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 butchered off, and the kindred species is rapidly disappearing in Africa.
In many parts of the world the crocodile is disappearing. We shall miss this highly unsympathetic animal because he performs a very valuable function, as is now being discovered: crocodiles kill off the enemies of fish as well as the weak and diseased in the fish population. Where they have disappeared the fishing is much worse.
The great wild species of Africa survive at all solely because there are national parks in various parts of Africa where these animals are carefully protected. Presumably they will continue to survive, for the benefit of science and for the delight of people who wish to go outside the all too human world and see what the rest of the creation looks like.
Let us now consider the plant world. We will begin with the forests. I have already talked about the cedars of Lebanon, an immense forest of magnificent trees which have virtually disappeared, leaving the mountains to be eroded. In many places all the topsoil has been washed away and nothing remains except the naked rock; such places, it is quite clear, can never be reforested, and this same situation occurs again and again in every part of the world.
Man has been deliberately destroying forests since the hunting period: to clear forests—to increase visibility—the hunting tribes tended to burn off the underbrush, permitting the game to be hunted much more easily than it could be in a very dense forest. And, since agriculture began, probably about 8000 b.c., men have been cutting (and burning) forests in order to create new places where they could plant food crops. The whole process was greatly speeded up after the beginning of the iron age, when it became possible, with the use of iron ploughshares, to break soils much too heavy for the wooden ones which had been used in the past. Another invention important to the greater spread of agriculture came towards the eighth century, when what appears to be an extraordinarily simple device, namely the horse collar, permitted horses to pull a much greater weight and to put much more strength into their pulling than they had been able to do with the previous forms of harness. Such technological advances, plus a slow but steady increase of population, have naturally led to the clearing of enormous forests.
Equally important in more recent times, especially in the destruction of forests which surround urban centres, has been the use of timber as a fuel. If you read Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, you will find a very, very interesting account of the provisioning of Paris with wood for space heating. All the forests around Paris had been largely exhausted and the wood came in from hundreds of miles away, being floated on great rafts down the Seine and its tributaries. The rafts were then moored off the quays of Paris and the wood distributed. Diderot, one of the few intellectuals of the eighteenth century who was deeply interested in the technological progress of his time, stated that this could not go on and that the only hope was to use coal for space heating; in fact, at about this time coal did begin to be used on a considerable scale, which helped to save the forests from total destruction.
Besides space heating, wood was used in industry. All ores were smelted with charcoal until steel was made with coke for the first time at the beginning of the eighteenth century, so that there was a prodigious destruction of forests wherever there was a metallurgical industry. The same happened wherever there was a glass industry. Although glass was a very early invention—it goes back to about 3000 b.c.—it was very expensive and difficult to make until the art of blowing glass was perfected in the first century a.d. This invention very rapidly led to the formation of glass industries all around the Mediterranean and as far north as Cologne and England, with the consequence of an enormous massacre of the forests.
Another very important reason for the destruction of forests was the building of houses and, even more significant, of ships. It is interesting to find how early the timbers suitable for building ships were exhausted in Western Europe. The French navy couldn’t find suitable timber in its own territory from about the end of the seventeenth century and had to be supplied largely by timber coming from as far afield as Albania. The Spaniards, at the time of their great naval expansion during the sixteenth century, were depending not upon wood from Spain, but upon wood coming from the Baltic.
You will find a reference in Pepys’ Diary saying, ‘God knows where our oak is to come from.’ And in fact the oak was running out. By the eighteenth century, the period of Britain’s naval supremacy, the oak for its ships was coming predominantly from the New World—from New England and the Eastern seaboard of this country. As for the rest, it was teak from the Indian Empire. Fortunately, perhaps, the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 proved that the iron ship was definitely superior to the wooden, and consequently shipbuilding ceased to be a reason for massacring forests of slow-growing trees.
The area where one sees the deforestation most clearly is in the Old World, most visibly in the ancient civilized world around the Mediterranean. You see it also terribly clearly in the Northwest here and around the Great Lakes. There are, of course, great forests remaining in the United States, but the annual cutting of timber exceeds annual growth by about 50 per cent. It is quite obvious that you can’t go on with this kind of thing for very long and hope to have many forests.
The forests in Europe used to come right down from the northern part to the Mediterranean coast. Today there are very few areas on the Mediterranean coast where you can still see traces of the ancient forests. In the south of France, east of Hyères, there is about a hundred square miles of forest called the Forêt des Morts; it is all that remains of the great primeval forest, which had already largely disappeared even in classical times, and which just vanished during the Middle Ages, largely because of the glass and soap industries of Marseilles and the shipbuilding industry of Toulon and Marseilles.
For those who are interested in landscape painting, it is a curious thing to realize that what we consider the typical landscape of Provence, such as we see in the paintings of Cézanne, is a relatively modern landscape. It represents hills which have now been weathered down, practically to their bare bones.
