Nature's Evil

ONE

Cry Fire

Our forebears migrated from the African savannah about 70,000 years ago. Hairless skin and the ability to sweat from all parts of the body allowed them to adjust to living in the subtropics. They were not particularly swift but had stamina: over a long distance, a man could catch up with almost any mammal. Having settled in the wetlands and coastal areas, humans learnt to make use of sticks and stones and to domesticate animals. Climate change forced people to migrate in search of new spaces. They soon learnt to cross open water, to catch fish and to seek a better life.

Not slash, but burn

Human migration northward was made possible by a revolutionary technology – the mastery of fire. Having learnt to walk upright, this particularly successful primate could now use his hands to strike a spark from a flint and set fire to dry grass. By gathering and burning the first non-edible resources – brushwood and reeds – people were able to control the temperature in their lairs or caves. Now that they were able to cook food over a fire, people consumed seeds, beans and bones that they couldn’t digest raw. Practically everything that humans have made subsequently – terracotta and brick, bronze and iron, salt and sugar, petrol and plastic – they have made in collaboration with fire. In the myth of Prometheus, the hero steals fire from the gods, hides it in the hollow centre of a reed and carries it to humanity. The gods’ revenge is long-drawn-out and cruel. All the details of the myth are significant – from the hero on the frontier between two worlds to the humble reed, with which the whole story begins.

The mastery of fire was the first practical act in which brain was more important than brawn. After a fire, forests were more productive, there was more game and the predators disappeared. A fire in the hearth tamed humankind. Armed with fire, humankind could tame nature. These hunters, whose only weapons consisted of cudgels or sticks, burnt forests to create great swathes of natural golf courses. This is how the American prairies were created, and probably the Eurasian steppes as well. For their physical survival, each human being needs to consume between 2,000 and 4,000 kilocalories per day. The production of a daily portion of the modern, meat-rich diet takes approximately 10,000 kilocalories of solar energy. Human muscles convert food into work, but most of the energy we use comes from elsewhere. In ancient Rome the consumption of non-food energy, most of it through the burning of wood, reached 25,000 kilocalories per person. In the modern world the energy consumption per person is 50,000 kilocalories per day, and in developed countries it is five times higher. 1 In 1943, the anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as the harnessing of energy with the help of technology. 2 Solar energy, which reaches our wicked world straight from the nearest star, is available to human beings in various forms: wind, water currents, firewood, fossil fuel and food. No energy is produced by human beings; it all comes from the sun. The only exception to this rule of thumb is nuclear energy; perhaps that’s why it is difficult for humans to harness it.

We learnt to cut wood and plough the earth once we had acquired the ability to attach a stone tip to a wooden handle. Wood was abundant, but rare flint was needed for the tip. In axes, crude stone was replaced with flint in about 4000 bce . Found all over Europe, flint axes and knives were produced in great quantities – about half a million every year. But there were very few flint mines. Axe heads originating from one flint deposit in the Alps have been found all over Western Europe. Axes from central Poland have been discovered 800 kilometres away. 3 So the earliest human tool, the flint axe, already combined two types of raw material – the easily replaceable stick and the precious flint, which was handed down from one generation to another, travelling huge distances on its way. The owners had to protect the sites where flint was found, and the first property rights developed. Others had to produce something of value to exchange: a flock of sheep, for example, or cured hides. This is how trade began.

For almost all of history, people lived in autonomous groups, communities or tribes. They fed themselves from the land on which they lived. When they had exhausted it they moved on to another plot and again burnt the forest. Fire helped to produce excellent harvests. Mature trees survived forest fires, and cereals or vegetables were sown around them. Field and forest existed side by side, and animals helped people clear the land. Horses and oxen hauled timber, pigs and sheep devoured grass and roots. It required about an acre of cleared forest to support one human being. Any growing population needed to expand the land available for burning and sowing. Like all technological revolutions, fire liberated people and reduced their dependence on nature. But no sooner had he achieved symbiosis with fire than bipedal man fell into the resource trap. In his quest for freedom and happiness, he was constantly destroying the very resource that made him prosper.

