Chapter XVI: 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!