E t/5 Ctí OJ E < CO o < Series Editor's Preface Of the several processes that all human societies in all ages have had in common, none has been more fundamental than their continual interaction with their natural environment. In fact, more than any other aspect of human endeavor, the diverse modes of human societal interaction with the larger ecological setting provide the basis for a genuinely global history of humanity. But, unlike so many of the other themes and patterns from which world history can be constructed, environmental history transcends the human experience. Due to the profound technological and scientific transformations that have occurred over the past millennium, it has come to effect—often fatally m recent centuries—every species of living creature on earth. In view of its centrality, it is rather remarkable that serious work °n the global dimensions of the history of human responses to and impact upon their environments has, with important exceptions, been undertaken only in the last three or four decades. There were, of course, important ecological dimensions to the patterns of societal development that Ibn Khaldun delineated in his fourteenth-century treatise The Muqaddimah, especially in his stress on the ebb and flow of pastoral nomadic and sedentary adaptations in the history of North Africa and the Middle East. And George Perkins Marsh's magisterial "meditation on Man and Nature was published nearly a century and a half ago. But it is only since the 1960s, that world and cross-cultural historians, led by William H. McNeill, Alfred Crosby, and more recently John McNeill, have embarked on sustained and thoroughly documented explorations of the diverse patterns of social and environmental interactions over time. Thus far, much of the research and writing that these pioneering hlstorians have inspired has been focused on specific ecosystems or regional complexes of environmental patterns. And almost all of the J^ork done thus far, including that of more globally-oriented pioneers uke McNeill and Crosby, has concentrated on actual processes of human interventions into the natural world and their consequents ^r both human societies and affected plant and animal species. 1 hough a considerable amount has been written on the attitudes vn vin Series Editor's Preface towards the natural world exhibited by specific cultures or ci tions, little work has yet appeared that attempts to stu culturally or from a global perspective dy th ese iliza-cross- ] The most important except to this general trendls Clarence Glacken's massive Traces on th "V j . Rbod- m Shore, which surveys responses to the environment from ancie times to the modern era. But Glacken s work is oriented to Europea thinkers and civilizations and to the ancient Mediterranean md»eU that give rise to them. . Given this "tuation, Ramachandra Guha's Environmentalist Kjilobal History is an especially welcome addition to the Long«»" World History series. Guha's incisive and wide-ranging survey of environmental thinking and the movements it has spawned is genuinely cross-cultural and global in scope. His focus is environmentalem in the modern age, but he delineates and explores in depth a multipU-ZE t0 ^°Se isSues' ™* P«ticular emphasis on the on the causes SS^SoZ^S^ " f °CUSSlng the different socioecofomUand T1*' ^ '° Pr°tCCt " ™ o them. But Guha is ^S^1 ^ T « e tothe ways in which thinking about ecology is reworked or transformed whÄ «po'sed tö international t< studies drawn from the experience of an or intercultural influences. He seeks t, . j re • . . to 'Qentvfv the commonalities and differences in environmental think;™ y ulc <-01 111 linking and activism through case States, the former Soviet Union, China, India, Africa and Brazil. Guha candidly assesses the strengths and shortcomings of each of these strands of environmentalem as well as their contributions to the coalescence of a global environmental consciousness. In many ways Ramachandra Guha is the ideal person to author the fust genuinely global history or environmentaUsm. Over the past ro decades, his many bnebooks.nd articles have earned him the „.;„n as one of the foremost thinkers on ecoWica\ 1. i • Pc his a historically one of the pivotal region £ "SUes . S°Uth^; Jasons he elucidates in the study^Qg****** hlStory for reaso his regional expertise, Guha has hZ^^™ years, building 0«™"J commentators or.2** °W °* Ihe more provocative and P P dimensions^T^r' alism in i» «oss-^Jce o{ under.«ndin4£^^ ■ convincing case for ^ Euro.Amencar^nV«^^. mental difference that s^ ^ argue {rom the p„8pect^ ies two re to 1 acti- Vists ana tnc-*- h the great majority of human' ° *e PHSCplatd great emphasis on the critical distinctions ? s. en Sena Editor's Preface strains of ecological activism based on preservationist, conservationist, earth first, and human accomodationist priorities. His capacity to identify and analyze the central precepts of these different strands of environmentaUsm, in combination with his well-informed critiques of each of them in the larger context of the current global predicament, render EnvironmentaUsm: A Global History a lively and engaging study of ideas and debates that all of us will find central to our lives in the twenty-first century. Michael Adas Series Editor Rutgers University at New Brunswick Author's Preface The r f working at YdeUmverSv^V0 tW? ^01'10^Y happy years I spent Work in India I CdSZ ' 198°S- °n Zis of my own qu«t10n of social justice oflenVlron,memalism to be principally a Unit eir,UUS °f n*^«- 'thet0"1^ ,Ae P°°r to have as much claim of ent51"65 1 * cot *Ut and teaching in the war5rtrmtmalism' ^,ch ' Wkh 3 rather different kind be n fasecn8ht! « ma£ T^'0" away ^ humans to- Menaced by the diverTky w iv habitats. I have ever since movement TV, u , dlv«sitv wirk- i ave ever since and S",^ expl0res 5^*» the global environmental «veral times smc^o *e USA^ fen8 of/hat diversity, standing of American if' but have g™e back -ademfc ^S"^^* a»d deepen my under- academic year W^T"^0^ M "* mV Under" the leader within Europ-in !T^* » «^^k*^ 1 SPent the to the German Greens^ľ" - unquestionably lu lne German Green, ,klcrs envimr, ls Ur>quest «1 party. Briefer^Z^T1 and is ho and to Southern SSf^g* I^^^h^^ '"d possibilities of environrnen;" OWed • Blim„ *° Ru"la Jn 1996> . These forays, short and 1^ in °f *e prob,ems -versntes and indulgent founl*>Ve been universities and indulgent founJ8,have ^cen 1^°"« one of the unacknowfed" ed^btrS ^ £fc> hospitable the way that the world is structured t'^^^tionZ^6 cl»U™ge zU, Nlgenans about Nigeria, riyS^hip. For broader works of contrast and ^ J?,*0* B^a- tncted to one country but which take K^' b°°k* th?^"1*- But written from the comfortable citadels of a W°r!d a* n°t res- versity in Europe or the United States 'n£*t«* ProSn°ySter' are or racial, but merely geographical. Global is n °Us ronmentahsm, feminism, liberalism or funda ^ be th^ CultUral ally the handiwork of people working and telX"^'''^- ^ Cnvi-half of the globe. It is as difficult for a scholar L^" th= nor\ner- Uish oril -rn Author's Preface xi write a global history living in Bogota as it is easy for an Indian while based in Indianapolis. My thanks then, first of all, to the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. Two colleagues at Yale, Bill Burch and Joe Miller, and two students, Mike Bell and Joel Seton, encouraged me to move beyond what had been; until then, a near-obsessive concern with the history and politics of my own country. Next in chronological order comes the University of California at Santa Barbara, whose invitation in 1989 to deliver the Ninth Steven Manley Memorial Lecture forced me to think more seriously about the comparative aspects of the environmental question. The arguments of that lecture were given a firmer empirical basis in the year I spent at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, whose magnificently efficient library staff chased and procured dozens of obscure references and out-of-print books. Other institutions that have helped materially include the University of California at Berkeley; the Harry and Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York; the Social Science Research Council, New York; and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi: my thanks to all of them. The themes and arguments of this book have been shaped by-numerous conversations across the continents. I have learnt much irom three scholars whose interests exemplify the cross-cultural character of the environmental movement: from Juan Martinez-Alier, a Spaniard most at home in Ecuador and Cuba; from Mike Bell, a Rhode Islander who happily mixes with Little Englanders; and from Wolfgang Sachs, a Bavarian radical with a keenly developed insight into the practice of the Gujarati Mahatma, Gandhi. There are other friends in Europe and American with whom I have argued fiercely or gently ut always (to me, at any rate) productively, and yet others who have passed on valuable tips and sources. I thank here William Beinart, uavid Brokensha, J. Peter Brosius, Louise Fortmann, Andrew Hur-«U, Arne Kalland, Margit Mayer, Arne Naess, Paul Richards, David «■othenberg, Kathenne Snyder, Carol Warren and Donald Worster. owe a particular debt to K. Sivaramakrishnan ( of Yale, again), the source of a steady stream of books and articles impossible to get hold of in India. To come home now, to the students and scholars of the Indian ^nvironmental movement, the college of colleagues to whom I per- Madh WC m°St °^ ^ ^'scuss'ons over many years with Anjan Ghosh, 3 av Gadgil and Shiv Visvanathan have helped me more clearly wľrml m C°ld Hght °f tHe W°rld' and the W°rld throuSh the m glow of India. I have also been challenged and inspired by the Xli Author's Preface verse and zest of younger colleagues such as Arruta ^a^li ££teille> a Rothari, Mahesh Rangarajan and Nandini Sundar. Andr .enC-distinguished senior scholar, and Reshav Desiraiu, an nte(j 0n ed environmental administrator, read and helpfully com 1 ^ -p. an earlier dratt. For valuable comments on the manuscrip debted to the following reviewers-. Randall Dodgen (bono ^-p. University); Robert Entenmann (St. Olaf College); Vera Rcbern pensburgUniversity); Cathy Skidmore-Hess (GeorgiaSoutne ^ vershy);Tracey Steele (Sam Houston State University)-1 woU ,^£W to thank my editors, Pam Gordon at Addison Wesley Longman ^^^.^ York) and Rukun Advani at Oxford University Press (New V for their critical support to the project. book But it is, of course, the editor of this series who made the possible, who gently nudged all that talking and listening tow the more reliable medium of print. Michael Adas invited me to J on global environmentalism, waited trustingly as I missed one dea line after another, and then, when the draft chapters finally began arrive, sent them back with meticulously detailed comments, ft is pleasure to thank him for all this, and a delight to remember those haPPy days ^tYal U this ys at Yale when Michael andInrst met. Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Afterword PART I: ENVIRONMENTALISM'S FIRST WAVE going green 1 The movement's two waves; environmentalism and industrialization; the varieties of environmentalism back to the land! 10 The English Love of the Country—Wordsworth, Ruskin and company; Were the Nazis Green?