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 CÆsar, 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.