played a primary role in influencing the course of human history.  It could enable the rise of mighty empires, and later reduce them to dusty ruins.  Big changes can happen suddenly, without warning, and have devastating effects.  Mighty scientists may huff and puff and stamp their feet, but climate will do whatever it wishes.

In 2000, archaeologist Brian Fagan published The Little Ice Age.  This book examined an era of cooler weather spanning from 1300 to 1850, and its effects on northern Europe.  In those days, most folks lived from harvest to harvest, with few safety nets.  In 1315, it barely stopped raining, and the heavy rains continued through 1316 and 1317, followed by horrendous weather in 1318.  At least 1.5 million folks checked out.  The famine of 1344-1345 was so extreme that even the super rich starved.

Preceding the Little Ice Age was the Medieval Warm Period, which spanned from 800 to 1300.  Fagan described this era in The Great Warming, published in 2008.  Far less was known about this time, because fewer written records have survived.  But new climate data has been filling in a number of missing pieces, revealing many forgotten events, important stuff.

When it was in the mood for mischief, the Little Ice Age was a harsh bully.  Fagan had expected the warm period to be the opposite, and in some regions, it was, sort of.  In Europe, there were fewer late frosts, and the growing season was three weeks longer.  There were vineyards in England and southern Norway.  Surplus wealth enabled the construction of grand cathedrals.

Whilst the weather was rather pleasant, the era suffered from a devastating spasm of innovation.  The diabolically powerful moldboard plow, which was able to turn heavy soils, replaced the primitive scratch plow.  A new harness allowed horses to replace pokey oxen as beasts of burden.  The new three-field fallowing system enabled two-thirds of the fields to be growing crops every year, instead of just half, with the old two-field system.

By using these new technologies, vast regions of highly fertile heavy soils could now be converted into highly productive cropland.  The only obstacle was the vast ancient forests, and their untamed wildlife.  Loggers grabbed their axes and exterminated more than half of Europe’s forests between 1100 and 1350.

Expanded cropland area, combined with a balmy climate, produced much more food, and this always resulted in a mushrooming mob.  Between 1000 and 1347, the population of Europe grew from 35 to 80 million, despite short life expectancies.  It got so crowded that folks in 1300 were worse off than their grandparents in 1200.

In other regions, the warm period brought unpleasant weather.  The Mayans of the Yucatan lowlands experienced extended droughts and abundant misery.  “Hot, humid, and generally poorly drained, the Maya lowlands were a fragile, water-stressed environment even in the best of times,” Fagan observed.  “It’s hard to imagine a less likely place for a great civilization.”

The Mayan city of Tikal may have had 300,000 residents.  It was entirely dependent on rainfall for water.  Their ecosystem did not have dependable sources of water, like rivers or underground aquifers.  They developed amazing systems for storing rainwater, and these worked really well, usually, but not during multi-year droughts.  The drought of 910 lasted six years, and generated social unrest, which led to the collapse of many Mayan cities.

At the same time, severe droughts in western North America followed similar patterns.  Irrigation systems at Chaco Canyon enabled more than 2,000 folks to survive in an arid region for several centuries.  This worked well in wetter years.  After 1100, droughts intensified, and within 50 years the city was abandoned.

California was home to hunters and foragers.  Acorns were half of the diet for many tribes.  Oaks could produce as much food per acre as medieval European farms, and foragers could acquire a year’s supply in several weeks.  Fewer acorns fell in drought years, and extended droughts killed the oak trees.

Stumps at Mono Lake indicate that a severe drought began in 1250 and lasted for over a hundred years.  Fagan noted “None of today’s droughts, which last as long as four years, approach the intensity and duration of the Medieval Warm Period droughts.”  He called them megadroughts.  They baked away the surface waters and soil moisture.

The Yellow River (Huang He) has an appropriate nickname, China’s Sorrow, because it is one of the world’s most trouble-prone rivers.  Fagan said “the Huang He basin [has] been a crucible for human misery for more than seven thousand years.”  About 45 percent of the Chinese population lives in the basin.  From year to year, precipitation can vary by 30 percent.  A dry June is a bad omen.

To reduce the risk of famines, the Chinese built complex irrigation systems, which the Yellow River enjoyed burying with silt.  The yellow loess soil of the region was highly fertile, easy to till, and 200 feet deep (61 m) on average.  It was also light and easily erodible.  Once upon a time, forests held the soil in place, but deforestation* had catastrophic consequences.  The river carried an enormous load of yellow silt downstream, and this created perfect conditions for disastrous floods, which have killed many millions over the centuries.

