FOREST CULTURE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
It is wonderful how often instinct has anticipated the practical
lessons of science. Long before comparative anatomy taught us the
characteristics of our digestive organs the testimony of our natural
predilections indicated the advantages of a frugal diet. Long before
modern hygiene pointed out the perils of breathing the atmosphere of
unventilated dormitories the evidence of our senses warned us against
the foulness of that atmosphere. And ages before the researches of
agricultural chemistry began to reveal the protective influence of
arboreal vegetation, an instinct which the child of civilization shares
with the rudest savage revolted against the reckless destruction of
fine woodlands, and sought to retrieve the loss by surrounding private
homes with groves and parks. The love of forests is as natural to our
species as the love of rocks to the mountain-goat. Trees and tree-shade
are associated with our traditions of paradise, and that the cradle of
the human race was not a brick tenement or a wheat-farm, but a
tree-garden, is one of the few points on which the genesis of Darwin
agrees with that of the Pentateuch. The happiest days of childhood
would lose half their charm without the witchery of woodland rambles,
and, like an echo of the foreworld, the instincts of our forest-born
ancestors often awake in the souls of their descendants. City children
are transported with delight at the first sight of a wood-covered
landscape, and the evergreen arcades of a tropical forest would charm
the soul of a young Esquimaux as the ever-rolling waves of the ocean
would awaken the yearnings of a captive sea-bird. The traveler Chamisso
mentions an interview with a poor Yakoot, a native of the North
Siberian ice-coast, who happened to get hold of an illustrated magazine
with a woodcut of a fine southern landscape: a river-valley, rocky
slopes rising toward a park-like lawn with a background of wooded
highlands. With that journal on his knees the Yakoot squatted down in
front of the traveler’s tent, and thus sat motionless, hour after hour,
contemplating the picture in silent rapture. “How would you like to
live in a country of that kind?” asked the professor. The Yakoot folded
his hands, but continued his reverie. “I hope we shall go there if we
are good,” said he at last, with a sigh of deep emotion.
The importance of hereditary instincts can be often measured by the
degree of their persistence. Man is supposed to be a native of the
trans-Caucasian highlands—Armenia, perhaps, or the terrace-lands of the
Hindookoosh. Yet agriculture has succeeded in developing a type of
human beings who would instinctively prefer a fertile plain to the
grandest highland paradise of the East. Warfare has in like manner
engendered an instinctive fondness for a life of perilous adventure, as
contrasted with the arcadian security of the Golden Age. There are men
who prefer slavery to freedom, and think pallor more attractive than
the glow of health, but a millennium of unnaturalism has as yet failed
to develop a species of human beings who would instinctively prefer the
dreariness of a treeless plain to the verdure of a primeval forest.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The love of forest-trees is a characteristic of the nature-abiding
nations of the North, and has rewarded itself by an almost complete
reversion of the original contrast between the garden lands of the
South and the inhospitable wilderness of the higher latitudes. Forest
destruction has turned Southern Europe into a desert, while the
preservation of forests has made the homes of the hyperborean hunters
an Eden of beauty and fertility. “One-third to the hunter, two-thirds
to the husbandman,” was the rule of Margrave Philip in his distribution
of forest and fields, and expresses the exact proportion which modern
science indicates as most favorable to the perennial fertility of our
farm-lands. In a single century the forest-destroying Spaniards turned
many of their American colonies from gardens into sand-wastes, while,
after fourteen hundred years of continuous cultivation, the fields of
the Danubian Valley are still as fertile as in the days of Trajan and
Tacitus. Along the river-banks and half-way up the foot-hills the
arable land has been cleared, but higher up the forest has been spared.
All the highlands from Ratisbon to Buda-Pesth still form a continuous
mountain park of stately oaks and pines, and, as a consequence, springs
never fail; crops are safe against winter floods and summer drouths;
song-birds still return to their birthland, and reward their protectors
by the destruction of noxious insects; meadows, grain-fields, and
orchards produce their abundant harvest year after year; famine is
unknown, and contagious diseases rarely assume an epidemic form. In
Switzerland and Prussia the preservation of the now remaining woodlands
is guaranteed by strict protective laws; Scandinavia requires her
forest-owners to replant a certain portion of every larger clearing; in
Great Britain the parks of the ancient mansions are protected like
sacred monuments of the past, and landowners vie in lining their
field-trails with rows of shade-trees. The fertility of those lands is
a constant surprise to the American traveler disposed to associate the
idea of eastern landscapes with the picture of worn-out fields.
