Tag Archives: conservation

A Land Worth Dying For

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I have no idea what the term “militia” conjures up inside the minds of Americans. But outside of the US, it tends to make us think of crazy right-wing extremists, the kind of gun-loving red blooded American who genuinely believes that it is essential to own a gun as a last resort to protect the American people from the tyranny of their own government. This lets us easily dismiss the recent actions of the so called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom and their occupation of the wildlife refuge in Oregon as actions of some ring-wing nut jobs. At first we’re shocked. Then we scoff. Then we send them a box of dildos. And then we move on with our lives.

You thought I was being rhetorical about the dildos?

Nevertheless, whether these groups are crazy or not (and make no mistake they are crazy), there are always reasons that their apparent craziness takes that particular form. With one member of the militia shot dead by police, and another four still occupying the facility, it is worthwhile to ask how have we ended up in a situation where a wildlife refuge is worth dying for.

In essence, the conflict is about land—who owns it and how they can use it. Currently, the US government own almost 30% of the land in the United States. However, the vast majority of this is concentrated in the West with the government owning as much as 85% of some states.

Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a blood-splatter pattern out of CSI?
Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a blood-splatter pattern out of CSI?
As the federal government basically operates out of the East Coast of the US, this leads to more than a few conflicts over how the land should be used. Specifically, conflicts between the needs of ranchers and conservationists; but we’ll get to that later. The first thing we need to look at is how the federal government ended up with such a disproportionate ownership of the West.

The secret is that the federal government never set out to own so much land, it simply couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. The US was colonised from the east.1 It took colonists about 160 years to move inland from the Appalachian mountains, somewhere between 400-500km from the coast. In this time, settlers tended to run ahead of the government (still the crown, at this stage). First some settlers who were trying to escape the law would settle down somewhere beyond the reaches of the government, but then the law would inexorably catch up, like a colonial T-1000. So they would have to move again.

An accurate portrayal of colonisation.
In fact, the British had signed treaties with the Native American population guaranteeing them everything west of the Appalachians. Subsequently, they deployed the army in an attempt to stop settlers moving over the mountains. In spite of “burning cabins and herding inhabitants eastward” (p. 156), settlement continued in waves until settlers were piled up against the banks of the Mississippi river in the early 1800s.

This is a distance of some 600km in about 40-50 years, so you’ll notice this is getting faster; although at this stage it is the settlers who are still leading the (now) US government in a merry chase. The final push was effectively lead by the government, however. Firstly, the US government constantly renegotiated treaties with Native Americans, pushing them further and further West, or isolating them in pockets of unwanted land and building the basis for much of the United States’ agricultural wealth. Secondly, the US “bought” much of its lands off Mexico. These two prongs of expansion let Americans tell themselves “We take nothing by conquest… Thank God” (p. 169). Of course, the fact that the deal was signed as part of the conclusion of the US-Mexican War and Mexico ended up ceding half its territory was purely coincidental.

This is Daniel Freeman, the first Homesteader. Yes, he looked exactly like you'd picture him.
This is Daniel Freeman, the first Homesteader. Yes, he looked exactly like you’d picture him.
Therefore, by 1853, the mainland of the US had finally assumed its present boundaries. Considering the last 2,500+ km between the Mississippi and the West Coast were covered in the space of about 40 years, the government was now left with so much land it had no idea what to do with it. So like someone who’s just won the lottery, the US government did its best to give away the land as fast as possible. With the Homestead Act of 1863, Americans were able to claim 160 acres of cheap land, so long as they occupied it for five years. Whilst this did spark a massive wave of migration westwards, proper government divestment was thwarted by the sheer size of the US and the unsuitability of the western states for farming. What the government wanted, was an enormous number of small-holding individuals; however, the geography of the West simply didn’t allow for this style of land-intensive farming. Instead, you ended up with cattle, lots of cattle, being grazed over huge tracts of land.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
As the majority of farmers could afford to purchase sufficient land to graze cattle, they leased the rights of the federal government. A system that has by and large continued to this day.

The final piece of the conflict is conservation. Slowly, as the US finally filled out its borders, it slowly came to realise it was going to have to come to terms with “a closed space existence” (p. 755). You can see the first signs of this change with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first national park in the US and possibly the world. Of course, the further down the road of conservation the US government went, the more difficult the livelihoods of ranchers became. Even on the great swathes of land ranchers were allowed to lease, the restrictions were ever growing.