This region has long been a spooky place to live, but the warm period was worse, “a time of violent climatic swings nurtured thousands of miles away that brought either lengthy dry cycles or torrential rainfall that inundated thousands of acres of the Huang He basin.”  (An extreme nineteenth century drought is described in Late Victorian Holocausts.)

Today, the global climate is hotter than the Medieval Warm Period.  The warming trend has been steadily building since 1860.  Glaciers are melting and folks are getting increasingly nervous about rising sea levels.  While this is indeed a bummer, Fagan warns that extended drought is a far greater threat.  Extended drought withers agriculture, toasts pastures, and dries up lakes and rivers.  Seven-point-something billion people will be extremely vulnerable when we move beyond Peak Food, and into the climate surprises of the coming decades.

Fagan, Brian, The Great Warming — Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2008.

* In the 1930s, W. C. Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, visited northern China as part of a research project.  In Shensi province, he saw an ancient irrigation system destroyed by silt, which had washed down from the uplands, where erosion gullies were up to 600 feet deep (183 m). 

He published his findings in Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years.  In this document, Figure 7 is a photo of serious erosion.  The caption reads: “A severely gullied area in the loess hills of North China.  These hills were once covered with trees and grass; but cultivation started the ruinous process of erosion.  There are thousands of acres like this in China today.  It produces nothing except yellow mud to clog the Yellow River with silt.”  For scale, note the human in the foreground.

Deep Water

The completion of the Hoover Dam in 1935 was a head-snapping experience — something like the moon landing, or the atomic bomb — history-making techno-craziness.  It was the greatest construction project in human history, and the world’s biggest power plant.  It was a giant leap forward in humankind’s crusade to enslave and abuse Big Mama Nature, and leave behind enormous messes for the kids.

Legions of hustlers were thrilled to realize the fabulous new opportunities for becoming rich whilst not getting their hands dirty.  From 1935 to 2000, about 45,000 large dams were constructed in 140 nations.  In his book, Deep Water, Jacques Leslie takes readers to India, Africa, and Australia to explore the dark world of the dammed.

In India, we meet Ms. Medha Patkar, a charismatic full-throttle activist determined to stop the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River.  It would flood the homes of 200,000 to 300,000, many of whom were indigenous tribal people.  Tribal folks were happy to live in the roadless forest, where the Hindus didn’t molest them.  In the Hindu world, tribal people were assigned a status even lower than the untouchables.  Tribes had zero political power.

The primary villain in this book was the World Bank, which poured billions of dollars into dam projects, to spur what is comically referred to as sustainable development.  Devious bureaucrats in India were highly skilled at diverting a good portion of this flood of money into their own pockets.  The politicians of India were so corrupt that they made American officials almost look virtuous.  Social and environmental concerns went out the window.

In India alone, dams have displaced somewhere between 21 and 55 million people (40 to 80 million worldwide).  In the relocation game, officials promised the sun and moon to the families to be displaced, like five acres (2 ha) of good land and a government job.  What they actually ended up getting was screwed.  Their fields were under water, and they were prohibited from fishing in the reservoir.  Often the tribes scattered to the winds, and ended up in urban nightmares.

India’s population is projected to be larger than China’s by 2050.  The privileged folks hunger to enjoy a planet-trashing consumer lifestyle, and have little concern for what happens to the politically invisible.  The nation has already built 4,300 large dams, and has plans for 700 to 1,000 more.  Dam building is easier and more profitable than population management.

The next section of the book takes us to Southern Africa, where we meet anthropologist Thayer Scudder, who spent decades as a consultant specializing in the resettlement of unlucky people who resided in future reservoirs.  He was skilled at creating high quality resettlement plans, and disappointed to see them all mostly ignored.  Once again, the natives were screwed, the officials pocketed a lot of money, and the ecosystem was damned.

Scudder had no doubt that dams were cool, in theory.  In theory, it was not impossible to create water projects that were fair, equitable, beneficial, and environmentally sensitive.  On the other hand, he believed that 70 percent of the world’s 45,000 large dams should have never been built.  Decade after decade, he nurtured a fantasy that some day he would be involved in creating just “one good dam.”  Instead, the great triumphs of his long career were his successes in killing a few stupid projects.

The last stop is Australia, where we meet water commissioner Don Blackmore, and get a thorough analysis of his frustrating struggle to keep the dying ecosystem of the Murray-Darling Basin on life support.  It’s the continent’s only major river system, but its annual flow is a wee trickle compared to the Amazon.  Australia was an especially unsuitable place to transplant the British way of life, and many experiments have fallen far short of their lofty goals, agriculture for example.  Much of the continent is arid, droughts are common, the ancient soils are low in nutrients, and the supply of fresh water is far from dependable.

