4. Los mass media
4.2 El efecto mass media
U.S. expansion and environmental degradation in North America (1800-1860)
The extension of U.S. power west of the Appalachians to the Pacific Coast was the beginning of a new empire. There were two main victims of that process of expansion. North American societies were decimated and reduced to reservations. Alongside, the demands of the market economy that drove U.S.
expansion resulted in the degradation of myriad ecosystems. Mechanized agriculture, industrial mining, overhunting, ranching, the timber industry, railways, ships, roads, urbanization, etc. left a lasting impact on the environment. As important as these activities were, they could not have taken place without an institutional apparatus and an ideological framework to support them. International law as well as the U.S. legal system acknowledged the imperative of the market, promoting a particular worldview that was to have deleterious environmental consequences in the U.S. and the rest of the colonial world.190
From the eighteenth century, the landscapes of the southern U.S. were a succession of plantations.
These agricultural enterprises enormously reduced the biodiversity of the region.191 At different historical periods rice, sugar cane, indigo, tobacco, and cotton were grown extensively. Louisiana provides a good example to put into perspective the mushrooming of agricultural plantations. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in 1802, there were only seventy-five sugar plantations, which produced a combined
188 This is the spirit that runs like a thread through Jules Verne’s book collection of Les Voyages Extraordinaires.
189 Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, 30-62.
190 For the United States see Sowards, Unites States, 85.
191 Davis, Southern United States, 113.
49 5 million pounds of sugar.192 Twenty years later that amount had increased to 30 million, reaching a maximum of 459 million pounds by mid-century.193 The cultivation of rice, indigo, sugar, and tobacco caused deforestation and soil erosion.194 Still, the impact of these staples was not comparable to the environmental transformations that resulted from cotton plantations.
In England, the Industrial Revolution moved to high gear through the textile industry. Accordingly, the demand for raw textile materials grew exponentially during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
By 1800, seventy percent of the 58 million pounds of cotton imported by Great Britain came from the southern U.S.195 Eventually New England started to compete with British industries, increasing even further the demand for cotton. The cotton industry was one of the main engines of economic growth in the U.S. It resulted in an increase in population and fostered investment, transportation, labor, and industrialization.196 Cotton was the most important staple of the American South and occupied most of the fields planted in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and extended as well to Tennessee and Arkansas.197
Only the effects of tobacco were as detrimental to North American soils as the impact of cotton. Cotton depleted the ground of nutrients and caused severe erosion.198 This had enormous environmental implications considering how widespread cotton plantations were in the American South. By 1860 cotton destined for domestic consumption as well as export occupied more than 7 million acres of land in the region.199 Almost every region in the American South had more than 80 percent of its territory dedicated to agriculture.200 There, where cotton was cultivated, erosion ensued.201 But erosion was not the only effect of the Southern economy on ecosystems. Hunting reduced the number of deer by hundreds of thousands, contributing also to the disappearance of elks and buffalos from the region.202 Cattle completely destroyed native herbs and compacted the soils of pastures and forests.203 Mining caused
192 Ibid., 118.
193 Ibid., 118-119.
194 Ibid., 109-121. See also, Merchant, The Columbia Guide, 47-49.
195 Davis, Southern United States, 122.
196 Ibid., 125.
197 Ibid., 122-125.
198 Ibid., 125.
199 Ibid.
200 Ibid., 131.
201 Ibid., 128.
202 Ibid., 134-138.
203 Ibid., 142.
50 deforestation and the pollution of riverine ecosystems.204 Overall, the natural abundance of Southern landscapes reduced significantly.
Buffalos were one of the animals that suffered most from the impact of hunting and the shrinking of natural habitats. From a starting point of somewhere between 30 to 60 million bison before European colonialism, buffalo were reduced to only a few hundred by the mid-1880s. Although the Bison steadily disappeared from the South of the U.S. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were still millions of them in the immense grasslands of the interior.205 The introduction of the horse and the rifle among the Comanche facilitated Buffalo hunting, making the bison the cornerstone of their economic and social lives. European market demands for bison products further spurred on their killing. Several other North American nations, such as the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks, also had an active role in the killing of bison.206 By the 1850s, a combination of climatic factors, religious ideas, and overhunting by the Comanche had severely reduced bison herds.207
However, the final blow to the survival of bison came from U.S. markets and U.S. hunters. First, the locomotive entered the U.S. prairies, allowing the transportation of goods from the East to the West coast in less than a week.208 Then, the leather of the buffalo was applied to the belts of steams engines in Europe and the U.S. Due to this new industrial use of bison hides, demand skyrocketed.209 Accordingly, the sale of bison hides became extremely profitable in U.S. industrial cities and a new industry was organized around their extraction in the 1870s.210 In less than two decades, U.S. hunters killed buffalo by the millions (they sold 14 million hides) and almost exterminated them.211 North American peoples suffered terrible loss. As bison withered away, their economy suffered a major setback, and thousands starved and perished.212 Avid hunting for profits took place with the connivance of the federal authorities, eager to diminish the supplies of the Comanche and other North American peoples who still resisted their authority.213
204 Ibid., 150-155.
205 Dale F. Lott, The American Bison: A Natural History (Berkeley, University of Carolina Press, 2002) 171.
206 Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008) 294.