Groups of people moved from place to place looking for firewood. These people had neither maps nor even word-of-mouth information about their environment. When they found a forest they could use, they settled there until they had burnt everything flammable. In need of timber, humankind migrated north, to the wooded tracts of Europe. But there were already similar creatures living there – the Neanderthals. Shorter but more heavily built than Homo sapiens , the Neanderthals were intelligent and aggressive. They lived in small communities, were capable of collective action and used fire and stone tools. They coped with the cold climate more easily than H. sapiens . Their brains were bigger than the brains of early modern humans, their sight was sharper, their muscles stronger. For five millennia, H. sapiens and Neanderthals lived side by side in Europe, mating and learning from each other. Then the Neanderthals died out. Archaeologists have found teeth marks from H. sapiens on their bones: early humans had eaten Neanderthals. The anthropologist Pat Shipman has proposed that the main difference between the Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern man was the symbiosis between man and wolf. Homo sapiens and wolves complemented one another. One species could track game; the other could kill it. One was swift-footed and had a superb sense of smell; the other had a big brain and tools. Hunting with dogs gave early humans their greatest advantage over Neanderthals. 4

American archaeologists investigated adjacent settlements of humans and Neanderthals in the mountains of the Southern Caucasus. The main source of food there was the Caucasian goat. Both groups knew this animal’s seasonal migration routes and settled in the vicinity. They behaved more like breeders than hunters, eating only adult animals and leaving the juveniles to mature. The Neanderthals lived in smaller groups than the humans. Their tools were more primitive because they made them out of local stone. In the human camps the archaeologists found knives made of obsidian, the nearest source of which was 100 kilometres away. With these knives, humans could split strong bones into needles. 5 These implements were highly prized and used over and over again for scraping skins and sewing them together, making clothes and shoes. These goods entailed a huge amount of labour, but they could be exchanged for other things such as obsidian. This is probably the first example of long-distance trade in human history, but the pattern was fully developed: a rare, distant natural resource was exchanged for products of human labour.

Having left their subtropical Eden, humans needed to dress in furs and skins. The Neanderthals had more subcutaneous fat and more body hair, and they did not need fur garments in the temperate climate. They could scrape animal skins but used them as bedding. In contrast to the human traders who exchanged sheep and skins for obsidian, the Neanderthals lived by subsistence farming. Along with dogs, trade gave humankind an advantage in its first battle for survival. Perhaps humans’ symbiosis with wolves was connected to their ability to carry out trade. Hunting with dogs relies on the ability to relate to another creature who has different needs from your own. This is also the basis of trade.

Roman fires

The level of harnessed energy reached a temporary peak in ancient Rome. The historian Ian Morris has used the number of kilocalories harnessed per head of population per day as ‘the measure of civilization’. 6 Those religions that worshipped the sun as the ultimate source of life – the religions of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton and the Persian prophet Zoroaster – understood this. Burning wood provides energy that can warm man and raise him up but can also destroy him. It is up to man which of these alternatives happens.

The building boom in ancient Rome required enormous quantities of timber. The exhaustion of forests caused the move from wooden walls and roofs to structures made of brick and ceramics; but the firing of clay in kilns also needed fuel. 150 cubic metres of dry firewood were needed to make 1 cubic metre of bricks; it took 10 tons of firewood to burn the limestone to produce 1 ton of cement. To heat ancient Rome, with its underfloor heating, huge baths and cooking stoves, required the cutting down of 30 square kilometres of forest per year. 7 Those who worked on the felling, transporting and processing of timber were not slaves but hired hands, either peasants or barbarians. The smelting of bronze, iron and silver created the need for quality wood to make props for the mines and charcoal for heating the smelting cauldrons. Time after time, the authorities claimed the forests as state property, but this did not improve the supply. Rome’s drive towards the north, to the forests of Germany and even Britain, was connected with its thirst for timber and energy.

Emerging from the forests, the barbarians put out this fire. By the seventh century, the level of energy harnessed per person fell by a factor of two. Only many centuries later did the mass consumption of Dutch peat and British coal allow societies to exceed the energy consumption reached by the Romans. Like any other activity, extracting fuel requires energy. The production of a kilogram of firewood or coal takes about 5 megajoules. When wood is burnt, it produces three times the amount of energy used to produce it. For coal, the figure is up to a hundred times greater and, for oil, up to a thousand times. Different forms of stored energy have very different characteristics, and they shaped different societies. Cities heated by wood, such as Rome, are organised differently from cities heated by peat, such as Amsterdam, and from cities heated by coal, such as London. The Romans dreamt of gold, of miraculous machines and voyages to other worlds. None of them could have guessed that the peaty sludge and black stone they found in their chilly colony would turn out to be the greatest miracles of the new world.

Ships

Humans’ earliest sources of energy were renewable. The wind filled sails, sending adventurers off in search of raw materials or their substitute, gold. Commodities floated downstream, and animals hauled goods upstream. Always on the front line of technology, shipbuilding sent people back to the forests. Ships required timber of the highest quality and of various sorts: straight oak for the planking, crooked oak for the ribs, pine for the masts, beech and spruce for the decks. And ships needed other products from the northern lands – tar for caulking the hull planks, hemp for ropes and linen for sails. But, in Southern Europe, forests remained only in the most inaccessible areas, on islands or on mountainsides. Wars were fought over these vital supplies of timber, and they were turned into colonies – Cyprus and Sicily, Istria and Macedonia, and later the Tyrol and Galicia. Sawmills and quays had to be constructed at river estuaries. All this activity depended on the population living on the river banks and sea coasts. But the imperial exploitation of the forests came into conflict with the native ways of using them and led to the policing of increasingly distant and inhospitable lands.

