Goats go on creating awful havocs in spite of all legal restraints. Great efforts have been made in Algeria and Tunisia to control the goats by law, but it is almost impossible to enforce the law, and the destruction goes on. And in Madagascar the government, which should have known better, introduced a valuable kind of goat which produces some useful hair, with the result that now, after some twenty-five years, only 20 per cent of the forest remains.
If over-grazing is of enormous importance in the creation of conditions for erosion, equally important, and possibly more important because it has been going on longer, is fire. We have already seen that man has used fire deliberately since earliest times to clear land for hunting and agriculture. The forests of Western Europe were largely cleared by fire—one sees traces of this even in the place names in England: ‘Brentwood’ means just burnt wood; ‘Brindly’ means burned lee or burned clearing. But far more destructive than man’s deliberate efforts have been the accidental fires resulting from his carelessness.
Geologists find a notable increase in fossil ashes from the beginning of Pleistocene time, about a million years ago, which would seem to indicate that even at that very remote period man or his near human ancestors had discovered fire. We know in any case that Peking man, who dates undoubtedly from 250,000 years ago (and possibly from half a million), had fire, and accidental fires have been occurring ever since.
One of the great tragedies in this country has been the fabulous amount of forest destroyed by accidental fires. The record is incredible: on this coast, in Washington, there were fires in 1865 and in 1868, one of which destroyed a million acres, the other six hundred thousand. There were very few fires in the area before the settlers arrived in 1847; after this date, they were absolutely incessant. There was the great Idaho and Montana fire of 1910, which destroyed eight and a half billion feet of lumber, and, one of the worst, the Tillamook fire of 1933, which destroyed twelve and a half billion feet. This is what the United States would have consumed in one year, and it was wiped out in a single fire in a week. It has been calculated that in Oregon, from the first settlements to about 1908, when fire protection was installed, about thirty-two billion feet of lumber had been cut and used while about forty billion feet had been destroyed accidentally by fire. Now elaborate firefighting organizations have been created, but anyone who sees the difficulty of controlling even a brush fire in California—we have had them recently—can realize that it is still profoundly difficult to control this engine of destruction. When one reflects that in countries like Chile forest fires are completely without control and rage for weeks, blackening immense areas, one sees the enormous importance of this human geological force.
What man is doing to his world unfortunately makes a gloomy picture. There is very little way to make it non-gloomy. In one of the next lectures I shall try to make a bridge from these facts to the problem of morality, the problem of what our philosophical views of nature should be. For we should think of these brute facts not only in a purely practical way, but also in a kind of metaphysical and ethical and aesthetic way. It is terribly important, I feel, that we should be able to think of these things with our whole nature, not merely as technologists, not merely as people who want to eat and to have timber products, but as total human beings with a moral nature, with an aesthetic nature, with a philosophical trend in our mind.
The end