207 Ibid., 293-299. The role of North American peoples in the reduction of bison is acknowledged in Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000) 3.
208 Lott, The American Bison, 175.
209 Ibid., 176.
210 Ibid., 176-178.
211 The figure of 14 million hides is given in Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 191.
212 Only the Comanche population was reduced to a third as a result of hunger. See Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire, 339-340.
213 Isenberg, The Destruction, 4.
51 The environmental effects of territorial expansion and its accompanying economic growth were visible all over the U.S. The West Coast provides another good example of this trend. The industrialization of mining, agriculture, pastoralism, and fisheries drove environmental change. The gold rush in the West, especially in California, had deleterious consequences for the environment. Hydraulic mining entailed the use of an immense amount of water (some companies used more than a billion cubic feet of water) to move land in search of gold ores. In California, the power of water moved 1.5 billion cubic yards of debris from the Sierra Nevada foothills between 1855 and 1885.214 The amount of sand, soil, and gravel washed away reached as far as the San Francisco Bay and represented eight times more than the earth displaced for the construction of the Panama Canal.215
As in the South, mining caused the destruction of mountain and riparian ecosystems. Hills and mountains around the mines became deserts of stone. Erosion of agricultural lands, deforestation, siltation, and flooding followed hydraulic mining.216 Another widespread mining system, hard-rock mining, equally polluted the water and air.217 In addition, Californian companies decided to add mercury to the process of mining, provoking the most destructive and long-lasting effect on nature.218 The quicksilver mine of New Almaden (south of San Francisco) alone produced 1.7 million pounds of mercury per year.219 Tons of mercury filtered into the rivers and the atmosphere of the U.S. West Coast.
Its toxicity entered the food chain and accumulated in animal tissue, reaching concentrations 100,000 times higher than those of the environment around them.220
Biodiversity in the U.S. was reduced as dramatically as its forest cover. Trees were cut to open up space for agriculture, fuel, the construction of buildings, railroads, ships, bridges, roads, machines, mines, etc. Forest fed the U.S. industry. Accordingly, deforestation intensified as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum during the second half of the nineteenth century.221 From 1750 to 1900, 142 million hectares of forest were cut to make space for agriculture.222 An additional eight million fell due to the
214 Sowards, United States, 93.
215 David Beeslay, Crow’s Range: The Environmental History of the Sierra Nevada (Reno, University of Nevada Press, 2004) 53.
216 Sowards, United States, 93-94. See also Powell Greenland, Hydraulic Mining in California: A Tarnished Legacy (Spokane, Arthur H Clark Company, 2001).
217 Sowards, United States, 99.
218 Ibid., 95. See also Beeslay, Crow’s Range, 56-57 and Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: an Ecological History (New York, Hill and Wang, 2005) 47-50.
219 Sowards, United States, 95.
220 Ibid.
221 From 1850 to 1869, in less than two decades U.S. settlers cut half the amount of the trees (24 million hectares) they had destroyed in the previous two centuries (40.4 million hectares). See Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 286.
222 Ibid., 308.
52 requirements of industry, transportation, mining, and urbanization.223 In total 150 million hectares were gone, the equivalent of half the original forest landmass of North America.224 This represented one of the largest episodes of deforestation in world history.225 The beginning of industrialization was the main reason for environmental degradation. However, the assault on nature had already started with the new ideas and practices introduced by the establishment of the first colonial settlements.
As in the rest of the U.S., capitalism and the legal, political, and ideological structures that sustained it drove environmental destruction. Referring to the West Coast, Sowards has argued that ‘capitalism exploited nature to fuel economic expansion’, producing the devastation of the ‘regions’ resources by reducing them to commodities whose only value was their market value’.226 As we shall see in the following chapters, the law of nations enabled the extension of the logic of appropriation to the world’s vast supposedly unexploited territories and vacant ecosystems from which capitalism fed. This logic was not only applied during the U.S. expansion. Far from the U.S., there were other savages and natural habitats, which, according to the law of nations, could also be occupied, improved, and civilized.