— environmentalism and nationalism in Germany; The Gandhian View of the Simple Life—early environmentalists in India the ideology of scientific conservation 25 Conservation Internationalism—The wider significance of George Perkins Marsh; The Global Reach of Scientific Forestry—German science in Asia and America; The Balance Sheet of Scientific Forestry—the social and ecological costs of state forest management the growth of the wilderness idea 44 Conservation in the Colonies—the crisis of African wildlife; Wilderness Thinking in America—the work of John Muir and Aldo Leopold some who don't fit 59 'Trans-disciplinary' environmentalists—Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Radhakamal Mukerjee PART II: ENVIRONMENTALISM'S SECOND WAVE °gue the age of ecological innocence 63 The decades of development and the making of the 'affluent' society; some xiii Contents dissenters-Carl Sauer, E. F. Schumacher, Lewis Mumford, and Mira Behn runter 5 the ecology op apeluence , CWP The Significance of Silent Spring-how a book by a woman scientist changed the world, The Environmental Debate—science and the discourse of ecological crisis-, The Environrnen Movement—environmental action in Europe and the United States-, Radical American Environmentalism—the competing claims Ol Deep Ecology and environmental justice; The German Greens—how a protest movement became a political party Chapter 6 the southern challenge The postmaterialist hypothesis challenged; The Environmentalism of the Poor_social action among the desperately disadvantaged in the Third World, An India/Brazil Comparison— ecological degradation and environmental protest in two large and important countries; A CfctpWCfcico Comparison—trie parallels between two famous lorest movements-Redefining De,eZopment-bringmg nawre and the people socialism and environmentalism ChaptCr £*Wy Soviet Enwronmemalism-a* life arid death of a dissident tradiuon, Tfce Thre™ Pro;PCt-destructive development m Cbin° § Democracy und Environmental«^^ ^ V tical system facilitates or suppresses environmental action The Earth ^ ^on% the environment unity and cu movement 69 98 125 icu. 138 BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY INDEX 155 1 Going Green The environmental movement is a child of the sixties that has stayed its course. Where other manifestations of that decade of protest—pacifism, the counter-culture and the civil rights struggle—have either lost out or lost their way, the green wave shows no sign of abating. The environmental movement has refused to go away and, some would say, refused to grow up, retaining the vigor and intensity but also the impatience and intolerance of an ever-youthful social movement. Alone among the movements of the sixties, it has gained steadily in power, prestige and, what is perhaps most important, public appeal. Popular support apart, the success of the environmental movement is also reflected in the forests and wild areas it has helped set aside, as well as in the laws it has repealed or got enacted, nowhere more effectively than in the United States of America. In this country the pressures of environmentalists, rather than autonomous government action, have created an extensive and for the most part well managed system of national parks. Having protected large chunks of wilderness from the threat of 'development,' the American environmental movement has increasingly turned its attention to controlling the hazardous byproducts of industrialization: air and water pollution, and the production of toxic or radioactive wastes. Here too it has been conspicuously successful, forcing Congress to enact over seventy environmental measures into law. Among these is the National Environment Protection Act of 1969, a comprehensive piece °« legislation and the envy of environmentalists in other countries who struggle to enforce minimum standards on their own governments. 1 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave ^ While opinion polls consistently show over two-thirds ^.^ng he in support of even stricter environmental measures ^ agenda to part with some hard-earned dollars in the cause—the gr^ is also influencing the outcome of local, state and iedera ^ Politicians from both parties assiduously project a g cultivate a green constituency. It was a Republican Pr Bush, who famouslv rw-»*-J nv' Politic 7 ,S the OUKome of local, state and federal e«cu^ cSSS? °th PanieS ^siduously project a green .mage and cultivate a green constituent. It , RL,,klLn President, George em author fAl C~" T"t °e outdone> sent forth as Vice-Pi of the L^^J^^rou^^ best-selling . Bush ™k c licuuency-tt was a Republican rresiucn-,"- -, The fw % remarked, 'We are all environmentalists now. .... em°crats, not to be outdone, sent forth as Vice-President the "■ survey "'uur ^°re) of a respectably thorough and best-selhng « of the environmental dilemma, entitled £arrA> m JW"«C its votaries seeking to influence the modernizing governments °* North America and Europe. Without always commanding a mass base, this earlier generation of environmentalists initiated wideranging Programs of forest and water conservation and also helped set up the tlrst national parks. The history of environmentalism in most countries has tollow-ed a broadly similar pattern; an early period of pioneering and propn-culminating in recent decades in a widespread social movement We might thus speak of a first wave of environmentalism, the initial resPonse to the onset of industrialization, and a second wave, wn< 4 Part 1: Environmentalism's First Wave largely intellectual response was given shape and force by a grounds-well of public support. Environmentalism thus has a rather longer and more distinguished lineage than is sometimes allowed for. In its contemporary forms it is certainly a child of the nineteen sixties, but also, as this book shows, perhaps a grandchild of the eighteen sixties. The first wave of environmentalism proceeded step-by-step with the Industrial Revolution, itself the most far-reaching process of social change in human history. The industrialization of the world dramatically altered the natural world through new methods of resource extraction, production, and transportation. The scale and intensity at which nature was used (and abused) increased manifold. Simultaneously, advances in medical technology led to a steady increase in Mnro kum^nc —:—-----------: — uoiogy icu lo a sicauy increase in human populations. More humans producing more and consuming more led axiomatically to greater pollution and habitat degradation. The pace of environmental destruction greatly accelerated. Nature became a source of cheap raw material as well as a sink for dumping the unwanted residues of economic growth. Open-cast mining and the ever-growing appetite of industry decimated forests and wild-lands. New and dangerous chemicals were excreted into rivers and the atmosphere. The industrialization of Europe led also to major changes in the rural economy. The factories and cities needed materials to process and consume, these demands leading to a transformation of agriculture through the adoption of more capital-intensive, market-oriented methods of production. Pastures and hedgerows and small farms with mixed crops gave way to a more monotonous landscape, of large, continuous holdings dominated by crop monocultures. Further afield, European economic growth also impacted the natural environments of Asia, Africa and North America. Industrialization had an organic connection with imperial expansion, as white colonists took possession of large parts of the globe, re-orienting local economies towards the demands of the metropolis. British ships were built of Burma teak, their sailors wearing clothes of cotton grown in India, drinking Kenyan coffee sweetened with sugar planted in the Caribbean Decimating the forests of north-eastern United States, southern Africa and the Western Ghats of India-to name only three such regions-the British were through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unquestionably the world leaders in deforestat.on. Emulating them in lesser or greater dewe .1- ^ • [ "s lese, , — i-uwcis wno we agical destruction in their colonies. in lesser or greater deeree * I J? detorestation. colonies, own in the past, Hnv,ronmentalproWem;^ee^™Ction » their 6 certainlynotunkn Chapter 1: Going Green 5 but possibly for the first time in human history there was now the perception of an environmental crisis. This was the perception seized upon by the first wave of environmentalism, which asked whether the great increases in wealth and prosperity brought about by modern industrialization were in fact sustainable. Notably, while the industrial city was the prime generator of ecological degradation, much of the burden of this degradation was felt in the country and the colony. As we shall see in this book, in the vanguard of the first wave of environmentalism were residents of the countryside, such as William Wordsworth, as well as unwilling subjects of colonialism, such as Mohandas Karamchand 'Mahatma' Gandhi. As a dynamic social response to the Industrial Revolution, environmentalism bears comparison with three other movements of the modern world—democracy, socialism, and feminism. Defined in opposition to absolutism, democracy calls for a greater voice of ordinary citizens in decisions that affect their lives. Defined in opposition to both feudalism and capitalism, socialism calls for a more equitable distribution of wealth and productive resources. Defined in opposition to patriarchy, feminism calls for the granting of greater political and economic rights to women. Meanwhile the environmental movement has expanded human understandings of 'rights' and 'justice', calling for greater attention to the rights of nature as well as for sustainable lifestyles. Its agenda has sometimes been complementary to the agendas of other movements—at other times, in competition with them. These connections, between environmentalism on the one side and democracy, socialism or feminism on the other, shall be made explicit throughout this book. Like all social movements, the environmental movement has Within its fold different individuals, trends, traditions, and ideologies. Just as they are varieties of feminism, there have been varieties of environmentalism as well. The first part of the book explores three such varieties, each a distinctive response to the emergence and impact of industrial society: 1. We have, first of all, the moral and cultural critique of the Industrial Revolution, here termed back-to-the-land. For the great romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth, the 'dark, satanic mills' of the industrial age threatened to obliterate for ever their green and pleasant land, the pastoral idyll of rural and traditional England. Novelists like Charles Dickens and political thinkers like Friedrich Engels wrote critically of the inhuman working and living conditions of the time, the bleak Part 1: Environmental!sm's First Wave homes and the dark, damp and polluting factories. Ot^ like the Indian saint-politician Mahatma Gandhi, cornbi moral critiquc with a simple lifestyle, living gently on the ^ while deploring the multiplication of wants that modern c ization had brought about. , ot 2- The second strand, that of scientific conservation, chose to turn its back on industrial society, but to work instead taming its excesses. Based on careful research in the emp>rl mode, rather than on a purely artistic or affective respO*» ' this variety of environmentalism argued that without care guidance by experts industrialization would rapidly use resources and pollute the environment. Conservation w the gospel of efficiency,' the use of science to manage . and natural resources efficiently and in the long run- Cruci here IS the idea of 'sustained yield,' the belief that human use ot fish or forest, water or wildlife, should not dip inio' «? capnal stock, restricting itself to the annual increment ot H» resource ,n question. By the late nineteenth century, selenitic conservation had emerged as a global movement, toresters taking the lead in establishing resource management agencies run on scientific lines in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. 3' ^e Air? strand °t environmentalism, which combines elements of morality, science, and aesthetics, is what has come o be known as the wilderness idea. The industrialization ot t.on?;6' ix, se"le«>ent and spread of European popuU' wTde n W°rld' devas^d large areas of forest and scienter U-1" ar°Se in resP°nse a movement of artists and keeTtW h,red t0 lock UP -eas still untouched, to tion waT'k Uman dlstutbance. Sometimes the motiva- te* like rV Pr0t<;ct:on from ^unction of endangered spe-habnats like S% ^ tlmCS the SaVm8 °* ^ corners too tieX' " ^ * °UtP°StS ° b tantly vr, the TT ,eIness movement has flowered mostvib-bock Ued Srates> as discussed in the pages of this constitute three eeneri?'"^^ con%erv^ion and the wilderness idea Wk defines and doc ? "L°f en^onmentalism. Part I of this ™* expressions acros* *T* 56 modes' tracing their evolution move forward to the slcoL'T^V *nd «™inems. In Part II ^ m"'°n 1 r°™ intellectual0rnj Wave °* environmental'^, its transfor- P°nse to mass movement. Here we study Chapter 1: Going Green 7 the resurgence of the three distinctive strands in the 1960s and thereafter, and also explore the new dimensions brought to global environmentalism by the fears of a population explosion, the claims and assertions of women, and, especially, the divide between the rich countries of the North and the mostly poor countries of the South. We show how, in one country after another, there has arisen a vibrant and popular social movement dedicated to protecting or replenishing nature. Readers will note that while Part I starts with an examination of British traditions, Part II begins with an analysis of American trends. This choice is in keeping with our emphasis on industrialization as the generator of environmentalism. For the United Kingdom was the home of the original Industrial Revolution, while the United States has led the world in later elaborations of the industrial way of life. One country, consequently, pioneered the first wave of environmentalism; the other country showed the way in the second. Both parts of the book thereby uses an exemplary country as a springboard, to set off the subsequent discussion of environmentalism in other cultures. Our focus is as much on the differences as the similarities, for these 'national' movements have varied widely among themselves with regard to their tactics of protest and their ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile environment for us to nourish and live in. Ill To write a global history of anything, let alone a complex and widespread phenomenon such as environmentalism, is to be savagely selective. Inevitably, some of the more telling illustrations come from the histories of the two countries I am myself most familiar with, India and the United States. But I have tried to cast my net wider, to pick up examples and exemplars from times past and distant places. Where the Indian and American materials come from my own research, I have distilled from other peoples' writings and experiences the history of environmentalism in the countries of Asia and Latin America, as well as of Africa and Europe. Even so, some readers will complain that I have omitted their favourite country, others that I nave not honored their favourite environmentalist. There have been millions of words written on the history of American environmentalism, by historians and journalists, scientists and sociologists—all American. Following their lead, scholars elsewhere nave written on the history of environmentalism in their own country. Studies of the United States still dominate the shelf of the library marked 'The Environmental Movement', but these are now being 8 Part J: Environmentalism s first Sfíave rapidly joined by works on the History of J"™*"^ s-na tiooal but a tr^- ttast; d com Ull U1V ---^ ^ \VV or Brazilian environmentalism. This book brea s pattern, providing not another national history ^ _ perspective on the environmental debate, by comp ^ ^ e*P ^ inghistorical processes in six continents. By bring t&®^°fae ence of other cultures, and juxtaposing it wU ^opes environmentalism in the United States, the boo ^t to set toss American experience more properly in its globa CO ^ .