The Roman trireme had a wooden hull and deck, about 200 oars and two masts. Building such ships required thousands of trees of rare species. The Vikings’ ships were simpler and lighter, but more seaworthy thanks to their use of tar. This sticky, impermeable substance, produced by the dry distilling of pine or birch wood, protected the craft from leaks and rotting. The Vikings dug a big clay pit, filled it with chunks of pine, covered them with turf, and set them alight. After several hours, tar trickled down out of an opening at the bottom of the pit. The sailors of antiquity also knew the recipe for making tar, but it required pine trees in quantities which they could hardly obtain. The Vikings produced tar on an industrial scale, 300 litres at one go; two such distillations would produce enough tar to caulk one craft. The sails, which the Vikings made out of wool, were also soaked in tar – they turned black. It is only thanks to the archaeologists who found these tar pits that we understand why the Vikings were better seafarers than the Romans or the Phoenicians. 8

Republics and empires alike were preoccupied by the shortage of oak for hulls, beech for decks and pine for masts. It took up to 2,000 oak trunks, preferably from hundred-year-old trees, to build one large warship; but oaks grow in rich soil suitable for agriculture, and they were always in short supply. The Venetians invested in planting and protecting forests along the Adriatic. 9 Powerful religious orders – Benedictines in the Alps, the Teutonic order on the Baltic – cleared forests at the European frontier, pushing it to the north and the east. Combining wood and metal, new implements – axes, yokes, wheels and ploughs – increased the productivity of the cleared land. Later, wooden palisades and stockades – no match for firearms – were replaced by clay and stone. But there was nothing to replace the floating fortresses built from choice timber.

The treeless Dutch Republic imported timber from Norway and the Baltic lands, floated rafts down the Rhine from the German princely states, and procured rare species from Java. In England, Queen Elizabeth I banned her own subjects from felling trees within 14 miles of any coast or river bank; Peter the Great followed suit in Russia with similar decrees. Portugal imported timber from Brazil, Spain from southern Italy and, at the time of the Armada, the Baltics. As was often the case with raw matter, the cost of transportation exceeded the production cost. The price of timber delivered to an English port was twenty times higher than its purchase price in the Baltic forests. In the eighteenth century, it took 4,000 oak trunks, or 40 hectares of mature forest, to build a British battleship. Contrary to the ideas of mercantilism, it turned out that building ships in the colonies was cheaper than transporting timber across the ocean. Almost half the Portuguese fleet was built in Brazil, a third of the Spanish fleet in Cuba, and much of the British fleet in India. 10

Firearms intensified the great powers’ dependence on their forests. Making guns and gunpowder required an enormous supply of firewood. The smelting of a ton of iron took 50 cubic metres of firewood, or a year’s growth of 10 hectares of forest, and then the forging process needed charcoal. Deforestation was one of the reasons for the decline of Venice and then of the Ottoman Empire. The abundance of firewood was one of the reasons for the success of metallurgy in Sweden and Russia. The pan-European shift from the Mediterranean to the North Sea followed the exhaustion of the southern forests.

Deforestation of Europe

While a forest stood, it remained subject to multiple ownerships, privileges and rights of use. The right to hunt belonged to the aristocracy, but the locals usually had the right of way through the forest, could collect brushwood, and let their pigs forage for acorns or cattle graze in the woods. 11 Once a forest was felled, the land became private property and could be mortgaged or sold. The spreading of Roman law through the North coincided with forest clearings. Surviving as hunting grounds for the local elite, the remaining forests were turned into enclosed parkland. Long considered a byword for wildness and barbarity, the forest, as the historian Keith Thomas has observed, ‘become an indispensable part of the scenery of upper-class life’. 12