Surrounded by Russian steppes and trans-Alpine deserts, the homes of
the Germanic nations still form a Goshen of verdure and abundance.
Forest protectors have not lost their earthly paradise.
C.—PERVERSION.
Sixteen hundred years ago the highlands of the European continent were
still covered with a dense growth of primeval forests. The
healthfulness and fertility of the Mediterranean coastlands surpassed
that of the most favored regions of the present world, and the
dependence of those blessings on the preservation of the
spring-sheltering woodlands was clearly recognized by such writers as
Pliny and Columella, though their own experience did not enable them to
suspect all the ruinous consequences of that wholesale forest
destruction, which modern science has justly denounced as the ne plus
ultra folly of human improvidence. Practical experiments had, however,
demonstrated such facts as the failing of springs on treeless slopes,
and the violence of winter floods in districts unprotected by
rain-absorbing forests, and tree culture was practiced as a regular
branch of rational husbandry. But with the triumph of the Galilean
church came the millennium of unnaturalism. Rational agriculture became
a tradition of the past; the culture of secular science was fiercely
denounced from thousands of pulpits; improvidence, “unworldliness,” and
superstitious reliance on the efficacy of prayer were systematically
inculcated as supreme virtues; the cultivators of the soil were treated
like unclean beasts, and for a series of centuries the garden regions
of the East were abandoned to the inevitable consequences of neglect
and misculture.
Millions of acres of fine forest lands passed into the hands of
ignorant priests, who, in their greed for immediate gain, and their
reckless indifference to the secular welfare of posterity, doomed their
trees to the ax, entailing barrenness on regions favored by every
natural advantage of soil and climate. Drouths, famines, and
locust-swarms failed to impress the protest of nature. Her enemies had
no concern with such worldly vanities as the study of climatic
vicissitudes, and hoped to avert the consequences of their folly by an
appeal to the intercession of miracle-working saints.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Yet the saints failed to answer that appeal. The outraged laws of
nature avenged themselves with the inexorable sequence of cause and
effect, and in spite of all prayer-meetings the significance of their
crime against the fertility of their Mother Earth was brought home to
the experience of the ruthless destroyers. In their net-work of moss
and leaves forests absorb the moisture of the atmosphere, and thus
nourish the springs which in their turn replenish the brooks and
rivers. When the highlands of the Mediterranean peninsulas had been
deprived of their woods the general failing of springs turned rivers
into shallow brooks, and brook-valleys into arid ravines. Summer rains
became too scarce to support the vegetation of the farm lands; the
tillers of the soil had to resort to irrigation and eat their bread in
a harder and ever harder struggle for existence, till vast areas of
once fertile lands had to be entirely abandoned, and the arable
territory of this planet was yearly reduced by the growth of an
artificial desert. And while the summer drouths became more severe,
winter floods became more frequent and destructive. From the treeless
slopes of the Mediterranean coastlands winter rains descended like
waterfalls, turning once placid rivers into raging torrents, and
depriving the fields of their small remnant of fertile mould. Hillsides
which in the times of Virgil had furnished pastures for thousands of
herds were thus reduced to a state of desolation almost as complete as
that of a volcanic cinder-field; their dells choked with rock debris,
their terraces rent by a chaos of gullies and clefts, while the soil,
swept from the highlands, was accumulated in mudbanks near the mouth of
the river. Harbors once offering anchorage for the fleets of an empire
became inaccessible from the ever-growing deposits of diluvium. Yearly
mud inundations engendered climatic diseases and all-pervading gnat
swarms. Insectivorous birds, deprived of their nest shelter, emigrated
to less inhospitable lands, and the scant produce of tillage had to be
shared with ever-multiplying legions of destructive insects. Along the
south coasts of Italy the shore-hills for hundreds of miles present the
same dreary aspect of monotonous barrenness. Greece is a naked rock;
forests have almost disappeared from the plains of Spain and Asia
Minor; in northern Africa millions of square miles, once teeming with
cities and castles, have been reduced to a state of hopeless aridity.
