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Does God Bless America?
In the beginning
In the beginning the world was beautiful. Mighty forests stretched across islands and continents. The soil was rich. Fruit lay upon the ground. Food was everywhere for the taking. Children grew strong and tall.
Man did no work, women did but little. Then man discovered work. Man discovered how to harvest grain, women discovered more work. Bread fed the people. The people grew in number.
The bread could feed more mouths but less well. The hunters in the forest were stronger, taller and sharper witted but the bread eaters outnumbered them, drove them back, burned the forests and ploughed up the soil.
We cannot go back to the garden. We would starve. We have destroyed the riches of the garden and we are stuck with the field and the orchard. I do not believe in an inevitable progress of mankind but I know we cannot go back.
Agriculture was the single biggest invention in the history of mankind. From the moment the first band of malnourished farmers drove off the hunter gatherers we began the journey to the present. That discovery was a mere eyeblink ago in geological time. Those first farmers were exactly the same as us. The only evolution that has occurred since is the micro evolution of disease resistance that has been going on for a billion years or more. We have not changed.
Man did not begin to destroy the planet when he began to farm. We have been doing it since the earliest days.
Sixty thousand years ago there were thousands more species of large animals on this planet than there are now. Man the pioneer has wiped them out. The first mass holocaust that can be clearly seen in the fossil record is caused by those loveable black men who live in the harmony of the dreamtime. In the space of a thousand years or so the proto Australians barbecued their way through three quarters of the mega fauna of a continent. Since that initial period of the pioneers Australian flora and fauna settled down to a working relationship with man, fewer trees, fewer large animals, more fires but diversity and harmony. Just when nature thought harmony was restored guess what sails over the horizon? A ship load of pioneers. Deep joy.
Until 150 years ago the tallest trees on the planet grew in Australia. Blue Gums over 400 feet tall. It is unlikely we will ever see another forest of fully grown Blue Gums.
Other mighty trees we will never see again in their majesty are the Cedars of Lebanon. Classical literature of the early Mediterranean area is full of references to them. King Solomon used the finest cedar timbers to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Egyptians used them to build ships. A ship has recently been excavated that is made of timbers of a size that cannot now be replicated. Lebanon was a mountainous land covered with one of the finest forests the world had ever seen. Mighty trees that would compare with the finest sequoias in California. Now Lebanon is deforested and denuded of soil. Goats nibble a little grass where once the finest trees man has ever known grew tall.
The Romans used to get their grain from the lands of North Africa. The bread basket of the empire. Now deserts and the poorest scrubland occupy most of this land. If you think this change is due to climate change you are deluding yourself. Climates do change but climate change does not wash away the topsoil that takes thousands of years to build up.
It was said that a squirrel, if he had a mind to it, could leap from one end of England to the other without ever getting out of a tree. Less than a thousand years ago England was mostly forest. The forest was cleared for agriculture, turned into building timbers and fine ships, burned to make lime for mortar, and to provide fuel to produce iron and glass. Discoveries of ways to use coal helped preserve the last timber in England before it was wiped out. Such discoveries then ignited the industrial revolution that has been changing our world in a faster way than ever before.
Twelve thousand years ago mammoths and mastodons walked North America. A mere 393 generations link the native Americans of today, who are icons for life in harmony with nature, from their ancestors who walked into an empty continent and chomped their way through the mega fauna of two continents in a blitzkrieg of butchery over a mere thousand years.
Let us not be racists. Pioneers are evil destroyers whatever the colour of their skin. The time of the pioneer is over. Mankind has crossed every ocean and found himself on every shore. Like the Australian and American pioneers of whatever colour we must realize that there is no more new land over the horizon anymore and that the animals and plants we kill today will not be here tomorrow. If we destroy the soil we will not be here tomorrow either.
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The problems we are facing today with our use of land are not new. Man has always had a tendency to treat newly opened up land in the same way: slash and burn, farm intensively, and then, if there is still soil or fertility left, continue farming. The difference today is that our power to slash and burn is greater than ever and we are increasingly doing it in environments that cannot survive the shock. The result is massive loss of habitat and hence loss of species and biodiversity and the loss in a few short years of the soil that has taken millennia to form. |
You may think you can escape the planet of your birth in some rocket powered lifeboat but I don't. I know that in Steerage Class I am going down with the ship, that knowledge gives me the strength to resist.