Man and His Planet, Aldous Huxley
Man and His Planet
What is our relationship with the planet? What are we doing with the world on which we are living and how are we treating it? How is it likely to treat us if we go on treating it as we are now?
I shall begin to answer these questions with two quotations from the Bible. The first comes from the Psalms: ‘The trees of the Lord are full of sap: the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted’ (Psalms 104: 16). The second comes from the Song of Solomon, where the face of the beloved is compared to the cedars: ‘His countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars’ (Song of Solomon 5: 15). These great trees have a kind of mythical quality. We have all heard of them from our earliest years; hospitals are named after them, and they have become a sort of household word. I remember when for the first time I went to the Middle East, one of the things I was most interested in seeing was precisely the cedars of Lebanon.
Lebanon is a very small country which consists of a coastal strip not more than a few miles wide at the foot of towering mountains which go up to about ten thousand feet. The mountain range is a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles long, twenty-five or thirty miles wide, and I expected, when I drove up into it, to find the cedars of Lebanon in profusion, as undoubtedly they once were. We drove and drove for hours up enormous hills and finally, after mile upon mile of absolutely barren country, came upon an enclosed space in which there were approximately four hundred cedars. Flying over the range later on, I saw two or three other such groves, and I believe there are in all perhaps fifteen hundred or two thousand cedars left. This is all that remains of the gigantic forest that supplied King Solomon with the timbers for his temple—if you remember, Solomon made a treaty with Heiram, King of Tyre, in which Heiram agreed that the timbers should be brought down to the coast, towed in floats to whatever port was appointed by Solomon, and then dragged to Jerusalem—and that for centuries supplied Egypt, which grows no trees of its own except palm trees, with all the timber it required.
This illustrates in a very striking way what man has been doing to his planet over the course of the centuries. He has found profusion in nature and in all too many cases he has completely devastated what he has found. Here we had a magnificent forest: these trees are very fine. You must have seen them in botanical gardens—the specimens grow all over Europe now, where they have been imported, and do very well in temperate climates. But, as Chateaubriand pointed out, ‘les forêts précèdent les peuples, et les déserts les suivent’ (forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them). During the time he has been on earth—which is anything from a half million to perhaps a million years—man has been increasingly a profound geological force. He has changed the face of the planet upon which he lives, sometimes for the better, but in all too many cases for the worse.
In the nineteenth century, the environmentalist school spoke of environment as conditioning and creating cultures but left out of account altogether the fact that cultures condition the environment—that man has certainly done almost as much to change the environment as the environment has done to mould the course of history.
In general, we may say that the realization that man is a changer of nature did not begin until the late eighteenth century. The first great classical work on the subject was written in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh, who was the first American Ambassador to the new Kingdom of Italy. In this book Marsh collected all of the European material to date on the subject of man and nature and set it forth in a kind of philosophical context. One of the precursors in the field, it remains an extremely valuable book.
Let us begin by talking about the positive contributions which man has made to changing the planet. For example, most ecologists will now agree that the tropical grasslands, and quite possibly the grasslands of the temperate zone, were actually created by man and have been maintained by him in their open grassy state for hundreds of thousands of years. I suppose the most important of man’s contributions are those he has made in bringing valuable plants or animals from one part of the world to another. In classical times such trees as the peach, the plum, the walnut, and the almond were brought from the Near East, the Middle East, and even the Far East to the Mediterranean; such valuable fodder plants as alfalfa and certain types of clover were brought from the Mediterranean and domesticated throughout Europe and later on in the New World; and such plants as peas and vines were carried from the West to China. The introduction of potatoes into the Old World from the New was revolutionary, as was the importation into Africa, Asia, and Southern Europe of Indian corn, from South and Central America.
What is true of plants is also true of animals. The most obvious case is the importation of the horse into the New World. The American Indians did all their hunting on foot before the Spaniards and the first English settlers introduced the horse. The North American Indians then rapidly took to this new quadruped, and you will see the same thing in South America. The only domesticated animal which the Incas, for example, possessed was the llama—the alpaca and the vicuna—which, in a pinch, can carry about twenty or thirty pounds on its back. But this was all they had, except for human beasts of burden, for transporting goods up and down those extraordinary mountain trails in the Andes. They have also adopted the sheep, which has entered into the Indian folklore of the Andes, and has become a kind of native animal there.
An interesting importation, from the East to Europe, was that of the cat. It came from Egypt (the local wild cat of Western Europe was never tamed) and didn’t make itself much at home in Western Europe until the early Middle Ages. We can see, in the old fairy story of Dick Whittington, for example, how extremely valuable cats were and how remarkable they seemed. In the Saxon law preceding the Conquest of England a cat was so valuable that anybody who killed someone else’s cat was expected to pay for it by pouring enough wheat to make a pile high enough to cover the cat suspended by its tail.
Another animal import from the East to Europe was the invaluable domestic chicken. It was brought from India into the classical world and has been with us ever since, laying eggs. It is a strange thing to realize that in the early classical period people had no eggs.
These are some of the immensely important changes for the good that man has brought to his planet. Now we have to consider the reverse of the medal. Man has lived only too frequently on his planet almost like a parasite living upon the host it infests. And whereas many parasites are sensible enough not to destroy their host, because after all if they destroy their host they destroy themselves, man is not one of the sensible parasites. Instead he has very often lived upon his host in such a way as absolutely to ruin it.
What are some of the ways in which man has proved most destructive? We will begin with the animals—a very depressing story, for we are wiping out creatures of extraordinary beauty and interest at rapidly increasing rates. If one looks at the statistics compiled by the International Society for the Protection of Nature, one learns that fifty species of mammals only were wiped out during the nineteenth century, forty more have been lost since 1900, and six hundred species are probably doomed to extinction at the present time. There is the case of the traveller pigeon, which existed at one time in such fantastic numbers that its flights used to darken the sun.
In the colonial and early post-Independence days one of the amusements of the inhabitants was to drive out to the woods where the pigeons nested, knock down the nests with the young squabs in them, fill entire wagons with these creatures, and drive home. Obviously, they couldn’t eat most of them, and many were just thrown away to rot by the roadside. The same thing happened with the bison, which once counted fifty to sixty million head on the plains. Now the traveller pigeon is completely extinct and there are only a few thousand bison left.
Another very odd case is that of the Indian rhinoceros, which is now practically extinct owing to the fact of human—above all, Chinese—superstition: the rhinoceros horn was regarded as a kind of love philtre or amulet, and enormous prices used to be paid for it. I remember years ago going to visit the great warehouse in the docks of London where ivory, horn, and tortoise and pearl shell were brought in and auctioned off. I was very surprised to find that rhinoceros horn was selling at a considerably higher price than ivory, entirely because of the huge Chinese market for what was supposed to be an aphrodisiac; which clearly it was not. To satisfy a human superstition these interesting creatures now have been
