THE EFFACEMENT OF NATURE BY MAN
Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man since his
upgrowth in the late Tertiary period of the geologists--perhaps a
million years ago--has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast
herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the
deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted. It is, no
doubt, true that changes proceeded, and are proceeding, in the form of
the earth's face and in its climate without man having anything to say
in the matter. Changes in climate and in the connections of islands
and continents across great seas and oceans have gone on, and are
going on, and in consequence endless kinds of animals and plants have
been, some extinguished, some forced to migrate to new areas, many
slowly modified in shape, size, and character, and abundantly
produced. But over and above these slow irresistible changes there has
been a vast destruction and defacement of the living world by the
uncalculating reckless procedure of both savage and civilised man
which is little short of appalling, and is all the more ghastly in
that the results have been very rapidly brought about, that no
compensatory production of new life, except that of man himself and
his distorted "breeds" of domesticated animals, has accompanied the
destruction of formerly flourishing creatures, and that, so far as we
can see, if man continues to act in the reckless way which has
characterised his behaviour hitherto, he will multiply to such an
enormous extent that only a few kinds of animals and plants which
serve him for food and fuel will be left on the face of the globe. It
is not improbable that even these will eventually disappear, and man
will be indeed monarch of all he surveys. He will have converted the
gracious earth, once teeming with innumerable, incomparably beautiful
varieties of life, into a desert--or, at best, a vast agricultural
domain abandoned to the production of food-stuffs for the hungry
millions which, like maggots consuming a carcase, or the irrepressible
swarms of the locust, incessantly devour and multiply.
Another glacial period or an overwhelming catastrophe of cosmic origin
may fortunately, at some distant epoch, check the blind process of
destruction of natural things and the insane pullulation of humanity.
But there are, it seems probable, many centuries of what would seem to
the men of to-day deplorable ugliness and cramping pressure in store
for posterity unless an unforeseen awakening of the human race to the
inevitable results of its present recklessness should occur. Whatever
may be the ultimate fate of the earth under man's operations, we
should endeavour at this moment to delay, as far as possible, the
hateful consummation looming ahead of us.
It is interesting to note a few instances of man's destructive action.
Even in prehistoric times it is probable that man, by hunting the
mammoth--the great hairy elephant--assisted in its extinction, if he
did not actually bring it about. At a remote prehistoric period the
horses of various kinds which abounded in North and South America
rapidly and suddenly became extinct. It has been suggested, with some
show of probability, that a previously unknown epidemic disease due to
a parasitic organism--such as those which we now see ravaging the
herds of South Africa--found its way to the American continent. And it
is quite possible that this was brought from the other hemisphere by
the first men who crossed the Pacific and populated North America.
To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that
man by clearing the land, as well as by actively hunting and killing
it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of
Caesar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627. He similarly
destroyed the bison, first in Europe and then (in our own days) in
North America. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain
in the two continents. He has very nearly made an end of the elk in
Europe, and will soon do so completely in America. The wolf and the
beaver were destroyed in these British Islands about 400 years ago.
They are rapidly disappearing from France, and will soon be
exterminated in Scandinavia and Russia and in Canada. At a remote
prehistoric period the bear was exterminated by man in Britain and the
lion driven from the whole of Europe, except Macedonia, where it still
flourished in the days of the ancient Greeks. It was common in Asia
Minor a few centuries ago. The giraffe and the elephant have departed
from South Africa before the encroachments of civilised man. The day
is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any
part of Africa, and with them are vanishing many splendid antelopes.
Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the
gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has
learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be
occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be
no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the
man-like apes, unless (as we may hope in their case, at any rate) such
living monuments of human history are made sacred and treated with
greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller
creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of
others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the
human blight. Even some beautiful insects--the great copper butterfly
and the swallow-tail butterfly--have been exterminated in England by
human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of the Fen country.
But the most repulsive of the destructive results of human expansion
is the poisoning of rivers, and the consequent extinction in them of
fish and of well-nigh every living thing, save mould and putrefactive
bacteria. In the Thames it will soon be a hundred years since man, by
his filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and murdered the
innocents of the eel-fare. Even at its foulest time, however, the
Thames mud was blood-red (really "blood-red," since the colour was due
to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms
of a delicate little worm like the earth-worm, which has an
exceptional power of living in foul water, and nourishing itself upon
putrid mud. In old days I have stood on Hungerford Suspension Bridge
and seen the mud-banks as a great red band of colour, stretching for a
mile along the picture when the tide was low. In smaller streams,
especially in the mining and manufacturing districts of England,
progressive money-making man has converted the most beautiful things
of nature--trout streams--into absolutely dead corrosive chemical
sewers. The sight of one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters
makes one shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in
which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-shore will be thus
dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and hill-sides will be
drenched with nauseating chemical manures. Such a state of things is
possibly in store for future generations of men! It is not "science"
that will be to blame for these horrors, but should they come about
they will be due to the reckless greed and the mere insect-like
increase of humanity.
