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 possible) until the goats are kept under control. Lebanon is divided politically along religious lines—the Moslems, the Druses, the Maronites, the Armenians, the Greek Orthodox. I was told the story of the Maronite bishop who came into the ministry of agriculture and said, ‘You will be glad to hear, Your Excellency, that we are doing very well with our goats in the mountains, but I regret to say the Orthodox goats are still creating an immense havoc.’
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.
More Nature in Art
In my last lecture I presented the factual side of the situation in which man finds himself in relation to his planet, the rather dismal story of the way in which he has ravaged and greatly destroyed the world—the home in which he travels through the Universe. In this lecture I propose to speak about the events on the other end of the bridge. I want to talk about the human or psychological end, because I feel that we must always try to bring together these two generally separate aspects of life, the purely factual and scientific, and the purely human-value end.
Let us begin with the practical problems involved. We now know enough to repair a good deal of the damage which has already been done to our planet and to prevent further damage from occurring. The necessary information and knowledge exist. But as usual there is a great gap between the ability to do a thing and the likelihood of its being done. It is very easy to describe the conservation methods which should be put into effect at once, but it is extraordinarily difficult to carry out what we know we can do.
First of all, in order to implement a satisfactory conservation programme, we have to communicate with immense numbers of human beings. After all, there are in the world several hundreds of millions of peasant farmers and workers who, if conservation is to be carried out effectively, must in some way be influenced to work along the lines which we know they should work along. Simply to establish relations with these people is obviously one of the major problems. And once relations have been established, there is the problem of persuading them to give up old traditional methods in favour of better modern methods. Furthermore, these vast numbers which are already here are increasing at a tremendously rapid rate. And the heavier the pressure of population upon resources, the more urgent becomes the need of man to produce food and the greater the temptation to use exploitative methods. Man simply has no choice but to live for the next year, and he must do his best to extract his living from soil which has often been already damaged and is in a precarious condition. The Germans have a good term for this kind of exploitative economy; they call it Raubwirtschaft (robber economy).
Now we have to consider a simple psychological fact. It is extremely difficult
