Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

by George P. Marsh

It is certain that a desolation, like that which has overwhelmed many once beautiful and fertile regions of Europe, awaits an important part of the territory of the United States, and of other comparatively new countries over which European civilization is now extending its sway, unless prompt measures are taken to check the action of destructive causes already in operation. It is vain to expect that legislation can do anything effectual to arrest the progress of the evil in those countries, except so far as the state is still the proprietor of extensive forests. Woodlands which have passed into private hands will everywhere be managed, in spite of legal restrictions, upon the same economical principles as other possessions, and every proprietor will, as a general rule, fell his woods, unless he believes that it will be for his pecuniary interest to preserve them. Few of the new provinces which the last three centuries have brought under the control of the European race, would tolerate any interference by the law-making power with what they regard as the most sacred of civil rights—the right, namely, of every man to do what he will with his own. In the Old World, even in France, whose people, of all European nations, love best to be governed and are least annoyed by bureaucratic supervision, law has been found impotent to prevent the destruction, or wasteful economy, of private forests; and in many of the mountainous departments of that country, man is at this moment so fast laying waste the face of the earth, that the most serious fears are entertained, not only of the depopulation of those districts, but of enormous mischiefs to the provinces contiguous to them.[214] The only legal provisions from which anything is to be hoped, are such as shall make it a matter of private advantage to the landholder to spare the trees upon his grounds, and promote the growth of the young wood. Something may be done by exempting standing forests from taxation, and by imposing taxes on wood felled for fuel or for timber, something by premiums or honorary distinctions for judicious management of the woods. It would be difficult to induce governments, general or local, to make the necessary appropriations for such purposes, but there can be no doubt that it would be sound economy in the end.

In countries where there exist municipalities endowed with an intelligent public spirit, the purchase and control of forests by such corporations would often prove advantageous; and in some of the provinces of Northern Lombardy, experience has shown that such operations may be conducted with great benefit to all the interests connected with the proper management of the woods. In Switzerland, on the other hand, except in some few cases where woods have been preserved as a defence against avalanches, the forests of the communes have been productive of little advantage to the public interests, and have very generally gone to decay. The rights of pasturage, everywhere destructive to trees, combined with toleration of trespasses, have so reduced their value, that there is, too often, nothing left that is worth protecting. In the canton of Ticino, the peasants have very frequently voted to sell the town woods and divide the proceeds among the corporators. The sometimes considerable sums thus received are squandered in wild revelry, and the sacrifice of the forests brings not even a momentary benefit to the proprietors.[215]

It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the public, and especially land owners, be roused to a sense of the dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. Fortunately, some of the American States, as well as the governments of many European colonies, still retain the ownership of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York, for example, has, in its northeastern counties, a vast extent of territory in which the lumberman has only here and there established his camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with permanent settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, and often ravaged by devastating fires, still covers far the largest proportion of the surface. Through this territory, the soil is generally poor, and even the new clearings have little of the luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes them elsewhere. The value of the land for agricultural uses is therefore very small, and few purchases are made for any other purpose than to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed that the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the suggestion has originated rather in poetical than in economical views of the subject. Both these classes of considerations have a real worth. It is desirable that some large and easily accessible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them. The immediate loss to the public treasury from the adoption of this policy would be inconsiderable, for these lands are sold at low rates. The forest alone, economically managed, would, without injury, and even with benefit to its permanence and growth, soon yield a regular income larger than the present value of the fee.

The collateral advantages of the preservation of these forests would be far greater. Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the central counties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which meet no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The climate of Northern New York even now presents greater extremes of temperature than that of Southern France. The long continued cold of winter is far more intense, the short heats of summer not less fierce than in Provence, and hence the preservation of every influence that tends to maintain an equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The felling of the Adirondack woods would ultimately involve for Northern and Central New York consequences similar to those which have resulted from the laying bare of the southern and western declivities of the French Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached peaks in front of them.

It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing of the mountains of New York may be less in degree than those which a similar cause has produced in Southern France, where the intensity of its action has been increased by the inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of the soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the same circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils enough to render widespread desolation certain, if the further destruction of the woods is not soon arrested. The effects of clearing are already perceptible in the comparatively unviolated region of which I am speaking. The rivers which rise in it flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring down much larger quantities of sediment, and the increasing obstructions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are extending themselves down the channel in proportion as the fields are encroaching upon the forest, give good grounds for the fear of serious injury to the commerce of the important towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures are taken to prevent the expansion of "improvements" which have already been carried beyond the demands of a wise economy.

I have stated, in a general way, the nature of the evils in question, and of the processes by which they are produced; but I shall make their precise character and magnitude better understood by presenting some descriptive and statistical details of facts of actual occurrence. I select for this purpose the southeastern portion of France, not because that territory has suffered more severely than some others, but because its deterioration is comparatively recent, and has been watched and described by very competent and trustworthy observers, whose reports are more easily accessible than those published in other countries.[216]

The provinces of Dauphiny, Avignon, and Provence comprise a territory of fourteen or fifteen thousand square miles, bounded northwest by the Isere, northeast and east by the Alps, south by the Mediterranean, west by the Rhone, and extending from 42° to about 45° of north latitude. The surface is generally hilly and even mountainous, and several of the peaks in Dauphiny rise above the limit of perpetual snow. The climate, as compared with that of the United States in the same latitude, is extremely mild. Little snow falls, except upon the higher mountain ranges, the frosts are light, and the summers long, as might, indeed, be inferred from the vegetation; for in the cultivated districts, the vine and the fig everywhere flourish, the olive thrives as far north as 43½°, and upon the coast, grow the orange, the lemon, and the date palm. The forest trees, too, are of southern type, umbrella pines, various species of evergreen oaks, and many other trees and shrubs of persistent broad-leaved foliage, characterizing the landscape.

The rapid slope of the mountains naturally exposed these provinces to damage by torrents, and the Romans diminished their injurious effects by erecting, in the beds of ravines, barriers of rocks loosely piled up, which permitted a slow escape of the water, but compelled it to deposit above the dikes the earth and gravel with which it was charged.[217] At a later period the Crusaders brought home from Palestine, with much other knowledge gathered from the wiser Moslems, the art of securing the hillsides and making them productive by terracing and irrigation. The forests which covered the mountains secured an abundant flow of springs, and the process of clearing the soil went on so slowly that, for centuries, neither the want of timber and fuel, nor the other evils about to be depicted, were seriously felt. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, these provinces were well wooded, and famous for the fertility and abundance, not only of the low grounds, but of the hills.

Such was the state of things at the close of the fifteenth century. The statistics of the seventeenth show that while there had been an increase of prosperity and population in Lower Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated parts of the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was an alarming decrease both in the wealth and in the population of Upper Provence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing of the forests, a great extent of plough land and pasturage had been added to the soil before reduced to cultivation. It was found, in fact, that the augmented violence of the torrents had swept away, or buried in sand and gravel, more land than had been reclaimed by clearing; and the taxes computed by fires or habitations underwent several successive reductions in consequence of the gradual abandonment of the wasted soil by its starving occupants. The growth of the large towns on and near the Rhone and the coast, their advance in commerce and industry, and the consequently enlarged demand for agricultural products, ought naturally to have increased the rural population and the value of their lands; but the physical decay of the uplands was such that considerable tracts were deserted altogether, and in Upper Provence, the fires which in 1471 counted 897, were reduced to 747 in 1699, to 728 in 1733, and to 635 in 1776.

These facts I take from the La Provence au point de vue des Bois, des Torrents et des Inondations, of Charles de Ribbe, one of the highest authorities, and I add further details from the same source.