^aS aC A second aim of the book is to document the o ^ c< cultures, the ways in wbich the environmental movemc dlSt0rted W try has been transformed, invigorated and occasion ^ e*amP e ^ infusions from outside. Let me quickly run through s ^ joreS developed at length later. The founder of the United inspira' Service, Gifford Pinchot, honored as his mentor and p ^ ^0 tion a German botanist, Dietrich Brandis; it was "ra, tne ^ar^' previously set up the Forest Department in India, per r ^s ^ebl est an d most influential of natural resource bureaucracie , ^bat-was returned with interest a century later when the ideas ^ the ma Gandhi were freely borrowed by the German Green Jjjol. most potent political expression of contemporary environrn ^^an, Gandhi himself is sometimes regarded as a quintessential^ ,lStTi even Hindu thinker, yet he was deeply influencedby Russian pop' , (via the nove\ist,LeoTo\stoy, with whomhe had been in cofresp ^ ence)-, and by American radical individualism via Henry V* Thoreau, whose essay on civil disobedience he regarded as his o political testament and most sigmflCantW by English alism via the works of the rrW; i i -X' J? 1 finally, tn movement of Deep EcoWv L ft- RusW °ľ ^' ?S environmental movemeíÄ?*vW?« edSe oi Ae Ame* "lity/ that is, the placing ľ ^ "WV' {'^s for 'biocentnc equaW cies.TOe most of itsľdhe "ľ P" ^ and ™ aboV£ foi the United States, the ideas oľlT Wd on tVi£ ^ °° ted by a Norwegian philosopher Ar et£.Ecology were first formulae ation on— Gandhi'. r l,™ncN«M,who once wrote a oi^3 The divides this book spans ar spatial. In the academy's division of ?Wevet> as much temporal as the past and sociologists and anthro \ herein historians study ier works have tended to concentrate glSts sludy the present, earl-wave of environmentallsm, tarc^, °n_wther the first or the second the present in the past, showing the lnn y cor>trast, this book locates ments of patterns and processes thathav^6 °" COnte™porary move- P«sisted over the years, or 9 plration from the ^ can>t ie\l who ^ TbetracingofÄSK idea; we can or picture, . ^ ^ have been some formPomJ 2recogniuon^be rad ^ ^ {orever cative but historically years'. Back to the Land! THE ENGLISH LOVE OF THE COUNTRY In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the landscape of England 3 reS,haPe^ b>' ^ industrial Revolution. Coal mines, textile mill* rauroads and shipyards were the visible signs of an enormous expansion ot industry and trade which made England the foremost economic power ,n the world. Industrialization was accompanied by rapid urbanization; between 1801 and 1911 the proportion of the British population living in cities increased from 20 per cent to 80 per cent. But the countryside was also being transformed, with a new breed ot landowners producing wool, cotton and grain for the urban market, peasants, shepherds and artisans, who had formed the backbone o marke1 bon he r: Dym ae dispossessed, nocking to the cities m somv.. — - ^ Opposi-England was the home of industrialization, but also> ^ ^ ■ \ ' ed the ran^= the rural economy in medieval times, increasingly join ent. of the dispossessed, flocking to the cities in search ot ei . wHere - 0----- ,.-----_----------__ tion to it. The anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has capture dox well. In the mid-nineteenth century, he writes England was the most urbanized country in the world, yet °^^e\0y the yearning for the countryside and rural values w as the most ^ *^ ed. Its strangely anti-urban bias was shown in the Pre dream* theubiquity of flower gardens, the country holiday inausti y, ^ of retirement to ahoneysuckie cottage arid the emphasis on rural values in the Romantic and pre-Raphaelite movements. the emerge This affirmation of country life, in direct opposition to ^ se& in a urban-industrial culture, was perhaps most eloquently 10 Chapter 2: Back to the Land! 11 rich literary tradition, flowering in some of the finest works in the Engl ish language. An early exemplar of this tradition was William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose poetry expresses an intimate affinity with the natural world. During his lifetime Wordsworth walked some 175,000 miles through England, and, as the literary historian Jonathan Bate remarks, he taught his readers 'how to walk with nature' too. In his travels Wordsworth saw only 'the darker side of the great change' wrought by the Industrial Revolution: the 'outrage done to nature' by the cities and factories, such that the common people were no longer 'breathing fresh air' or 'treading the green earth.' The poet was profoundly out of sympathy with the mores of city life, with its impersonality and its elevation of money-making above all other values. In the country, and only there, lay 'the secret spirit of humanity,' which, despite war, revolution and economic change, 'mid the calm oblivious tendencies of nature, 'mid her plants, her weeds and flowers, And silent overgrowings, still survived. Underlying Wordsworth's poetry and philosophy was a defense of the organic union with nature of the peasant and shepherd, a way of life that the deadly combination of industrialization and market farm-mg wished to obliterate. Although village folk were illiterate and inarticulate, they were in closer touch with nature than the city dweller. And grossly that man errs,' he wrote, 'who should suppose'— That the green Valleys, and the Streams and Rocks Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts. Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breath'd The common air; the hills which he so oft Had climb'd with vigorous steps; which had impress'd So many incidents upon his mind Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear; Which like a book preserv'd the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had sav'd, Had fed or shelter'd .. . these fields, these hills Which were his living Being, even more Than his own Blood—what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which is there in life itself. This is from a poem about the shepherds of the Lake District, the 12 ran I. Environmentalism's First Wave ^ ^ wrote" With7hich Wordsworth is most closely identifieojHe « Wot, gUL 6 t0 tHe Pe°Ple and s«=nerv of the Lakes: a book E ' a be"««er in ns day, which earned him more £»1 SS m°" "crated poems. Indeed, in the last years of h» would d raiWay X° thc Lake D>strict' a development he fear disrupt the beauty and integrity of the region. , . ■ Wordsworth's book on his favorite place was published SlST" unrder var,ous tltles-The 1842 version had an eTrS- Xe ? W ° thg nine^nth century: it was published **A LT^ut Comprising Minute Directions for the To* t'c AnAri W°fdSW°rth'S option of the Scenery of the Cf** Profess \7 LTrS m the Geol°& of the Lake District, by the mo«T ' EdUed ^ the flSir. By any name it was rather mn,r i j oc"ure' and little less than a summation of the poet Places Wo i In J1'5 b°ok R°™«ntic Ecology, Jonathan Bate uesTf I r W,°rttln the COntcxt of h" own time and ours. The V CS oi the Guide, he says, were con«ntnta'm^ °fJthe Pla" for the benefit of whole nation; tH! (sublime" lands,caPe bea"ty, with a particular emphasis on wild pect fori'T^' uhC b the ™P°rtance of the open a.r; the respect ior buildings that have a hisrnrv L A. -i______j i-------- nicely ral- , .t. uie Deliet in tht ... Ui tnc open > pect for buildings that have a history in the place; and the recognition that traditional agricultural practices are integral to the identity of the place. Wordsworth would have been pleased that shepherds still work on the hills of Westmorland and Cumberland, since, in contrast to the American model, the English and Welsh National Parks do not consist of enclosed areas owned by the government; the land in them remains privately owned . . . Conservation is sought bymeans of planning rather than possession. One of Wordsworth's junior contemporaries was John Clare (1793-1864), a poet from farming stock. Clare's best-known verses deal with the impact of the enclosure, by rich landowners, of village common land to raise crops for the urban market. Enclosure threw the rural poor out of work and destroyed the diversity of life-forms that had long been a feature of the English landscape. Clare's poem Village Ministrel speaks of how— The •"closure came and ^ ^ wound~ Each tyrant Bx'dh ^ W3S St°Pt; To him a rl S'gn Where Paths were f°und, ° nint a tresspass now who cross'd the ground: Chapter 2: Back to the Land! 13 Justice is made to speak as they command; The high road must now be each stinted bound: —Inclosure, thou'rt a curse upon the land, And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann'd . . . ■ •. Ye fields, ye scenes so dear to Lubin's eye, Ye meadow-blooms, ye pasture-flowers, farewell! Ye banish'd trees, ye make me deeply sigh, Inclosure came, and all your glories fell. Next in the English tradition of romantic environmentalists lies John Ruskin (1819-1900), artist, art critic, sometime Professor of Poetry « the University of Oxford. Ruskin thought modern towns little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.' The air was foul, and the water too, for every river in England had been turned into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain, and even ^at falls dirty' This destruction, he thought, owed itself to the tact th-at modern man had desacralized nature, viewing it only as a source °f raw materials to be exploited, and thus emptying it of the mystery, the wonder, indeed the divinity with which pre-modern man saw the natural world. Observe the contrast at work through Ruskin's lumin-ous prose: Whereas the mediaeval never painted a cloud, but with the purpose of Pacing an angel in it; and a Greek never entered a wood without expecting t° meet a god in it; we should think the appearance of an angel in the cloud wholly unnatural, and should be seriously surprised by meeting a god anywhere. Our chief ideas about the wood are connected with Poaching. We have no belief that the clouds contain more than so many lnches of rain or hail, and from our ponds and ditches expect nothing m°re divine than ducks and watercresses. ^nllke Wordsworth, Ruskin focused closely on the physical consciences of the industrialization of England: the befouling of the air K u tHe Waters' as wel1 as the impact of this pollution on human ea'th and the landscape. But the influence of the poet on his work is ^an'fest, never more so when, in 1876, he launched a fresh campaign ri 6 n ) t0 Prevent the extension of the railroad into the Lake Dis-'f. Ruskin believed that the trains, and the hordes of tourists they night bring, would destroy the District. As with Wordsworth, Rus-dw ii T5 °f the la"d was inseparable from his love of the rustic who *elled m it. In opposing the railways he wished as much to protect 14 Part J; Env lr°nmentalism' Wave RUSKIN OPPOSES THE RAILWAYS, DEFENDS THE LAKES In John Ruskm the passion of the environmentalist fused with the eloquence of a great prose stylist. When the frenzy of avarice is daily drowning our sailors, suffocating our m. ers poisoning our children, and blasting the cultivable surface ot a flock a trCeleSS W3Ste of ash"> w^t does it really matter whethe th itl, °r leSS'be drive" from the slopes of Helvellvti, or tP°° ° Thlrlmere filled ™" shale, or a few wild blossoms of NooneneT/u ' * least'ln the outset of a» savm.--^- M »no one need charge me witV,.-!* -ot these rr,-- N0onene' »V this, at least.^^he ^ SP™8? Lit^ » any sho»n ln the W 1 d° no< move » I My Word or a«ion for de: lr°Ln wheels by D?eSS> be«t.se 1' SUth activity as I have yet Place to _nmai1 Raise can " ^°n,sco" (where no sound of the r\ v l.