Before the colonial invasion, thirsty Australian forests prevented most precipitation from reaching the water table in the Murray Basin.  When the white lads chopped down 15 billion trees to create cropland, the water table surged upward, as much as 75 feet (23 m), mobilizing the salts stored in the soil, and poisoning large areas of land.  The soils in the basin contain 100 billion tons of salt.  It would be a terrible place to attempt large-scale irrigation, but they did. 

Radical reductions of water diversions would slow the growing damage, but without water, farming is impossible.  Climate change presents a new wild card.  It could add major strains to a system that’s already staggering.

Leslie spent a day with an Aborigine man, Tom Trevorrow.  He lives in the Coorong, a 90-mile (145 km) lagoon near the mouth of the Murray.  When he was young, the land was thriving with abundant wildlife.  Today, with 75 percent of the water diverted upstream, the Coorong is very salty, and the habitat for birds, fish, and trees is devastated.  He wants the dams removed.  “The River is a living thing.  When you start interfering with it, everything dies.”

Aborigines managed to survive with an unrestricted free-flowing river for 50,000 years.  They survived because they learned how to live with the land, an extremely intelligent strategy.  They were not possessed with unhealthy impulses to temporarily control and exploit nature.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the powerful wisdom that our ancestors forgot — wisdom that we damn well need to remember if humankind is to have any chance for sticking around for a while.

This book is a powerful parable.  Readers are given a backstage tour of the hideous world behind the dazzling magic show of endless growth and sustainable development.  The heroes of our culture, the wealthy pioneers of progress, without their makeup and glittering costumes, are sad creatures, like spoiled two-year olds.

Every single one of those 45,000 dams will die, sooner or later.  About 5,000 large dams are more than 50 years old.  As they age, the costs of maintenance rise, eventually eliminating profits.  Investors must make an important decision — should they abandon the dam, or come up with billions of dollars to safely decommission it?  It often costs more to decommission a major hydropower dam than it did to build it.

Many dams are nearly impossible to safely decommission.  Exactly where do you dispose of billions of tons of accumulated sediment, mud often loaded with pollutants?  Abandoned dams become the responsibility of taxpayers, who may not have the expertise, funds, or desire to safely decommission them.  Earthquakes may decommission some dams.  So might terrorists or wars.  Old age and normal decay will certainly remove many.

The good news here is that we enjoy a surplus of super-important lessons to learn.  We currently have access to outstanding tools for learning and teaching.  We have a ridiculously out-of-balance culture to practice on, and little to lose.  We have been presented with a fabulous opportunity to become the most beloved generation of ancestors ever.

Leslie, Jacques, Deep Water — The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005.

Cadillac Desert

Marc Reisner’s classic, Cadillac Desert, takes us for a walk on the wet side, revealing far more than you ever wanted to know about dams, flood control, irrigation, and municipal water systems — and the serious long-term drawbacks that came along with building thousands of water projects in the frenzied pursuit of short-term wealth and power.  It’s a brilliant, funny, and annoying expose of government corruption.  It’s an ecological horror story.  It’s a collection of powerful lessons for our society, lessons on how not to live, warning signs.

The western regions of the U.S. tend to be dry.  Agriculture is risky where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches (50 cm).  Locations like Phoenix, Reno, or El Paso, which get less than seven inches (18 cm), are especially poor places to settle, let alone build cities.

Native Americans in the west were blessed with excellent educations, and they wisely lived in a manner that was well adapted to the ecosystem, for thousands of years, without trashing it.  Europeans suffered from dodgy educations that celebrated the magnificent civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, all of which transformed lush oases into moonscapes and went extinct.  Almost all of these dead cities were hard-core irrigation addicts. 

Around the world, most civilizations arose in arid regions.  Desert soils were often highly fertile, because the nutrients were not leached out by centuries of significant rainfall.  Desert farmers did not need to clear forests before planting.  All they needed to do was add water.  Irrigation turned their deserts green, but it also accelerated the growth and demise of their societies.

By the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles was growing rapidly, but it was doing this by mining the groundwater, a practice that had no long-term future.  The city finished the Owens Valley project in 1913, which brought in water from 223 miles away (359 km), and included 53 miles (85 km) of tunnels.  Drought hit in 1923, and the head of the water department frantically urged the city to stop the growth immediately, even if this required killing everyone in the Chamber of Commerce.  They ignored him, so he began pressing for an aqueduct from the Colorado River.

