Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall, not as now losing the water which flows off the bare earth into the sea, but, having an abundant supply in all places, and receiving it into herself and treasuring it up in the close clay soil, it let off into the hollows the streams which it absorbed from the heights, providing everywhere abundant fountains and rivers, of which there may still be observed sacred memorials in places where fountains once existed; and this proves the truth of what I am saying.
Such was the natural state of the country, which was cultivated, as we may well believe, by true husbandmen, who made husbandry their business, and were lovers of honour.
Plato gives this description of the frightful erosion already taking place in the fifth century b.c.—but he ascribes almost divine qualities to the husbandmen who obviously caused it. Rather as Ellsworth Huntington did forty years ago, Plato attributed all the trouble not to man but to a change in climate. He thought that what had happened to Attica had been caused by a series of deluges. But I think that if he hadn’t been so interested in platonic ideas and had been a little more concerned with what the husbandmen were actually doing, he probably would have seen that it was precisely these divine husbandmen who had done things to the soil which had left it in the ruined and impoverished state in which the Greeks of his own time found it—and Heaven knows it was relatively fertile then compared to what it is now. One may say that perhaps Plato would have done better to devote more attention to these dreadfully practical problems of nature than to the rather abstract metaphysical problems which engaged him.
And one can say something of the same kind about Socrates, who said that he saw no object in going outside the city walls because everything of interest was within them, and that his business was solely with men. But men do have to live on the soil and live in community with nature, and one wonders whether Socrates wouldn’t have done more good to his fellows if he had paid a little more attention to what went on outside the city walls.
Those of you who are acquainted with the literature of the conservationists will know what an immense amount of land has been destroyed here in an extraordinarily short space of time by wantonness. The same thing is true in many other areas of the world; there are vast areas of erosion in China, in Africa, in South America, and in Southern Europe. And the dreadful process goes on and on, becoming progressively more and more dangerous as more and more people are born into the world and have to be supported and the increasing pressure drives peasants and farmers to attempt to get more and more out of the soil.
The combination of human destructiveness and population increase is an enormous and frightening fact. It is clearly one of the major problems confronting human beings at the present time. But it mustn’t be thought that all people have been destructive all the time and everywhere. On the contrary, in many parts of the world, quite primitive people have shown remarkable understanding of preserving and conserving the soil. I had the opportunity of visiting the Inca regions of the Andes this summer. To see the Inca terraces rising from the floor of the Urubamba River two or three thousand feet up the side of a mountain is an exceptional sight.
Some of this wonderfully cared-for terracing is made with dressed stone, and some of the terraces are used to this day—they permit quite intensive agriculture on incredibly steep slopes (often thirty-five degrees). You go to a place like Machu Picchu, a fantastic city built on a sugarloaf hill, and you discover that its population, which was quite small—probably not more than two or three thousand—was able to survive for two or three centuries at least on its elaborate system of terracing. You will also find extraordinary examples of terracing in Indonesia and the Philippines: among the Igorots in the Philippines there is a wonderful rice cultivation. You will see the same thing in Java, and there is good reason to suppose that many of these rice-growing terraces have been used for a thousand, perhaps even two thousand years.
These are remarkable achievements, but one of the saddest things is to realize that the good examples which some people have set in some parts of the world have certainly not been followed in others. You will find the remains of the ancient pre-Spanish Inca terraces within thirty miles of Cusco, where the worst kind of farming practices have been used in barley cultivation and where the most fearful gullying and erosion is seen. One wonders why on earth modern farmers couldn’t have taken the hint; evidently, as someone said, the greatest lesson of history is that nobody ever learns the lessons of history. Similarly, it is extraordinary that the methods of contour ploughing which are now being applied more and more to agriculture in this country were really not developed until thirty years ago, although a hundred and fifty years ago the process was already apparent to Thomas Jefferson, who talked about soil erosion and soil exhaustion. These facts are all the more disturbing when one realizes that, owing to the increasing pressure of population upon resources, there is extraordinarily little time.
There are several most powerful instruments of soil destruction which man has employed during the ages, but the most disastrous has probably been over-grazing, which has been going on at least since the domestication of sheep and goats—probably seven or eight thousand years. There is a very ironical point here: We generally feel a great sympathy for Abel and a great dislike for Cain, but let us never forget that Abel was the man who had sheep and goats and Cain was the agriculturist. Actually, if there was ever a justified homicide, it was probably Cain’s destruction of Abel, because the followers of Abel in fact have performed incredible feats of destruction all over the world. Both the goat and the sheep are highly destructive; they are thin-lipped animals which pull up the grass by the roots and leave nothing. The sheep has accomplished frightful destruction in Spain. One of the oddest chapters of Spanish history is the history of Mesta, the great co-operative of the shepherds, who were in perpetual conflict with the agriculturists and who, in the course of about three hundred years, succeeded in turning Spain almost into a desert.
Here it is worth mentioning something which has only been discovered within the last few years. It had been supposed that Southern Italy assumed its present barren aspect towards the end of the Roman Empire, the breakdown of agriculture at that time having led to deforestation and loss of fertility. But a recent discovery has shown that this is not true. During the war the Royal Air Force made an almost complete air map of Italy, photographing it very carefully with slanting light, which permits one to see the archaeological traces. It was found, to everyone’s surprise, that what had previously been supposed to be barren since the time of the Roman Empire was in fact quite fertile at that time and even during the Dark Ages. You can see the traces of the fields and of the terracing and of the foundations of peasant houses. It is now realized that the destruction of this fertile and forested area in Southern Italy was a consequence of the introduction during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Spanish methods of shepherding, which were completely ruinous to the country, and which left it in its present desolate state.
The goat is much more active than the sheep and can even climb trees to eat its food. It is quite fantastic what the goat has succeeded in destroying; it includes the whole Mediterranean basin. One of the worst things goats do is to prevent forests from reproducing themselves: they attack the young shoots as they come up and bite them down to the ground.
One of the few really good things that can be said for the British and their occupation of Cyprus is that they did persuade the inhabitants of the forested west end of the island to give up their goats in favour of forests. It was all done quite democratically. The administrators went from village to village and talked about the relative advantages of goats and forests: goats have considerable advantages here and now, but the advantages of forests later on are very much greater. A great many villagers were persuaded to tether their goats and to give up a certain proportion of them, with the result that there has been a remarkable revival of forests on the mountains of western Cyprus. Similarly, in Lebanon there is absolutely no prospect of reforestation (where it is still