___ t e n move, with such small activity «^ ^ ^ ... iiitnebusiness.becauselliveatConiston (where nos ^ nQ iron wheels by Dunmail Raise can reach me), nor because • n of his other place to remember Wordsworth by than the daffodil mar^c^ aS he \iu\e Rydal marsh. What thoughts and work are yet before me, su ^ taught, must be independent of any narrow associations. All my dear mountain grounds and treasure-cities, Chamouni, Interla Lucerne, Geneva, Venice, are long ago destroyed by the European P°P lace; and now.ior my own part,! don't care what more they do; theV «1 drain Loch Katrine, drink Eoch Lomond, and M -land into a be— \e- 'u ^uamoum, lnten00pu-...b *%o destroyed by the European y * now,ior my own part,l don't care what more they do; tne> _ drain Loch Katrine, drink Loch Lomond,andblow a\\ Wales and Cum \anA - > of slate shingle-, the world is Vvde enough yet to fm-O during the days appointed for me to stay in But it is no l«s my duty, in the cause of those to whom the sweet landscapes of England are yet precious, and to whom they may yet reach what they taught me. in early boyhood, and would still if 1 bad not to learn —it is my duty to plead with what earnestness I may, that these sacred sibylline books may' be redeemed from perishing. 1 hav e said 1 take no self ish interest '• - " (do take an unselfish on, —it is my duty tc ve said 1 take no seUi,hittt ". "** may But I do take an unselfish one. U vs n*'**1,1 this resist to improve the minds of the popular!?1* b<*ause l"" to the railroad, mind, strength, and fortune, wholly o , ecause j Passionately wish let them see Hellvellyn while they are dr^v °W,ect> ^\nA[ngmy own ing have so earnestly felt—none certainlyV SUpP°Se{e d°nt want to that the beauty of nature is the blessedest a a"6 So "^trie^i^611 now ^1V" for men; and that all other efforts in educati*0** necess dcclared— taught your people to love fields, birds, arid°« are tutil *!2,,of lessons benevolent friends, ioin with me in .K- .^1^*«**. o- 1 Vo1 B"' X"ur PeoPle > ..us, birds T ■ benevolent friends, join with me in th,,' *nd flow "ule till ' 'cssons - hal ^ching Corn; **• have Source: 'The Extension of Railways in the I u my The Works of John Ruskin, Volume XXXIV, ^e Gistric , Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen ^ ^ "t^ ---'--"-'--*\t*l • 'jrks of John Ruskin, Volume XXXil ke t>i ' ider Wedderburn (London: George K^^'S^ . "'^Pp.^^Cnd 8.142, Chapter 2: Back to the Land! 15 nature as the moral fibre of the villagers : whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of England before her days of mechanical decrepitude and commercial dishonour.' His writings apart, Ruskin also worked to build institutions which would recapture the flavor of a world rapidly being lost. He set up a guild, named for St. George, that ran farms and craft shops which stressed self-sufficiency and simplicity, producing food and weaving cloth for their own use. The revival of handicrafts was also vigorosly promoted by his disciple William Morris (1834-96), likewise a man mostly out of step with his times, a man who—as the writer Jan Marsh points out—'wished as far as possible to live in the fourteenth rather than the nineteenth century' Poet, prophet, designer, architect and socialist, William Morris lived a life of many parts; he has since been claimed as an ancestor by numerous artistic and political movements. But the environmental movement has as good a claim as any. A native Londoner, Morris deplored the city's growth, its 'swallowing up with its loathsomeness held and wood and heath without mercy and without hope, mocking our feeble attempts to deal even with its minor evils of smoke-laden sky and befouled river.' Morris wished to turn England 'from the grimy backyard of a workshop into a garden,' from which factories would disappear, with town and country resuming a relation of harmony and mutual benefit. His long narrative poem 'The Earthly Paradise' begins by asking the reader to— Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green . . . We move on, finally, to Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), an associate of Morris with whom the English back-to-the-land movement finely turned international. Trained as a mathematician, ordained as a Pnest, Carpenter resigned holy orders and a prestigious Cambridge fellowship to move back to the land. With some friends he set up a commune on a hill above the factory town of Sheffield, offering a union of manual labor and clean air as an alternative to industrial civilization. In this he was influenced by Morris, but also by the Americans Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, whose message of the simple life he enthusiastically embraced. The commune grew its °wn food and vegetables and baked its own bread; its members, who First Wave - oí Ptfrt /: Environmentalism's ^eluded men from working class backgrounds, discarded :l»°s ^ "»»-iuucu mer thdr cl°tHng a?™ W°'k,n8 clas* backgrounds, ^e Arcadia; three f Ti US" Their farm has been described as 'a °el°" and the ml Tnnin8 ^own to a brook, a wooded valley be SharPiy etched 2, The contrast with SheffHJ «*ld Penter saw^ '3nd look'ng down on the town in May on'y a vast dense clo d COuld supp„rt life in it It that 1 wo"dered how any human being S,eat altar. An altar inde A • Up tD heaven like the smoke fr°m * tttoA. A^fTZrj'V"?^ tome> herein thousands of lives - t-:ii. rua Clin was shining, 1839, Ca being Were beingyear]y sac T "j"°«mcu Lu, larks were sinäncl.'^'B"lde mc on the hTlls the sun was sh.nmg, P^P'e, let alone childr^ W" tllere a hundred thousand grown ™olll"g, living a life off'' Stru§glir>g for a little sun and air, toiling, or learly Sh0w) of dise aUOn' dyinS » ^ghteen^' plants, and threatened landscapes, and named for trs^6r" SmO^^ century naturalist Gilbert White of Selbourne; and the ingS) an0 Abatement Society, influenced by Edward Carpenter s ^ the goV-started in 1898 as an independent pressure group to ma.£s prece°-ernment enforce pollution control laws on errant facton ' ^d U* ing all of these was the Scottish Rights of Way Society, 18« to ptotect walking areas around the city of Edinbur One of the most influential of these societies has be"»' * ••** " andentre" A nation of peasants and shepherds, not of factory wor^mg. In the peneurs, which was in fact what Germany was fast °® Q{ the na-Rilkean vision peasants were celebrated as the back ^ sit.ory ot IV tion, but the forests were more important Still, as t e ^ aruStS- German culture, the inspiration for its poets, mus^.?,*' fcja****** The self-proclaimed sociologist 'of field and forest,' W i"1 * rGerm^l Reill, wrote in 1861 that the woods 'were the heartland O \^ folk culture ... so that a village without a forest is like a gatnes out any historical buildings, theater or art galleries. Fores ^jog the fields for the young, feasting-places for the old.' But V joreSts or peasant into a market-driven farmer, and by destroying un, converting then into timber plantations, industrially TOmar,tlC dermining the very basis of 'German-ness.' In the German ^at tradition environmentalism was united with patriotism, . ^cAe. peasants, forests and the nation came to constitute an organ ^Qie a 'The German people need the forest like man needs wvne, nineteenth-century theologian, adding-. '"We must preserve ^s0 est, not simply so that the oven does not grow cold in winter in order that the pulse of the national life continues to bea and happy [in order that] Germany remains German.' manticS Of course, in England as much as in Germany, rural ro ^ ^e were in a distinct minority. The dominant industrial ^y^f tst re-two countries met in the Eirst World War, a conflict which » ^£ vealed the awesome destructive power of modern technology- ° observers the costs of war—some ten million dead—were the ^ sequence wholly of industrialization and capitalist develop ^ through the hunger for territory and the forces of avarice tha g had unleashed. Indeed no sooner had the conflict ended that ^ occurred a revival of the of , , ^at ther uiuccu no sooner had the conflict ende ^ to0 occurred a revival of the agrarian ideal throughout Europ • l0ri d various forms-, the establishment of a Council for the 1 ro t^sier0-Rural England in 1928; the growth of agrarian parties in .^tf\ Europe to defend the peasant from exploitation by the city ^ Q{ and the spread of ruralist ideas in Scandinavia through the ^ ^ the novelist Knut Hamsun, who spent his N obel Prize money storing an old farm. • n the In Germany the reassertion of peasant environmental^ ^^ete 1920s was accompanied by the rise of the'National Socialists- ^ ^ was unquestionably, at times, a congruence between the vievvs ^ ^ ^ mmentalists and Nazis. Some M—'■ -v' vtronmentalists and Nazi* Y^T'Jenceb«... mystic unity between the LmC^azi thinke« also emphasize-Others railed a&amst lheP"Sant: the forest, and the national spin* paper worried in 1932 that'tV, • n the cilies- The party's ne^s-tAemfluenee of the metropolis has gro-"1 Chapter 2: Back to the Land! 19 overwhelmingly strong. Its asphalt culture is destroying peasant thinking, the rural lifestyle, and [national] strength.' Leading Nazis were prominent in environmental causes. The Minister for Agriculture, Walter Darr6, was an enthusiast for organic farming. Herman Goering, second only to Adolf Hitler in the party hierarchy, strongly supported nature protection, appointing himself Master of the German Hunt as well as Master of the German Forests. The apparent affinity between Nazism and green ideology has led some commentators to claim that environmentalism is conducive to authoritarian thinking. When the German Green Party was formed in the 1970s (a development explored in Chapter Five), some of its opponents darkly suggested that the National Socialists were the first 'Green party' The historian Raymond Dominick, after a careful study of the subject, points out, however, that 'although several substantial areas of agreement drew National Socialism together, to cross over into the Nazi camp a conservationist had to accept blatant racism.' In the Nazi slogan of 'Blut und Boden' (Blood and Soil) many environmentalists identified only with the latter part. Moreover, in practice the Nazis built an industrial economy—in part to ready themselves for war—that was totally at odds with the peasant ideology they sometimes claimed to uphold. The journalist Sebastian Haffner, who was forced into exile by Hitler's regime, wrote in 1944 that as 'soon as the Nazis took over in Germany they began feverishly to build. First came technical construction work, motor roads, aerodromes, armanent factories, fortifications:' scarcely the agenda of environmentalists. As one of their leading architects, with a sheaf of commissions in hand, put it, the Nazis wished to give 'permanent evidence in concrete and marble of the greatness of our time.' They also vigorously promoted consumerism; Hitler once promised every German citizen a Volkswagen car and built in anticipation highways to drive them on. In the wry judgement of the Spanish scholar Juan Martinez Alier, the reality of Nazi rule was not Blut und Boden but father Blut und Autobahnen. Some Nazis were indeed Green, but most were not. In any event, to be Green—then or now—is not connected with being Nazi. THE GANDHIAN VIEW OF THE SIMPLE LIFE In 1889 Edward Carpenter published Civilization: Its Causeand Cure, a book which has been termed a 'kind of text for the back-to-the-'and movement.' One of its early and admiring readers was a twenty-Year-old Indian who had recently arrived to study law in London. 20 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave ith The Indian did not know Carpenter, but soon became intimate wit his disciple Henry Salt, a pacifist and animal rights activist who likewise preached a return to nature and praised the simplicity of rural life. It was in Salt's Journal of the Vegetarian Society that the young man published his first writings, the beginnings of an ocuvre that came to comprise ninety closely printed volumes. The Indian was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a political and spiritual leader of consummate skill and considerable achievement, regarded by the International Herald Tribune, and by countless other organizations and individuals, as the greatest person of the twentieth century. Mahatma Gandhi is celebrated as a doughty opponent of racism in South Africa, where he lived, and struggled, for over twenty years; as an Indian freedom fighter whose opposition to British rule helped inspire numerous anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa; and as the perfector of a technique of non-violent protest that has since been used in a variety of contexts, from the civil rights movement in the United States to Solidarity in Poland. All this notwithstanding, he was also an early environmentalist who anticipated the damaging effects on nature of the industrial economy and the consumer society. In his autobiography, Gandhi recalled that of the books he read in his youth, 'the one which brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was [John Ruskin's] Unto This Last.' John Ruskin and Edward Carpenter are both acknowledged in Gandhi's first book, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), published in 1909. In this work Gandhi decisively rejects industrialization as an option for India, then a colony struggling to free itself from British rule. For industrial society, as Gandhi had observed it in the West— in person and through the writings of Ruskin and company—was selfish, competitive, and grossly destructive of nature. He thought that 'the distinguishing characteristic of modern civilization is an indefinite multiplication of wants,' to satisfy which one had to forage far and wide for raw materials and commodities. Gandhi believed that by contrast preindustrial civilizations were marked by an 'imperative restriction upon, and a strict regulating of, these wants.' In uncharacteristically intemperate tones, he spoke of 'wholeheartedly detest [mg] this mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites, and go to the ends of the earth in search of their satisfaction. If modern civilization stands for all this, and I have understood it to do so, I call it satanic' Gandhi offered, as an alternative, a code of voluntary simplicity that minimized wants and recycled resources—his own letters were Mahatma Gandhi, at his spinning wheel, circa 1946. SOURCE Unidentified Photographer. 