Australian ecosystems: before and after British colonization
The size of the pre-contact population of Australia when the British explored the western coast in 1788 remains disputed, with figures ranging from a minimum of 300,000227 to a maximum of 1.5 million.228 Several authors agree on an intermediate figure of about 750,000.229 The ecological limits of natural habitats and factors such as climate change forced Australian peoples to adapt to external environmental conditions. For this reason, Australian landscapes were the result of a centuries-long process of continuous interaction and mutual adaptation between humans and nature (if one could ever really draw a clear-cut line between the two).
223 Ibid.
224 Ibid.
225 Ibid., 284.
226 Sowards, United States, 125.
227 This is the number proposed by Arthur Brown in an official estimate published in 1930. See Arthur R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Former Numbers and Distribution of the Australian Aborigines’ 23 Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia (Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1930) 687-696.
228 See Butlin, Economics, 139. See also Noel G. Butlin, Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal Population of South-Eastern Australia 1788-1850 (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1983) 175.
229 See, for instance, William J. Lines, Taming the Great South Land: History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia (St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 1991) 10-11 and Derek John Mulvaney and John Peter White Derek, ‘How Many People?’ in John Mulvaney and John Peter White (eds.), Australian to 1788 (Fairfax, Sime & Weldom Associates, 1987) 114-117.
53 Despite the view of Australian original inhabitants as a backward and primitive people,230 and their surroundings as a wilderness, their social achievements showed a remarkable resourcefulness. The island seamen, for instance, could differentiate sea locations by the taste of salty water (apparently every part of the sea had a distinct taste), the patterns of waves and swells, and the disposition of the stars.231 They built vessels, fished, sailed, and participated in the cinnamon trade across the Indian Ocean.232 The ability of adapting house building techniques to the requirements of different settings and weather conditions are further proof of an adaptable and sophisticated culture.233
Three main questions have come to the fore in the debate about the extent to which the peoples of Australia altered ecosystems before British colonization. The first disputed issue is their role in the extinction of Australian megafauna. Already in the nineteenth century, human agency was identified as the main agent of the total disappearance of megafauna.234 In contrast, other authors believed that climate change was responsible for the extinction process.235 Current positions do not differ much, with studies that alternatively emphasize anthropogenic or climatic causation.236 There are also studies that draw a middle line combining both factors.237 In those cases in which the peoples of Australia were found to be responsible, overkilling238 and the destruction of ecosystems due to intensive burning239 were hypothesized as causes for the Pleistocene extinctions.
230 It is still possible to find this opinion in contemporary scholarship. See, for instance, Frank Welsh, Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land (Woodstock, Overlook Press, 2006) 23.
231 According to Rolls, this is something that Europeans could not do. See Eric Rolls, ‘The Nature of Australia’ in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds.), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh, Keele University Press, 1997) 35-45, 36.
232 Ibid.
233 Ibid.
234 Richard Owen, ‘Extinct Animals of the Colonies of Great Britain’ 10 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute (1879) 267-297.
235 David R. Horton, ‘A Review of the Extinction Question: Man, Climate and Megafauna’ 15Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania (1980) 86-97, 86.
236 See Gifford H Miller et al., ‘Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafauna Extinction’
309 Science (2005) 287-290. A contrasting view is presented in Stephen Wroe and Judith Field, ‘A Review of the Evidence for a Human Role in the Extinction of Australia Megafauna and an Alternative Interpretation’ 25 Quaternary Science Review (2006) 2692-2703.
237 See, for instance, Graham W. Prescott et al., Quantitative Global Analysis of the Role of Climate and People in Explaining Late Quaternary Megafauna Extinctions’ 109 Proceeding of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America (2012) 4527-4531.
238 Timothy F. Flannery, ‘Late Quaternary Extinctions in Australia: An Overview’ in Ross D.E. MacPhee and Hans-Dieter Sues (eds.), Extinction in Near Time: Causes, Contexts and Consequences (New York, Kluwer Academy/Plenum Publishers, 1999) 239-256.
239 See Miller et al., ‘Ecosystem Collapse’. See also Gifford H. Miller et al., ‘Pleistocene Extinctions of Genyornis Newtoni:
Human Impact on Australia Megafauna’ 8 Science (1999) 205-208.