* * * * *
In the destruction of trees and all kinds of plants man has
deliberately done more mischief than in the extermination of animals.
By inadvertence he has completely abolished the strange and remarkable
trees and shrubs of islands--such as St. Helena--where the herbivorous
animals introduced by him have made short work of the wonderful native
plants isolated for ages, and have completely exterminated them, so
that they are "extinct." We have just had the opportunity of studying
one of the few oceanic islands--"Christmas Island" (forty square miles
in area)--untouched by man until thirty years ago. It lies 200 miles
south of Java. Its native inhabitants, plants and animals were
carefully examined, and specimens secured twenty years ago. There were
then no human inhabitants, and the island was rarely visited. It was,
however, about twelve years ago handed over by its proprietors to some
thousand Chinamen to dig and ship the 15,000,000 tons of valuable
"phosphate" (at a profit of a guinea a ton), which forms a large part
of its surface. And now from time to time we shall have reports of
this result of contact with man, and through him with all the plagues
and curses of the great world. Already a remarkable shrew-mouse and
two native species of rat, peculiar to the island, have disappeared.
Dr. Andrews ("Proceedings of the Zoological Society," February 2nd,
1909), who has twice explored the island, gives evidence that this is
caused by a parasitic disease (due to a trypanosome like those which
cause sleeping-sickness and various horse and cattle diseases)
introduced by the common black rats from the ships which now frequent
the island. The further progress of destruction will be carefully and
minutely observed and recorded--but not arrested!
It is, however, in cutting down and burning forests of large trees
that man has done the most harm to himself and the other living
occupants of many regions of the earth's surface. We can trace these
evil results from more recent examples back into the remote past. The
water supply of the town of Plymouth was assured by Drake, who brought
water in a channel from Dartmoor. But the cutting down of the trees
has now rendered the great wet sponge of the Dartmoor region, from
which the water was drawn all the year, no longer a sponge. It no
longer "holds" the water of the rainfall, but in consequence of the
removal of the forest and the digging of ditches the water quickly
runs off the moor, and subsequently the whole countryside suffers from
drought. This sort of thing has occurred wherever man has been
sufficiently civilised and enterprising to commit the folly of
destroying forests. Forests have an immense effect on climate, causing
humidity of both the air and the soil, and give rise to moderate and
persistent instead of torrential streams. Spain has been irretrievably
injured by the cutting down of her forests in the course of a few
hundred years. The same thing is going on, to a disastrous extent, in
parts of the United States. Whole provinces of the Thibetan borders of
China have been converted into uninhabitable, sandy desert, where
centuries ago were fertile and well-watered pastures supporting rich
cities, in consequence of the reckless destruction of forest. In fact,
whether it is due to man's improvident action or to natural climatic
change, it appears that the formation of "desert" is due in the first
place to the destruction of forest, the consequent formation of a
barren, sandy area, and the subsequent spreading of what we may call
the "disease" or "desert ulcer," by the blowing of the fatally exposed
sand and the gradual extension, owing to the action of the sand
itself, of the area of destroyed vegetation. Sand-deserts are not, as
used to be supposed, sea-bottoms from which the water has retreated,
but areas of destruction of vegetation--often (though not always) both
in Central Asia and in North Africa (Egypt, etc.), started by the
deliberate destruction of forest by man, who has either by artificial
drainage starved the forest, or by the simple use of the axe and fire
cleared it away.
The great art of irrigation was studied and used with splendid success
by the ancient nations of the near East. They converted deserts into
gardens, and their work was an act of compensation and restitution to
be set off against the destructive operations of more barbarous men.
But they, too, long ago were themselves destroyed by conquering hordes
of more ignorant but more war-like men, and their irrigation works and
the whole art of irrigation perished with them. One of the absolutely
necessary works to be carried out by civilised man, when he has ceased
to build engines of war and destruction, is the irrigation of the
great waterless territories of the globe. A little home-work of the
kind has been carried on in Italy regularly year by year since the
days of Leonardo da Vinci, and our Indian Government is slowly
copying the Italian example. In Egypt we have built the great dam of
Assouan, whilst in Mesopotamia it is proposed to re-establish the
irrigation system by which it once was made rich and fertile. But, as
has lately been maintained by Mr. Rose Smith in his book, "The Growth
of Nations," the vast possibilities of irrigation have not yet been
realised by the business men of the modern world. Millions of acres in
the warmer regions of the earth now unproductive can be made to yield
food to mankind and rich pecuniary profits to the capitalists who
shall introduce modern engineering methods and a scientific system of
irrigation into those areas.
The whole problem of the increase of the more civilised races and the
necessary accompanying increase of food-production depends for its
solution on the speedy introduction of irrigation methods into what
are now the great unproductive deserts of the world.