22 Part I: EnvironmentaUsm''$ First Wave written on the back of used paper. One of Gandhi's best known aphc-risms is: 'The world lias enough for everybody's need, but not enough for one person's greed:' an exquisitely phrased one-line environmental ethic. It was an ethic he himself practised; when he died in January 1948 this man, whose followers were reckoned in the tens of millions, and who helped bring down one of the most powerful empires in history, had possessions that could fit in a small box: two or three changes of clothes, a clock, a pair of spectacles, and a few other odds and ends. Gandhi's broader vision for a free India was a rural one. He worked for the renewal of its villages, in defiance of the worldwide trend towards industrialization and urbanization. The reasons for this were moral as well as ecological—namely, that there were natural limits to the industrialization of the whole world, as distinct to the industrialization of one country. As he wrote in December 1928: 'God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million [India's population at the time] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.' For Gandhi, as for Ruskin and Morris, the growth of cities and factories was possible only through a one-sided exploitation of the countryside. 'The blood of the villages,' he wrote in July 1946, 'is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built.' He himself wished to see that 'the blood that is today inflating the arteries of the cities runs once again in the blood vessels of the villages.' Gandhi also opposed the industrialization of agriculture, that is, the replacement of the plough by the tractor and the spread of chemical fertilizers, measures which undeniably increased productivity in the short term but which created unemployment and depleted the soil of its nutrients. He warned that 'trading in soil fertility for the sake of quick returns would prove to be a disastrous, short-sighted policy' He promoted instead the use of organic manure, which enriched the soil, improved village hygiene through the effective disposal of waste, and saved valuable foreign exchange. But the revital-lzation of the rural economy also depended on the revival of craft industry (see box for his vision of village renewal). India's once vibrant traditions of weaving and other handicrafts had been largely destroyed under British rule, and to restore them Gandhi created two organizations: an All India Village Industries Association and an All India Spinners' Association. These organizations were run by one of Gandhi's close followers, J. C. Kumarappa, an economist to whom he entrusted the work Chapter 2: Back to the Land.' 23 of village reconstruction. Kumarappa had studied accountancy in London and economics at Columbia University in New York, before joining the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s. Working with Gandhi, Kumarappa explored the relation between peasant agriculture and the natural world. For Indian peasants the cultivation of the soil was made possible only by the flow of nutrients from outside: water from ponds and rivers, and manure from cattle dung and from the forest. This meant that the careful management of common property resources, such as irrigation tanks and grazing grounds, was as important to agricultural production as the management of privately owned plots of farmland. There had once existed vigorous village-level institutions for this purpose, which had decayed under British rule. Water and pasture were gifts of nature that were central to peasant farming in India: and in Kumarappa's view, the revival of collective institutions for their management was an important task for economic policy in free India. an ideal village Gandhi's prosaic, down-to-earth description of his ideal Indian village, offered in January 1937. It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation, built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free of all avoidable dust. It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to a'l- h will have houses of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a co-operative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which industrial [i.e. vocational] education will be the central fact, and it will have Panchayats [village councils] for settling disputes. It will produce its own grains, vegetables and fruit, and its own Khadi [hand-spun cotton]. This is roughly my idea of a model village . . . Source: Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume LXIV (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1976), p. 217. Like his master, Kumarappa believed that an 'economy of permanence' could be founded only on agriculture. 'There can be no industrialization without predation,' he observed, whereas agriculture is, and ought to be, 'the greatest among occupations,' in which 'man attempts to control nature and his own environment in such a way as to produce the best results.' This contrast could be expressed in terms °f their relative impact on the natural world. Thus— 24 Part I: Errjironmcntalism's First Wave in the case of an agricultural civilization, the system ordained by nature is not interfered with to any great extent. If there is a variation at all, n follows a natural mutation. The agriculturist only aids nature or intensifies in a short time what takes place in nature in a long period . . . Under the economic system of [industrial society] ... we find that variations from nature are very violent in that a large supply of goods is produced irrespective of demand, and then a demand is artificially created for goods by means of clever advertisements. Comparing trie philosophies of Ruskin and Gandhi, the eminent Indian economist M. L. Dantwala has remarked that for both think ers 'industrialization was the culprit which destroyed their idyll of a peaceful self-sufficient rural society, in which workers bought their own raw materials, spun and wove them and sold their finished goods to the rural community.' The Gandhian version of the simple life did indeed follow the English model in several respects-, in its focus on manual labor, in its elevation of the village as the supreme form of human society, in its corresponding rejection of industrial culture as violent, competitive and destructive of nature and thus unsustainable in the long run. To quote Dantwala once more, the work of Gandhi and Ruskin is best understood as 'a reaction to the egregious excesses of adolescent industrialization.' Nonetheless, the Indian tradition is to be distinguished from the English in at least two respects. First, the Gandhian vision was a severely practical one, ridding itself of the lyric romanticism of Wordsworth and company. Gandhi had little time for art or poetry or music; his concerns were resolutely focused on the economic and the political, the restoring of the livelihoods and dignity of villagers subjugated by the cities and by British colonial rule. Second, in the England of the nineteenth century peasants and craftsmen had been more or less extinguished by the Industrial Revolution; going back-to-the-land was in this sense an act of defiance, quite out of step with the dominant ethos, It might, through pressure groups and environmental societies, moderate the progress of industrialization, but it could scarcely hope to halt it. By contrast, while Gandhi and Kumarappa worked and wrote India was a land of 700,000 villages whose traditional methods of farming, pas-toralism and craft production still had a fair chance of withstanding competition from factory-made products. The agrarian ideal for Ruskin was just that—an ideal; whereas for Gandhi it might just conceivably have formed the basis for social renewal in a free India. The Ideology of Scientific Conservation CONSERVATION INTERNATIONALISM In May 1864 the well-known New York firm of Charles Scribners Published a volume called Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography ™ Modified by Human Action. The book was based on years of care-mi study and reflection, but the author, a Vermont scholar and diplomat named George Perkins Marsh, expected it to have little impact. So doubtful was Marsh of the book's sales that he donated the copyright to the United States Sanitary Commission. Thoughtful friends purchased the copyright and gave it back to the author; a prudent move, for, contrary to Marsh's expectations, Man and Nature was to achieve canonical status as the book that sparked the first wave °f American environmentalism. As the historian and critic Lewis Mumford once remarked, Marsh's opus was the 'fountainhead of the conservation movement,' a 'comprehensive ecological study before the very word ecology had been invented.' In the same year as Marsh's book first appeared, a German botanist employed by the government of British India was invited to head a newly created, countrywide, Forest Service. This man, Dietrich Brands * i —i „.:*u AmAri -~my ^ieaiea, countrywide, rorexi jti vh-v-. ^ ------,--- 'is, knew and corresponded with Marsh; he shared with the Amen-n a concern with the pace of deforestation and an abiding faith in e powers of scientific expertise to reverse it. The Indian Forest 25 26 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave Department, which Brandis headed for close on two decades, has been one of the most influential institutions in the history of conservation. Established in 1864, by the turn of the century it came to control a little over a fifth of India's land area. It was by far the biggest landlord in a very large country, a status it continues to enjoy to this day. Although separated by some 10,000 miles, the American publication of Man and Nature and the formation of the Indian Forest Department should be viewed as part of the same historical process. From the late eighteenth century, "Western scientists had begun exploring the links between deforestation, desiccation, and drought. The rapid clearance of forests, due to agricultural colonization and industrial development, contributed to accelerated soil erosion, and even, some scientists argued, to a decline in rainfall. In North America as well as in the Continent, the growth of human populations and the expansion of trade and industry led to a crisis in the availability of wood products and a steep rise in their price. In Africa and Asia too, the dynamic forces unleashed by European colonialism led to massive environmental degradation, as rainforests in the hills were converted to tea plantations and pastures in the plains replaced bv commercial crops such as cotton and sugarcane. A pioneering analyst of global deforestation was the German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). From a study of the fluctuating levels of a Venezuelan lake he drew these general conclusions: The changes which the destruction of forests, the clearing of plants and the cultivation of indigo have produced within half a century in the quantity of water flowing in on the one hand, and on the other the evaporation of the soil and the dryness of the atmosphere, present causes sufficiently powerful to explain the successive diminution of the lake of Valencia ... By felling the trees that cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations, the want of fuel and the scarcity of water____When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an improvident precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rain falls on the heights. The sward and the moss disappearing with the brushwoods from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course, and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive f iltrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, beat down the loosened soil and Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 27 form these sudden inundations that devastate the country. Hence it results that the destruction of forests, the want of permanent springs and the existence of torrents are three phenomena closely connected together. Countries that are situated in opposite hemispheres, Lombardy bordered by the chain of the Alps and Lower Peru inclosed between the Pacific Ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes, exhibit striking proofs of the justness of this assertion. The British historian Richard Grove correctly observes that these observations of 1819 'have not been superseded by more recent findings'. But Humboldt was, as Grove further reminds us, but the most sophisticated among a group of like-minded conservationists. In both metropolis and colony, the process of habitat destruction was viewed w'th horror by these conservation-minded scientists. Where private greed—notably, the pioneer's plow and the lumberman's axe—had contributed to deforestation, scientists believed that prompt intervention in the form of public ownership of forests and other natural resources might arrest environmental decline and provide a basis for steady economic growth. Crucial here was the idea o{ sustained yield, based on the belief that scientists could accurately estimate the annual increment of renewable natural resources like wood and water, fish and wildlife. Scientists prescribed that utilization stayed within this increment, thus maintaining nature's capital and ensuring a yield capable of being 'sustained' in the long term. George Perkins Marsh in North America, and Dietrich Brandis •n South Asia, were in the vanguard of what was to emerge as a scientific movement of truly global consequence. