Page 155 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

504 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

and personal and political freedom led to a rapid and suc- Sao Paulo state alone the original 204,500 square kilo-
cessful expansion of settlement, although much environ- meters of forest were reduced to 45,500 square kilome-
mentally destructive exploitation also occurred. Tree ters by 1952.
growth was considered a good indicator of soil fertility in Peasant proprietors were not immune to the pressures
all pioneer societies, and the bigger the trees the quicker of the global commercial market. Outstanding was the
they were felled to make way for farms.The United States expansion of peasant cultivation in lower Burma (encour-
was the classic example. The pioneer farmer, through aged by British administrators) between 1850 and 1950,
“sweat, skill and strength,” (Ellis 1946, 73) was seen as the which resulted in the destruction of about 35,000 square
heroic subduer of a sullen and untamed wilderness. kilometers of imposing equatorial (kanazo) rain forests
Clearing was widespread, universal, and an integral part and their replacement by rice.Throughout the Indian sub-
of rural life; about 460,300 square kilometers of dense continent the early network of railways meant an expan-
forest were felled by about 1850 and a further 770,900 sion of all types of crops by small-scale farmers, often for
square kilometers by 1910. “Such are the means,” mar- cash, that led to forest clearing everywhere.
velled the French traveller, the Marquis de Chastellux in Uncolonized Asian societies exploited their forests
1789, just as vigorously, commercially, and uncaringly as did
their European counterparts.There is evidence from, for
by which North-America, which one hundred years ago
example, southwest India and Hunan province in south
was nothing but a vast forest, is peopled with three million
central China from the sixteenth century onward to show
of inhabitants....Four years ago, one might have travelled
that the commercialization of the forest was well estab-
ten miles in the woods... without seeing a single habita-
lished. In the former, permanent indigenous agricultural
tion (Chastellux 1789, 29).
settlements existed side by side with shifting cultivation,
It was one of the biggest deforestation episodes ever. and village councils regulated forest exploitation by agri-
A similar process of the pioneer hacking out a life for culturalists.The forest was not regarded as a community
himself and family in the forest occurred in Canada, New resource; larger landowners dominated forest use locally.
Zealand, South Africa, and Australia. In Australia, for Scarce commodities such as sandalwood, ebony, cinna-
example, nearly 400,000 square kilometers of the south- mon, and pepper were under state and/or royal control.
eastern forests and sparse woodland were cleared by the In Hunan, a highly centralized administration encour-
early twentieth century. aged land clearance in order to enhance local state rev-
In the subtropical and tropical forests, European sys- enues so as to increase the tax base and support a bigger
tems of exploitation led to the harvesting of indigenous bureaucracy and militia. State encouragement was also
tree crops (e.g., rubber, hardwoods), and in time to the given to migrations into the forested hill country of
systematic replacement of the original forest by “planta- south China later on. Simply, forests everywhere were
tion” crops grown by slave or indentured labor. Classic being exploited and were diminishing in size as a re-
examples of this were the highly profitable crops of sponse to increasing population numbers and increasing
sugar in the West Indies, coffee and sugar in the sub- complexity of society. In the subtropical world change
tropical coastal forests of Brazil, cotton and tobacco in was just slower than that unleashed by the Europeans
the southern United States, tea in Sri Lanka and India, with their new aims, technologies, and intercontinental
and later rubber in Malaysia and Indonesia. In eastern trade links, but no less severe. Measures of destruction are
Brazil, over half of the original 780,000 square kilome- hard to come by, but in South and Southeast Asia
ters of the huge subtropical forest that ran down the between 1860 and 1950, 216,000 square kilometers of
eastern portions of the country had disappeared by forest and 62,000 square kilometers of interrupted or
1950 through agricultural exploitation and mining. In open forest were destroyed for cropland.