To make a long story short, America built a couple thousand major dams between 1915 and 1975.  Many were built during the Depression, to put the unemployed to work.  In congress, water projects became an extremely popular form of “pork.”  A great way for me to get your support for my bill would be to amend the bill to include a water project in your district.  This got out of control, to ridiculous proportions.

Many worthless projects were built at great expense to taxpayers and ecosystems.  Corporate America refused to invest in dams, because they were unlikely to pay for themselves, let alone generate reliable profits.  So, the west became a socialist utopia, dominated by militant free market conservatives who adored massive government spending in their region, and howled about it everywhere else.

By the time Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976, the national debt was close to a trillion dollars, and inflation was in double digits.  It was time to seriously cut spending, and Carter hated water projects, because they were so wasteful.  He attempted to terminate 19 water projects, and promptly became the most hated man on Earth.  He was a president with above average principles, a serious handicap.

Ronald Reagan took a different principled approach — no more free lunches.  He thought that those who benefitted from the welfare should fully repay the government for the generous help they received, both capital costs and operating expenses.  States should pay a third of the costs of reclamation projects, up front.  Pay?  Legions burst into tears.  The keg was empty, and the party ended.

I was amazed to learn that Carter was special because of his sense of history.  “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built.  What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers?  What would happen when the dams silted up?  What if the climate changed?” 

Well, of course, great questions!  As victims of dodgy educations, our graduates do not have a sense of history, a tragedy for which we pay dearly.  What right did we have to build 440 nuclear power plants that cannot be safely decommissioned?  What right did we have to destroy the climate?  What right did we have to leave a trashed planet for those coming after us?  A sense of history is powerful medicine, an essential component for an extended stay on this planet.

We know that any dam that doesn’t collapse will eventually fill with silt and turn into an extremely expensive waterfall — no more power generation, no more flood control, no more irrigation.  Every year millions of cubic yards of mud are accumulating in Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam.  Many reservoirs will be filled in less than a century.  In China, the reservoir for the Sanmexia Dam was filled to the brim with silt in 1964, just four years after it was built. 

We know that irrigation commonly leads to salinization.  Salts build up in the soil, and eventually render it infertile, incapable of growing even weeds.  This often happens after a century of irrigation.  Salinization played a primary role in the demise of the ancient Fertile Crescent civilizations.  China’s Yellow River Basin is an exception, because of its low-salt soil.  It’s a serious problem in the Colorado River Basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and many other places.  It’s sure to increase in the coming decades, following a century-long explosion of irrigation around the world.

We know that the Ogallala aquifer will eventually become unprofitable for water mining.  This ocean of Ice Age water lies primarily beneath Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska.  Following World War II, diesel-powered centrifugal pumps enabled farmers to pump like there’s no tomorrow.  A 1982 study predicted problems after 2020.  When the irrigation ends, many will go bankrupt, many will depart, and some will return to less productive dryland farming, which could trigger another dust bowl.  Water mining has become a popular trend around the world, a short-term solution.

Stonehenge was built between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, and it was a durable design.  It had no moving parts, no electric-powered controls, and it was not required to prevent billions of gallons of water from normally flowing downstream to the sea.  How long will our dams last?  The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

Typhoon Nina blasted Asia in the summer of 1975.  Near China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours.  The dam collapsed, and the outflow erased a number of smaller dams downstream.  Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.

In 1983, a sudden rush of melt water blasted into Glen Canyon Dam, damaging one of its spillways.  The dam did not fail that day.  It did not take out the Hoover Dam downstream with a huge wall of water.  It did not pull the plug on agriculture and civilization in southern California. 

As we move beyond Peak Oil, and energy production goes downhill, industrial civilization will wither.  It won’t be able to make replacement parts for dams, turbines, the power grid, and so on.  Will the nation of the United States go extinct some day?  The status quo in California is dependent on the operation of many pumping stations, which depend on the operation of hydro-power dams.  The Edmonston station pushes water uphill 1,926 feet (587 m), over the Tehachapi Mountains, using fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. 

As I write, the west coast is experiencing a serious drought.  Reservoirs in California are dangerously low.  Droughts can last for decades, or longer.  There is a good chance that climate change will increase the risks of living in extremely overpopulated western states.  So might earthquakes.

A wise man gave this advice to California governor Edmund Brown: “Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.”

Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert — The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin Books, New York, 1986.

A Forest Journey

Once upon a time, at the dawn of civilization, the planet’s forests were in peak condition, in terms of their age, range, and health.  Wildlife was thriving.  Modern lads and lasses would not believe their eyes if they could dream their way back to 10,000 BC and observe the stunning abundance of birds, fish, and wild grazing animals — and the absence of cities.