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the centralization of political authority and the formation of nation-states allowed experts to intervene more broadly, °n a national scale, in the planning and management of natural resources. It began to make sense to speak of 'national forests,' or of nvers as the property of the nation,' where previously these resources w«re recognized largely as being locally owned and controlled, by villages, tribes, or municipalities. The growing prestige of science, and its ever closer alliance with the state, helped foresters and irrigation engineers, soil conservationists as well as wildlife managers, build numerous institutions based on sustained-yield principles in differ-em parts of the world. Some of the more extensive and powerful of tn«e institutions were to be found in the European colonies of Asia and Africa, where authoritarian state systems allowed for the exer-C1Se °$ scientific conservation unconstrained by parliaments, a free Press' or the practice of democracy more generally. 28 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave To locate scientific conservation in its international context, let us consider the following developments, all of which occurred ten years either side of the publication of G. P. Marsh's Man and Nature. In 1859, a Forest and Herbiage Protection Act was passed by the Government of the Cape Colony of Southern Africa, allowing the state to intervene and take over areas of veld and forest threatened with destruction. The next year, 1860, the governor-general of colonial Java formed a committee to plan forest legislation for the island, the epicenter of the Netherlands' overseas empire. Laws protecting Java's forests and affirming state control over them were passed in 1865, also the year of the first Indian Forest Act. Already in 1862, the French had promulgated the first of a series of ordinances designed to create forest reserves in their colonies in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam). Further east, the 1870s witnessed a flurry of forest-related activities in the British colony of Australia. Thus the province of Victoria appointed a Royal Forestry Commission in 1871, while South Australia passed a Forest Tree Act two years later. Australian forest enthusiasts frequently used Marsh's findings as supporting evidence (see box); meanwhile, at the other end of the world, Man and Nature was acquiring belated attention at home. The book stimulated the American Association for the Advancement of Science to submit a petition to Congress in 1873, urging the establishment of a national forestry system and the creation of forest reserves. As these examples illustrate, foresters were unquestionably in the lead of a scientific movement that also counted, among its constituents, votaries of sustained-yield soil, water, wildlife and fisheries management. This movement was held together by a set of beliefs that was remarkably invariant across the continents and across the different sectors in which it was applied. In the phrase of the South African scholar William Beinart, scientific conservation was an ideology of 'doom and resurrection,' predicting that agricultural and industrial expansion would destroy the environment unless replaced, forthwith, by more rational and far-seeing forms of resource use. Here the conservationist singled out the pioneer farmer for special attention, or, should one say, special condemnation. Thus, one colonial soil scientist remarked in 1908 on the tendency of European settlers in African colonies to 'scoop out the richest and most beautiful valleys, leaving them dry and barren.' Or, as a Scottish forester working in the same continent put it: 'Is it not the case that the history of civilized man in his colonisation of new countries has been in every age substantially this—he has found the country a wilderness; he has cut down trees, and he has left it a desert.' Again, the head of the Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation United States Soil Conservation Service wrote in 1935 that 'the ultimate consequence of unchecked soil erosion when it sweeps over whole countries as it is doing today must be national extinction.' scientific conservation in australia A year after the publication of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, a Melbourne newspaper reprised the book's message fur its own readers. Note the global reach of the discussion, the cautionary tales as well as the positive lessons gleaned from the experience of other lands. Over and over again we have urged that steps should be taken to protect our forest lands, not only because extravagance will lead to scarcity, but also because the local climate will be affected in all those places where the forests are removed. In protecting the forests we do more than increase the growth of timber—we prevent waste of soil, we conserve the natural streams, it is not improbable that we prevent decrease in the rainfall, and 't is certain that we largely affect the distribution of storm waters. A covering of shrubs and grasses protects the loose soil from being carried away by floods . . . The Italian hydrographers have made mention very °ften of the disastrous results attendant on destruction of forests—Fnsi relates that when the natural woods were removed from the declivities of the Upper Val ď Arno, in Tuscany, the soil of the hills was washed down to the Arno in vast quantities, to the great injury of the riparian proprietors. Some districts of Catalonia have suffered even more by the incautious operations of man; and, on the other hand, we know by what has been done in Italy, in France, in Germany and in Algeria, how much the local climate may be ameliorated, and the fruitfulness of gardens and fields increased by judicious planting. ■ • • The reservation of large tracts of forests is our first duty. By keeping the hills clothed we may make fruitful the valleys, and provide stores °f moisture for the parched plains____Carefully managed, we have much health in our forests. The miner, the agriculturalist, and the housebuilder, notwithstanding that their demands are large, can be fully supplied if extravagance be checked and waste be prevented. As the old trees are removed others should be pi anted. We may with advantage take a lesson from Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha, who planted more than 20 million of trees in Egypt . . . The conservation of the forest lands, and the extension and improvement of them, concern alike the landholder and the miner, and should occupy the attention of everyone who has leisure and means to become a co-worker with nature. Source: The Argus, Melbourne, 16 October 1865, quoted in JM. Powell, Environmental Management in Australia, 1788-1914 __ (^bourne: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 61-2. 30 Part /. EnvironmentaUsm's First Wave Strikingly, this hostility extended to indigenous forms of land use, that is, to the varieties of pastoralism and cultivation practised by African and Asian communities in territories recently colonized by Europeans. Pastoralists were accused of over-stocking and careless grazing practices, peasants of short-sightedness in their use of water and timber, but particular opprobrium was reserved for swidden or shifting agriculturists. Swidden farmers worked forest areas in rotation, burning and felling a patch of woodland before cultivating the soil for a few years, then moving on to the next patch: returning to the area originally felled once it had been fully reclaimed by forests, to start afresh this rotational cycle of fire, cultivation and fallowing. Although it had been successfully practised for generations, and sustained the economy of hill communities across large parts of Africa and Asia, to the European eye swidden cultivation epitomized indolence, instability and especially wastefulness, intensifying soil erosion and destroying forest areas that could perhaps be put to better use. Representative here are these remarks, dating from the 1860s, of a British forest officer on the Baigas of central India, a tribe that lived in valuable forests that the newly established Forest Department wished to take over. The officer wrote of this community of swidden farmers that they were 'the most terrible enemy to the forests we have anywhere in the hills.' It was sad 'to see the havoc that has been made among the forests by the Baiga axes.' In some areas 'the hills have been swept clean of forests for miles; in others, the Baiga marks are tall, blackened, charred stems standing in hundreds among the green forests'—it was 'really difficult to believe that so few people could sweep the face of the earth so clear of timber as they have done.' However, scientific conservation was an ideology that was at once apocalyptic and redemptive. It did nor. hark back to an imagined past, but looked to reshape the present with the aid of reason and science. For rational planning would ensure that the 'great error' of waste— whether caused by settlers, native farmers, or industtialists—could be done away with, and a more efficient and sustainable system put in place. This could only be brought about by the state, the one body capable of taking a long-term view. For the profit motive was incompatible with conservation; with both individuals and enterprises being notoriously short-sighted, the state had to assume the responsibility for managing resources such as forests and water. Individuals and corporations came and went but the government, wrote the founder of the United States Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, 'is not mortal. Men die but the Government lives on. The forests, like the race, must Chapter J: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 31 live on also. And the government alone can have, and does have, the continuity of purpose without which, in the long run, the forests cannot be saved.' The opposition to private control was by no means an argument for locking up resources. It was, rather, a precondition for wise use. To quote Pinchot again, 'the job was not to stop the ax, but to regulate its use.' Likewise, the first head of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries noted that 'while we are aiming to prevent the depletion of the great resources with which our country has been blessed, it follows logically that these resources must not be permitted to lie in a state of unproductive idleness.' The 'real problem of conservation,' he continued, 'is plainly a problem of efficient development and utilization.' That was a specific aim baldly stated: but men like Gifford Pinchot were also prone to identify their ideology with all that was good and noble in the human condition. In an essay published in the magazine American Forests, Pinchot wrote that Conservation is the wise and far-sighted use of all the things—natural, artificial, and spiritual—which men require upon this earth----Conservation is as wide as the earth itself, as inclusive as the needs and interests of humanity upon the earth. It is far too great a question, therefore, to be included within the bounds of any single government department... It is the background, the spirit, and the strength of the progressive movement in American public life. It is the forward-looking point of view. It is the signboard on the road to a greater and better America. Other conservationists were generally less lyrical, defining their faith more modestly in terms of its abhorrence of waste and its emphasis on wise use. These were embodied in the definition of conservation as 'the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time,' this ast phrase giving a distinctive twist to the ideals of utilitarian philosophy. The credo of scientific conservation was early and authoritatively expressed in George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, a book which drew upon the author's varied professional experience—as wmer, timber merchant, fish commissioner, plenipotentiary and ^•ongressman—and his wide travels through North America and t-urope. Recent scholarship has suggested that the strong and at times most hysterical condemnation of peasants and