The Mediterranean, once a forest-lake of paradise, has become a Dead
Sea, surrounded by barren rocks, and sandy or dust clouded plains.
According to a careful comparison of the extant data of statistical
computations, the population of the territory once comprised under the
jurisdiction of the Cæsars has thus been reduced from 290,000,000 to
less than 80,000,000, i.e., from a hundred to less than thirty per
cent. In other words, an average of seventy-eight in a hundred human
beings have been starved out of existence, and the same area of ground
which once supported a flourishing village, at present almost fails to
satisfy the hunger of a small family. For we must not forget that
modern industry has devised methods of subsistence undreamed of by the
nations of antiquity, and that the religion of resignation has taught
millions to endure degrees of wretchedness which nine out of ten pagans
would have refused to prefer to the alternative of self-destruction. A
whole tenement of priest-ridden lazaronis now contrive to eke out a
subsistence on a pittance which a citizen of ancient Rome would have
been too proud to ask a woman to share; yet with all their talent for
surviving under conditions of soul and body degrading distress, only
eight children of the Mediterranean coastlands can now wring a sickly
subsistence from the same area of soil which once sufficed to supply
twenty-nine men with all the blessings of health and abundance.
E.—REFORM.
The discovery of two new continents has respited the doomed nations of
the Old World, but the rapid colonization of those land supplements
will soon reduce mankind to the alternative of tree-culture or
emigration to the charity-farm of the New Jerusalem. In the words of a
great German naturalist, “We shall have to work the world over again.”
On a small scale the practicability of that plan has already been
conclusively demonstrated. By tree-culture alone arid sand-wastes have
been restored to something like tolerable fertility, if not to anything
approaching their pristine productiveness. In the lower valley of the
Nile (the ancient Thebaïd) Ibrahim Pasha set out thirty-five million
Circassian forest-trees, of which one-third at least took root, and by
their growth not only reclaimed the sterility of the soil but increased
the average annual rainfall from four to fifteen inches. In the Landes
of western France a large tract of land has been reclaimed from the
inroads of the coast sand by lining the dunes with a thick belt of
trees, and some fifteen hundred square miles of once worthless fields
have thus been restored to a high degree of productiveness. In the
Austrian Karst, a sterile plateau of limestone cliffs and caves has
been dotted with groves till the valleys have been refreshed with the
water of resuscitated springs; and pasture-lands, long too impoverished
even for the sustenance of mountain goats, once more are covered with
herds of thriving cattle.
The experience of the next three or four generations will not fail to
make every intelligent farmer a tree-planter. Our barren fields will be
turned into pine plantations, every public highway will be lined with
shade-trees. The communities of the next century will vie in the
consecration of township groves, in the founding of forestry clubs, in
the celebration of arbor days and woodland festivals. The barren
table-lands of our central states will be reclaimed, and before the end
of the twentieth century the work of redemption will be extended to the
great deserts of the Eastern continents. And as a hundred years ago
armies of tree-fellers were busy wresting land from the primeval
forest, in a hundred years more armies of tree-planters will be busy
wresting land from the desert. The men that will “work the world over
again” will not be apt to forget the terms of their second lease.
In turning up the soil of the reclaimed desert they will unearth the
foundations of buried temples, temples once sacred to the worship of
gods whose prophets drenched the world with blood to enforce the
observance of circumcision rites, wafer rites, and immersion rites, and
filled their scriptures with minute instructions for the ordinances of
priests and the mumbling of prescribed prayers. In musing over the
ruins of such temples, the children of the future will have a chance
for many profitable meditations—the reflection, for instance: From what
mistakes those alleged saviors might have saved the world if their
voluminous gospels had devoted a single page to an injunction against
the earth-desolating folly of forest-destruction!