Sadly, on a dark and stormy night, some wise guys figured out how to smelt ore and forge ax heads, and things have been going downhill ever since.  Axes did make it much easier to cut down trees, but the mad scientists totally failed to imagine the unintended consequences of their brilliant invention (as usual).  But this was an era when it was quite popular to invent technologies that would have negative effects for many, many centuries.  It was the trendy thing to do.

For example, the digging stick.  Agriculture preceded metal making.  First, they farmed shorelines and riverbanks until the soil fertility wore out.  Then, they cleared forests, and wore out the soil there.  Then they moved to a different forest, killed the trees, and wore out that soil.  And on and on.  This cycle has been repeated for thousands of years. 

Prior to the digging stick, hunter-gatherers simply limited the number children they allowed to survive.  By keeping their numbers low, they could live in a wild and healthy land, and enjoy a life that required far less effort and drudgery.  Remember that!

John Perlin’s book, A Forest Journey, is a history of forest destruction, with stops including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil, and America.  Humans have always used wood in a number of ways, but the era of agriculture has shown little mercy for forests, and it has turned more than a few of them into barren wastelands and urban wastelands.

A healthy forest grew in healthy fertile soil, but wheat would not grow in the shade, so the trees had to go.  The wood was used to build houses, bridges, temples, and palaces.  It was made into fences, docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.  It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.  Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry.  Very importantly, wood was used to build cargo, fishing, and war ships.  In earlier times, almost everything moved via water.

A civilization with access to abundant forests had great potential power.  It could grow, create profitable industries, participate in trade networks, defend itself from conquest, and conquer new forests.  Be careful not to confuse this glorious enterprise of never-ending growth with a free lunch.  The path of never-ending growth always seems to end at a mountain of skulls.  Typically, it allows for a few generations of excess and debauchery — and then the bill arrives.  Holy expletive!

Perlin discussed the pattern repeated by the civilizations of the Mediterranean Basin.  The trees were cut, then the heavy winter rains came, the soil eroded from the hillsides, the ports and bays were buried with eroded silt, and flash floods roared through the valleys.  Eventually, the prime soil was sent to the bottom of the sea, and the remaining wasteland could produce little more than olives, grapes, and goats.  The fuel for industry was gone, population plummeted, and the forest could never again recover on ruined land.  Most of the arid wastelands of today’s Mediterranean Basin used to be forests. 

Even the ancients understood that their civilizations were unsustainable.  In the epic poem Cypria, Zeus started the Trojan War to thin the bloated human herd so the weary earth could recuperate.  Plato wrote a bitter lament about the devastated land of Attica, a sickly skeleton of its former vitality.  In Works and Days, Hesiod described the decline of humankind from the wonderful Golden Age to the horrid Iron Age.  In Genesis, the Hebrew deity observed the stunning wickedness of humans, regretted creating them, and sent a huge flood to eliminate his multitudes of embarrassing mistakes.

Well hey, if they could see that what they were doing was really dumb, then why didn’t they just stop?  They could have quit cutting trees, thrown away their icky plows, implemented a draconian population reduction regime, and lived happily ever after, right?  Our modern consumer society has similar healthy options.  Why don’t we just stop? 

The bottom line was that people who preferred to limit their numbers, and continue living in harmony with nature, had no future.  Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts.  In other words, if you didn’t destroy your forest, someone else would.  If you didn’t build war ships, you were a helpless sitting duck.  Thus, civilization bounced from region to region, repeating the same mistakes, turning countless paradises into parking lots.  Progress!

That was the story in the Mediterranean Basin.  It was a completely different story along the Pacific coast of America and Canada.  In this region, the people remained hunter-gatherers, and their ecosystem stayed as healthy as it had been 10,000 years earlier (until you-know-who arrived).  In the absence of agriculture and civilization, life can be far more pleasant for one and all, including the entire ecosystem.  Remember that!

Perlin concluded with two huge chapters on industrial England and America, for which large quantities of written records still survive.  He described greedy industrialists, corrupt politicians, exploited peasants, and several centuries of ridiculous environmental destruction.

By the end of the book, alert readers will recognize similar patterns of unwholesome behavior that continue to this very day.  The rate of destruction has skyrocketed — and so has our understanding of the harm we are causing.  Alert readers will be compelled to discard all fantasies of quick and easy remedies.

This book makes me crazy.  Why isn’t ecological history a compulsory subject throughout every student’s education?  Why are we still training our youth to be mindless consumers, and punctual obedient industrial robots?  There is more important information in this book than I learned during most of my school years.  Imagine what could happen if we ever produced a generation of well-educated children.  Hug every tree you see.

Perlin, John, A Forest Journey — The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.  [1989]