pioneers by forest-ers and soil conservationists stemmed in good part from a competition for territory, with the conservationist aiming to take over, under state auspices, land or forests controlled by rival groups. Marsh him-sl , as not interested in power; his language was sober rather than c"°leric, but his conclusions were equally disturbing. Taking a global Vlew, he remarked that 32 Part I: Environmentahsm's First Wave Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.. .There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even ot Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon . . . The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence . . . would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. David LowentVial, Marsh's biographer, writes that through the Ver-montcr's studies 'History revealed man as the architect of his own misfortune, but when the processes of nature were better understood, foresight and technical skill might reverse the decline.' In Marsh's view man was an agent of destruction as well as regeneration, with the potential, as he so beautifully put it, to be a 'restorer of disturbed harmonies.' For the history of early modern Europe had shown quite clearly that judicious intervention and systematic management could rehabilitate degraded forests, thereby arresting soil erosion, helping to regulate the flow of streams and rivers, and (not least) assuring a steady supply of wood for the economy. As Marsh wrote in the preface to his great work, 'my purpose is rather to make practical suggestions than to indulge in theoretical speculations.' Pre-eminent here was the need for public ownership of forests and water, resources so vital to the social and economic life of the nation. In his view, concessional grants to individuals and companies, while an attractive option in the short term, 'may become highly injurious to the public interest for years later:' an outcome he thought unlikely were these resources securely under state control. Marsh's insights, writes Low-enthal, were to 'become the guiding principles behind American conservation policy,' to be embodied, in time, in such institutions as the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold said of Marsh that he was 'that rara avis, a really well-bred and trained American,' the characteristically English note of condescension barely masking what was well-considered and well-merited praise. But Marsh was also a genuine internationalist, who sought to influence the New World through the example of the Old, and whose work, in turn, was read and admired as far afield as India and Australia (and also in Russia, where his book had appeared in translation as early as 1866). Appositely-the Vermont conservationist spent his last days in a forestry schoo in the mountains above Florence, talking with students and walking Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 33 among the firs. When he died there, on July 23, 1882, his body was draped in an American flag, but his coffin was carried down the hill by the Italian students, to be finally buried in a Protestant cemetery in Rome. In life, as in death, George Perkins Marsh epitomized the internationalism of scientific conservation, the movement of which he was such an outstanding exemplar. THE GLOBAL REACH °F SCIENTIFIC FORESTRY Scientific forestry, the oldest and most influential strand in the conservation movement, had its origins in late medieval Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it had moved steadily outward to embrace much of the globe. France was a pioneer, introducing a Forest Code in the fourteenth century and a stricter forest ordinance in 1669, both initiatives aimed at regulating wood production for the navy. But by the eighteenth century, Germany had clearly emerged as the front-runner in the field. The ascendancy of German forest science was a consequence or the quantitative methods developed there to estimate growing stock ar>d yield. In large, powerful kingdoms such as Frederick the Great's Prussia, forestry officials reaped the benefits of a centralized administration which enabled the close supervision of state forests. In refining techniques of sustained-yield management, foresters moved horn an area-based approach to a more reliable yield-based system. In the former case, foresters estimated the mature age of a tree spe-c'es, then divided up the forest into areas whose number equalled this age (in years): on the assumption that equal areas yielded equal amounts of wood, the harvest of one patch annually would not dip mto forest capital. Over time, this was replaced by a system based more directly on estimates of the volume and weight of trees of different ages. By carefully studying growth patterns on experimental P'°ts, silviculturalists developed standard 'yield tables' for different sPecies which computed, with a fair degree of accuracy, the wood mass of individual trees as well as of whole stands. These numbers, adjusted for varying soil and moisture conditions, then formed the asis of sustained-yield forestry. To qUote tng historian Henry E. Lowood, 'Theories, practices rnd lnstructional models from Germany provided the starting point 0r every national effort in forest science and management until the e"d 01 the nineteenth century' German foresters were mercenaries as well as missionaries, enthusiastically traveling abroad to promote 34 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave and propagate methods that had successfully stabilized the forest economy of their land. Throughout Europe, in Austria, Toland, Russia, Finland, Sweden, even in France—close neighbor, old enemy, and forestry pioneer itself—forest schools and departments were established on the German model and very often with German technical support. German experts also set up forestry establishments in their own colonies and, perhaps more surprisingly, in colonies controlled by rival F.uropean powers as well. When the Dutch wished to systematically exploit the teak forests of Java, they could only turn to Germans for advice. From 1849 till the early decades of this century, a stream of German experts arrived to help the Dutch colonies institute a forest regime, based on strict state control. The foresters' brief was to harvest teak for the construction of roads, railways, and for the growing export trade—teak being a high-quality wood plundered for making furniture to adorn Eairopean drawing rooms. Likewise, the Indian Forest Department was serenely guided, for its first half century, by three successive German Inspectors General of Forest: Dietrich Brandis, Wilhelm Schlich, and Bertold von Ribbentrop. The Germans took on a wide array of tasks seen as essential for successful forest administration: the reservation of forest areas to the state, by curtailing or extinguishing rights exercised by village communities; dividing up these reserves into territories controlled by individual officers; identifying valuable species and studying their growth curves; and finally, establishing schools and laboratories for furthering research and education. In time, British officers trained by Brandis and company emerged as forest internationalists in their own right, with officials of the Indian Forest Service helping to set up forest departments in West and East Africa, in South East Asia, and in New Zealand. One of the most remarkable of these German forestry missionaries was Ferdinand Mueller, a graduate of the University of Kiel appointed Government Botanist of the Australian province of Victoria in 1852. Over a forty-year period Mueller used the varied fora of the government commission, the scientific seminar and the newspaper column in awakening the Australian public to the destruction of forests which provided pit props for their mines, charcoal for their railway engines and, indirectly, water for their rivers. Unusually for a forester, Mueller used ethical and esthetic arguments in conjunction with the more familiar utilitarian ones. In an address of June 1871 to the Technological Museum in Melbourne, he urged that the forest be seen Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 35 as an heritage given to us by nature, not for spoil or to devastate, but to he wisely used, reverently honoured, and carefully maintained. I regard the forests as a gift, entrusted to any of us only for transient care during a short space of time, to be surrendered to posterity again as an unimpaired property, with increased riches and augmented blessings, to pass as a sacred patrimony from generation to generation. The German experience also deeply stamped the evolution of North American forestry. A Prussian forester, Bernhard Fernow, was in 1879 appointed the first chief of the Division of Forestry in the Federal government; he went on to set up forestry schools at the universities of Cornell and Toronto. When a full-fledged forest service was created in 1900, its first head was a home-grown American, Gifford ,'nchot, tne scion of a distinguished Pennsylvania Republican fam-Y who ended up as governor of his home state. But Pinchot himself ays maintained that his mentor was Dietrich Brandis, the German scientist who set up the Indian Forest Department. When, in e 880s, the American decided to make a career in forestry, he made ^ P gnmage to Bonn, where Brandis lived in retirement. Brandis took tur °^ ^'ncnot's education, continuing to advise him after his re-t0 tne United States. In his autobiography, Breaking New round, Pinchot generously acknowledged this debt. 'Measured by 'hjj^311 ' brandis was the first of living foresters,' he wrote, who th ^reat work as a pioneer, and had made Forestry to be where sid T** n°ne before. In a word, he had accomplished on the other eo the world [in India] what I might hope to have a hand in do-U ln America.' The impact of Brandis on Pinchot, and the more ner.a. mfluence of German forestry on American forestry, are illus-tratcd in the W versf lff°rd P'nchot also helped found a forestry school at Yale Uni-r^sitv which rapidly established itself as a world leader in forestry which anC' e<^Ucat'on- Fittingly, it was the Yale University Press cance ' "h Published the first historical survey of the signifi- silvic 1 mPact °f German forestry. The author, a reputed German ence U"S* namec' Franz Heske, celebrated his country's experi-trarfcfS 3 sn,mng example for forestry in all the world.' After having orrned their 'depleted, abused woods' into 'well-managed for- teadily increasing yields,' German foresters, working at transfc "ts with borne and overseas, had made it considerably easier for the rest of the world to pursue a similar course, because the attainable goal is now known, at least in principle. The sponsors of sustained-yield in countries where forestry is still new can find in the results of this large-scale German experiment a strong suppori Part 1; Environmentalism's First Wave in their battle with those who know nothing, who believe nothing, and who wish to do nothing [to protect forests]. This experiment and its outcome have rendered inestimable service in the cause of a regulated, planned development anduseof theearth's rawmaterials, which will be an essential feature of the coming organic world economy. 1. AMERICA LOOKS TO EUROPE Two Chiefs of the United States Forest Service outline their country's debt to Germany and Germans. We see the need of curbing individualistic exploitation and we are looking towards the future with justified apprehension. In this situation we instinctively turn to the experience of older countries. . . . In Germany the conflict between public interest and private right is resolved by the concept of the dependence of the individual on the nation as a whole, 'Gememnutz gebt vor Eigennufz.' In no other framework could the crowded nations of Europe maintain their national well-being. This tenet of totality is the growth of centuries of sacrifice and struggle. It has gained a perspective in which the future becomes a fixed reality. In German forestry policy this concept is expressed in what foresters call sustained-yield management. It is what Dr Heske calls it, an example for all the world. 