Soldiers, traders and monks kept moving east to discover new lands that seemed to them wild, uninhabited and promising. Mingling with the Slav or Finnish tribes who lived in their native forests, the migrants from the west or the south enticed them into the fur or fish trade and then into farming the cleared lands. The historian Fernand Braudel wrote that the Baltic lands were Europe’s ‘internal Americas’. 13 But most of these lands in the North-East of Europe produced nothing but grain and timber. In Prussia, Russia and the Baltic countries, it took 1.5 hectares of woodland to construct a single farmhouse with a barn, which would last only fifteen years – less time than it took for new pines to grow. For most of this time, the house had to be heated with firewood. The rising price of grain and timber led to a new serfdom: landowners forced the peasants to work in the fields in summer and to fell trees in winter. Transportation costs were often prohibitive. The landowners delivered rye and timber to the nearest harbour. Then foreign ships transported the cargoes, and most of the trading profits went to Dutch and English merchants. 14 Thousands of their ships traded in the Baltic, exchanging iron goods, luxuries and firearms for grain, timber and a few other forest products, such as hemp, beeswax, tar and potash. Until 1760, the Baltic ports exported masts throughout Europe; later, American-sourced masts got their share of the market. Endowed with diffused, labour-intensive commodities, the Baltic lands were dominated by their neighbours who possessed topical resources – silver, iron and specialised labour. It was a colonisation by proxy. Trade was profitable, but landowners captured the rent, and the population of these lands grew more slowly than it would have done had people been left to subsistence farming.

Southern Europe made use of the roads built by the Romans, but in Northern Europe the branching network of rivers played a similar role. Instead of building roads, collecting taxes and investing in land, the Baltic states collected customs duty at river estuaries. Their capital cities grew in these chosen locations. Granaries, sawmills and aristocratic mansions sprang up on the quaysides of Königsberg, Danzig and Riga. Landowners managed their estates, which functioned upstream as colonial plantations, remotely. Brute force was used there to make the peasants work.

Before we harnessed fossil fuels, each European city needed a tract of forest a hundred times larger than its own area. Heated with wood and often built out of wood, growing cities pushed the forests ever further away. A city could replace wood with stone and clay, peat and coal. But clay had to be fired, stone had to be transported, river banks and mine shafts had to be reinforced, and wood was still needed for all these purposes. But the greater part was burnt where it stood, to provide land suitable for planting crops. The woods around Madrid were exhausted – from the seventeenth century onwards, this city had been heated with charcoal, which provides more heat per unit of weight than firewood. Every year thousands of tons of charcoal were produced by burning even more wood and delivered by oxen from provinces up to 50 kilometres away. Less than 7 per cent of the British Isles was covered in woodland, falling to a minimum during the First World War. Even in the departments of northern France, no more than 15 per cent of the territory was covered in forests. Firewood was brought to Paris from up to 200 kilometres away, along canals and the Seine. Each Parisian needed, on average, 2 tons of firewood per year, equivalent to harvesting 1 acre of woodland. If forests were felled and not replanted, then the radius of delivery increased annually. In contrast to that of Paris, the London price of firewood remained stable thanks to the abundance of coal. But the timbering of mines required good quality logs, and they had to be frequently replaced; only a few species – particularly chestnut – did not immediately rot in the mines. Metal smelting needed even more firewood. Charcoal produced a hotter fire than wood, but it needed high-quality wood such as oak. Smelting furnaces were built next to the mines, but these were often in the mountains, and charcoal had to be taken up there on carts. A journey of between 5 and 8 kilometres was viable, but once all the timber within this radius had been felled the mine had to be shut even if there was still ore to be mined. The irony was that timber, not ore, defined the economic geography of the Iron Age.

In the imperial period, the Europeans were as anxious about the disappearance of the old forests as they were delighted about newly discovered ones. Felling and burning woodland, they harnessed enormous expanses of territory from Rome to St Petersburg, and from the Amazon to Siberia. Starting from the west of Europe, the further a traveller went, the more forests he saw. In Prussia about 40 per cent of the land was forested, and the woods in Poland and European Russia still seemed boundless. Discovering new islands and continents, expeditions found woods instead of gold. But you can’t depend on what you destroy; you can’t have your cake and eat it. Our parks – places for relaxation and sites of nostalgia – are great monuments to the vanished forests. The places where we work bear no resemblance to bosky glades, but the places where we choose to relax still look like forests.

Notes

1 Smil, Energy in World History . 2 White, ‘Energy and the evolution of culture’. 3 Van Gijn, Flint in Focus ; Lech and Werra, ‘On artefacts from the prehistoric mining fields’. 4 Shipman, The Invaders . 5 Adler et al., ‘Ahead of the game’. 6 Morris, The Measure of Civilization . 7 Williams, Deforesting the Earth , p. 92. 8 Hennius, ‘Viking age tar production and outland exploitation’. 9 Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea . 10 Williams, Deforesting the Earth , pp. 196–201; de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis . 11 Fedotova and Korchmina, ‘Cattle pasturing as a traditional form of forest use’. 12 Thomas, Man and the Natural World , p. 209. 13 Braudel, The Mediterranean , Vol. 1, p. 62. 14 De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis ; Lupanova, Istorija zakreposhchenija .