54 The peoples of Australia used fire as a resource management technique. Large areas of forests were cleared by fire in order to open space for cultivation and attract animals to pastures.240 The nature and impact of the use of fire is also controversial. Regarding the first question, whereas some authors define that use as judicious and positive,241 others have underlined the negative effects of Australians’ use of fire.242 The politics of conservation in ‘modern’ Australian and the alternative depiction of Australian peoples as either conservationist or inept managers of resources have complicated this debate.243
As far as the impact of fire is concerned, views have ranged from the claim that Australian grasslands mostly originated from past human-induced fires244 to the contrary thesis that fires have had a minimal impact upon Australian vegetation.245 Both these claims seem to be an overstatement. It is now the consensus that Australians’ use of fire served to introduce/select particular plant species, which in turn maximized productivity, increased biodiversity, and expanded their natural habitat zone. This view is supported by evidence of the positive ecological effects of fire practices currently undertaken by the peoples of Australia, based on their sophisticated knowledge of ecological processes.246
Last but not least, there has been a heated debated concerning the ‘narrative of intensification’.
According to this account of Australian history, sometime during the Holocene the hunter-gatherer communities experienced a series of changes driven by sociocultural factors.247 These included an increase in the number of sites and intensity of occupation, the appearance of new types of stone
240 Eric Rolls, ‘More a New Planet than a New Continent’ in Stephen Dovers (ed.), Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases (Oxford, Auckland, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994) 22-36, 25.
241 See R. Bliege Bird et al., ‘The ‘‘fire stick farming’’ Hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal Foraging Strategies, Biodiversity, and Anthropogenic Fire Mosaics’ 105 Proceeding of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America (2008) 14796-14801.
242 See Rhys Jones, ‘The Geographical Background to the Arrival of Man in Australia and Tasmania’ 3 Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania (1968) 186-215. See also Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Heart (Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1975).
243 Lesley Head, Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape (New York, Syracuse University Press, 2000) 207.
244 Norman B Tindale, ‘Ecology of Primitive Aboriginal Man in Australia’ in Allen Keast, Robert Langdon Crocker and Clifford Stuart Christian (eds.), Biogeography and Ecology in Australia (The Hague, Junk, 1959) 36-68.
245 David R. Horton, ‘The Burning Question: Aborigines, Fire and Australian Ecosystems’ 13 The Australian Journal of Anthropology (1982) 237-252.
246 See, for instance, David M. J. S. Bowman, Angie Walsh and Lynda D. Prior, ‘Landscape Analysis of Aboriginal Fire Management in Central Arnhem Land, North Australia’ 31 Journal of Biogeography (2004) 207-223. See also D Yibarbuck et al., ‘Fire Ecology and Aboriginal Land Management in central Arnhem Land, Northern Australia: a Tradition of Ecosystem Management’ 28 Journal of Biogeography (2002) 325-343. The ecological knowledge of Australian peoples is underlined by Henry T. Lewis, ‘Ecological and Technological Knowledge of Fire: Aborigines versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia’
91 American Anthropologist (1989) 940-961.
247 Harry Lourandos, ‘Intensification: A Late Pleistocene-Holocene Archaeological Sequence from Southwestern Vitoria’ 18 Archaeology in Oceania (1983) 81-94.
55 technology, the ‘domestication’ and further manipulation of plants as food resources, and more regionalized forms of art.248
The ‘narrative of intensification’ had the positive effect of challenging environmentally deterministic ideas about hunter-gatherer societies. It also questioned the strict divide between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist societies.249 Allegedly, both abstract social types had more in common than was traditionally recognized. Nevertheless, there have been a number of criticisms of the ‘thesis of intensification’. Some scholars have either underlined inadequacies in the data on which the thesis was based or defied the conclusions drawn from it.250 Others have focused on the political implications of challenging the opposition between the categories of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. Trying to squeeze the former into the latter seems like trying to raise hunter-gatherers one-step higher in the ladder of social evolution. This could have the counter effect of cementing the very logic of progress that sought to be challenged in the first place.251
Despite the complexity and nuances of these three debates,252 they have all similarly contributed to the demythologization of the image of a primeval Australia and a pre-colonial population unable to modify and improve their wild surroundings. We now know that the peoples of Australia had a profound and lasting influence on their habitats and that their ecological practices were knowledgeable, flexible, and dynamic. In spite of the undeniable and broad impact of Australians on the flora and fauna, they generally maintained the productivity of the land.253 Therefore, their relationship with nature was largely sustainable.254 Sustainability was not the result of an inherent quality of the peoples of Australia, but
248 Head, Second Nature, 103.
249 In the words of the most famous exponent of the thesis: ‘Australian hunter-gatherer societies overlapped to some extent with many Guinean hunter-horticulturalists in relation to population sizes and densities, hunting-gathering fishing practices, levels of land and resource management (for example, plants and fish), social formation, ritual and exchange.’ Harry
249 In the words of the most famous exponent of the thesis: ‘Australian hunter-gatherer societies overlapped to some extent with many Guinean hunter-horticulturalists in relation to population sizes and densities, hunting-gathering fishing practices, levels of land and resource management (for example, plants and fish), social formation, ritual and exchange.’ Harry