2. Hisconnection . . . with the English students led Sir Dietrich [Brandis] very naturally to take charge of American students who came to Europe to study. Taking charge of a student meant with him not merely to advise as to the general course of study, but also to require bi-weekly reports, and to read and to criticize them, to send long letters written in longhand to each of us from time to time, and in every detail to try, with a never-ending patience, enthusiasm and generosity, to see that each of us got from his work exactly what he came for. This was done for me, then for Graves, then for Price, Olmsted, Sherrad and many others. Sir Dietrich thus had a guiding hand in shaping many of the men whose fortune it became afterwards to shape the general policy of forestry in the United States. Source- 1. Henry S. Graves, 'Preface,' in Franz Heske, German Forestry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), pp. xvii-xviii, 2. Gifford Pinchot, 'Sir Dietrich Brandis,' Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters, volume 3, number 1, 1908, pp. 58-9. theMeli,! MP'T4er tr?Ted m France rather 'han Germany was he Mexican Miguel Angel de Quevedo. Born in 1862, Quevedo took Powl S B°rdeaux before "roving to the Ecole olytechmque in Pans to study hydraulic engineering. Here one of Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 37 his teachers told him that an engineer not instructed in forestry was eficient, an ignoramus who will make grave mistakes.' The lesson came home most forcefully when Quevedo returned to Mexico in 87, and began work as a hydraulic engineer. Supervising a drainage Project outside the capital, Mexico City, he came to understand the ■mpact of deforestation in the hills on flood ing in the plains below. e tnen spent a decade as a consultant to various hydro-electric companies, studying afresh how forest cover, or its disappearance, had an "npact on water flow and rates of sedimentation. Quevedo's public debut as a forestry campaigner came at a 1901 rence on climate and meteorology. Here he spoke out on the need for a nation-wide law to protect and replenish Mexico's fast-trabj n^ ^orests- He then started a lobbying group, the Junta Cen-ra de Bosques: this promoted parks and tree nurseries in the cities, compiled inventories of forest cover in different districts. In 1917 persuaded the newpost-revolutionary government to insert a clause rj ? e Constitution, which read: 'The nation shall always have the . S't to impose on private property the rules dictated by the public "terest and to regulate the use of natural elements, susceptible to ppropnation so as to distribute equitably the public wealth and to Sate8uard its conservation.' eff 192^ Quevedo founded the Mexican Forestry Society to more 'tonal"' ' C'amor aga'nst the silence of our country against the na-tree a SUlc'de that signifies the ruin of the forest and the scorn of our pass^r°tector-' Quevedo and his society were instrumental in the corn ^ 31 'aSt' nat'ona' forest act in 1926. By now, his work had pro 6 tC> ^ attent'on °f Mexico's new President, Lazaro Cardenas, a and^reSS|!VC re^orrner already known for his interest in land reform P„ °rkers> rights. In 1935 C ardenas created a Department of For-an ^ • anc' Game. Quevedo was appointed its first commissioner, tutcd^hlntmCnt' aS °ne °^ ^°"owers remarked, which 'consti-defen X e SVnthesis and crowning achievement of the great work in gatorS\anC' ProPagat'on °f our natural resources that the wise investing ' j n°b'e apostle, the pure spirit, Miguel Angel de Quevedo as undertaken during his life.' ^Vuevedo's recent biographer, Lane Simonian, likewise refers to an3S Mexico's apostle of the tree.' He was certainly a remarkable bp^I.'" energy and foresight fully the equal of other and, thus far. hi ^an, „, cnergy and roresig| etter-known conservationists from other lands. Quevedo shared ■*'th these contemporaries a hostility to peasants, whom he held to b* ehiefly responsible for the destruction of his country s forests. He also tended to oscillate between exuberant optimism, foreseeing 38 Part I: Environmentalism's First Wave a future when scientists would finally be in charge, and bleak Pe^sl" mism, in case his technically equipped visionaries were not placed in positions of power and influence. The following quote, from 1939, captures him in the latter mood, in despair after forty years of mostly unsuccessful preaching and proselytizing: Each day the Mexican forest problem becomes graver; the large woods are beingdepleted at an alarmingrate, the productionof chicle diminishes notably year by year, the hardwoods and even firewood cannot be obtained in regions once classified as heavily forested. Everywhere one observes forests impoverished and ruined by greed and thought! ulness and almost we can claim that Mexico is heading {or drought. [translated by Lane Simonian] THE BALANCE SHEET OF SCIENTIFIC FORESTRY The actual experience of scientific forestry was quite often at odds with its professed aims and supposed achievements. Especially in the colonics, it followed a 'custodial' approach, with the strengthening of state control having as its corollary the denial of customary rights of user exercised by peasant and tribal communities. For the acres and acres of woodland taken over by the state were by no means pristine, untouched forests; rather, they had been controlled and used by humans down the centuries. Peasants and pastoralists, swidden cultivators and wood-working artisans, all looked upon the forest as a provider of their basic means of subsistence: the source of fuel for cooking, grass for livestock, leaf for manure, timber for homes and plows, bamboos for baskets, land for extending cultivation, herbs for curing ailments, and so on. When access to these resources was restricted by the creation of strictly protected government reserves, escalating conflict between local communities and forest departments was the inevitable outcome. In South Asia, where the history of scientific forestry has perhaps been most fully documented, the fores; department quickly became a reviled arm of the colonial state. When a comprehensive Indian Forest Act was enacted in 1878—to supersede a preliminary Act of 1865—the government was warned, by a dissenting official, that the new legislation would leave 'a deep feeling of injustice and resentment amongst our agricultural communities;' indeed, the act might 'place in antagonism to Government every class whose support is desired and essential to the object in view [i.e. forest conservation] , from the Zamindar [landlord] to the Hill Toda [tribal].' These Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 39 words were far-sighted, for once the act was in place, peasant and ^ibal groupings resisted the operations of the Forest Department in all kinds of ways: through arson, breaches of the forest law, attacks on officials and on government property, and quite often, through co-ordinated and collective social movements aimed at restoring local control over forests. These rebellions formed part of broader nationalist upsurges; sometimes engulfing thousands of square miles, they were quelled only by the superior firepower of the colonial army and police. A flavor of the sentiments behind these militant and enduring Protests is contained in some remarks of the nineteenth-century social reformer, Jotiba Phule. Writing in 1881, Phule captured the transformations that the forest department had wrought in the Indian countryside. 'In the old days,' remarked the reformer, small landholders who could not subsist on cultivation alone used to eat wild fruits like figs and [berries] and sell the leaves and flowers of the flame of the forest and the mahua tree. They could also depend on the village ground to maintain one or two cows and two or four goats, thereby livinghappily in theirown ancestral villages. However, the cun-n'ng European employees of our motherly government have used their foreign brains to erect a great superstructure called the forest department. With all the hills and undulating areas as also the fallow lands and graz-lr>g grounds brought under the control of this forest department, the 'ivestock of the poor farmers do not even have place to breathe anywhere °n the surface of the earth. Th [translated from the Marathi by Madhav G.idgil] eSe contemporary social criticisms of scientific forestry (see also tal SS ln ^°X^ nave now Deen joined by retrospective environments °neS Recent work by ecologists suggests that, at least in the trop-> sustained-yield forestry has been honored mostly in the breach. Un|jk' forests are very diverse in their species composition, quite large areas of forest; a situation far removed from the tropical humid 'orests of Asia and Africa, in one acre of which dozens of tree species c°-exist along with hundreds of plant varieties in the understorey, to speak of thousands of micro-organisms and animals of many shapes and sizes. In South and South-east Asia, an addiuonal compiling factor is the monsoon, the two or three months of torrential ra'n wh.ch quickly wash away soil exposed by logging, thus render-ln8 regeneration extraordinarily difficult. In such circumstances, it Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 41 highly questionable whether sustained-yield forestry on the European model can be successfully practised, a skepticism that is borne out by the record. In India, for instance, 130 years of state forest management have left the forests in much poorer condition than they were when scientific forestry first made its appearance. Twenty-two Per cent of India's land mass is still controlled by the forest department, but less than half of this has tree cover on it: proof of the failures of German forestry to successfully replicate itself in the tropics. peasants versus the forest department In 1913 the Government of Madras appointed a Commission to investigate grievances against the forest administration. Offered here are two exchanges with the Commission, one with a group oj ryots (peasants), the other with an individual landholder identified by name, e conversations reveal the sharp opposition between scientific foresters and the interests of the rural community. n Committee Ryots Committee Ryots Committee Ryots Committee Ryots Co Rye mmittee Committee Tlmma Reddy What is your next grievance.' We have no firewood; and are not given permits for them. Are you willing to pay for permits for firewood? No; it has not been the custom up till now. There are only three or four rich ryots and all the rest are poor and cannot pay for fuel. We pray that we may be given the grants. At present what do you burn? We use cow-dung cakes . . . We want more manure leaves. Do you always use them? When the land was a [commons], we used to get leaves for manure, sixteen years ago. You do not get them now? Occasionally one or two men who can afford it send their men to distant places to get leaves. What are your difficulties about the forests? There are two temples on the top of the hill . . . There is worship there every week. There are many devotees. If ryots go there, the forest subordinates trouble them and they do not go even to the temple. If we do not worship in any year, tanks will not get supply of water. Part I: Environmentalist's First Wave Committee Timma Reddy Committee Timma Reddy Did you worship this year? Yes. A case was also made against us. While the God was being taken along the path, some trees were said to have been injured and the District Forest Officer inquired and let us off. . . . We worship every year. Instead of worshipping the God there, the ryots have to worship the forest subordinates. : Did you not represent to the District Forest Officer? : Once we went to worship the God and a case was made against my brother that he went for hunting. The District Forest Officer charged us for trial in the Taluk Magistrate's Court. There we were acquitted. Even if we go to the D.F.O., we thought we will not have justice. So we do not go to him. Source: Atluri Murali, 'Whose Trees? Forest Practices and Local Communities in Andhra, 1600-1922,' in David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha, editors, Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 106, 110. One Asian country that has not followed European models—in this as in so many other respects—is Japan, also, and not coinciden-tally, a country that never came under colonial rule. Independent of, and at least as early as in Germany, Japanese scientists had developed skilled methods of regenerative forestry that helped stabilize the forest cover and mountain slopes of their islands. The historian Conrad Totman notes that between 1590 and 1660 Japanese farmers and timber merchants 'devastated much of their forest land and seemed to be in the process of pressing the archipelago beyond endurance.' Disaster was forestalled by a mix of negative and positive interventions; the former aimed at restricting and regulating tree-felling so as to assist natural regeneration, the latter at more actively enhancing tree cover through plantations, especially of conifers. Large tracts of woodland owned by temples and shrines were also sequestered by the central government, to be worked on rotations of a hundred years and more. Meanwhile, a proliferation of books and pamphlets authored by officials and intellectuals urged the public to help the government protect forests and pass on their patrimony to later generations. As Totman observes, the concerns of these writers were emphatically practical, affirming not a mystic ecological consciousness—of t e Chapter 3: The Ideology of Scientific Conservation 43 kind looked for by recent Western enthusiasts of Japanese Zen Buddhism—but, rather, highlighting the very real dangers of soil erosion and resource shortages that deforestation would give rise to. An official of the Akita district wrote, in the early seventeenth century, that 'The treasure of the realm is the treasure of the mountains [i-e. soil and water]. When all the trees are cut and gone, however, their value will be nil. Before all is lost, proper care must be taken, destitution of the mountains will result in destitution of the realm.' This is a succinct statement of the ideology of scientific conserva-u°n, apocalyptic at one level, holding out the hope of redemption at another.