And so we arrive at the present day conflict. Just as the ranchers were once the first wave of a new philosophy of land management, displacing the Native American ways of life with treaty after treaty, now they find themselves as a holdout against yet another new philosophy, with their own ways of life being threatened by legal restriction after legal restriction.

One has to wonder whether they see the irony in it.

Although one can't help feeling any direct comparison to the signing of this treaty and grazing restrictions being enforced on ranchers in Oregon is probably a little exaggerated.
Although one can’t help feeling any direct comparison to the signing of this treaty and grazing restrictions being enforced on ranchers in Oregon is probably a little exaggerated.

Academic Sources

Anderson, TL & Hill, PJ 1975, “The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West”, The Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 163-179.

Billington, RA 1949, Westward Expansion: a history of the American frontier, The Macmillan Company, New York.

Zinn, H 2010, A people’s history of the United States, HarperCollins, New York.

  1. This is hardly surprising, as this is the side that’s closest to England. ↩

Environmentalism’s dark, troubled past

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So this time I'm writing from the perspective that this isn't a total charade.
So this time I’m writing from the perspective that this isn’t a total charade.

In last week’s post, in response to the Paris Climate Change Conference, I looked at some of the historic origins for our environmental troubles—basically, why humanity has spent so much of its time not caring about the environment. Before I move onto another topic, I feel I should balance it out with the other side of the coin: If we’ve cared so little for the environment for so long, where do we find the motivation for conferences like Paris—times when our nations’ governments come together and actually think they can do something about the environment? Surely there can’t be that much hot air in the world, or else the greenhouse effect would already be far more progressed.

Many, including CNN apparently, seem to believe the environmental movement began in the 60s. To be fair, if you click on that article, it opens with the story of a river so polluted it literally catches fire. That sticks out in your memory.

Others, such as the illustrious Encyclopaedia Britannica, are willing to trace modern environmentalism back to the Industrial Revolution.1 People who are choking to death under the pollution from the factories they’re working in wanting to clean things up a little? That seems pretty accurate and intuitive to me.

Sorry, what's wrong with living here? Credit: explorePAhistory.com
Sorry, what’s wrong with living here?
Credit: explorePAhistory.com
So instead, I’d like to talk about a much lesser known influence on environmentalism—colonialism.

Now, one of the hallmarks of modern environmentalism—that the state has an important role to play in protecting the environment via regulation and legislation—is literally ancient. Rome, for instance, had laws around the protection of water sources that were so elaborate that apparently we’re still discussing their finer legal ramifications today. Though this seems a little redundant, as they managed to pollute the Tiber River to the point where it was undrinkable. These were relatively piecemeal however, not even conceiving of the environment as a whole, let alone attempting to tackle environmental degradation holistically or systematically.

Richard Grove places large importance on the early colonial experience of tropical islands.2 He talks quite romantically about the experiences of the tropical paradises and the differences between utopias, edens, etc.. I’d explain the difference, but to be honest I skipped over it. His main argument, however, is basically this: as Western powers colonised tropical islands and exploited their resources, they devastated the local environment. Hardly controversial. Grove’s novel insight is that due to a variety of factors, most prominently that said islands were seen as self-contained paradises (or edens, or utopias—I lose track), colonial authorities, particularly those of a scientific bent, were suddenly able to imagine this devastation on a worldwide scale (or a quater-of-the-worldwide scale, in the case of the English). In fact, due to the widespread belief at the time that trees encouraged rainfall, this forms one what seems to be one of the earliest antecedents for modern conceptions of climate change, certainly on a global scale.

I'm not even going to try for a joke.
I’m not even going to try for a joke. Just go to Old Maps Online. Seriously, it’s a really cool website.
In response, according to Grove, the wide-ranging practice of forestry was established. Mauritius is the example he uses, as it’s where the “early environmental debate reached its most comprehensive form” and where local authorities displayed “the kind of rigorous scientific empiricism associated with mid-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany” (p. 9). Which is big surprise, as early-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany is renowned for its slap-dash scientific empiricism. Nevertheless, credit where credit’s due, local authorities did introduce a level of planning around land use hitherto unseen, with very specific restrictions on how much land could be felled and where.

At a time when a new scientific understanding of the world was expected to sweep-away old superstitious beliefs and usher in an age of Enlightenment, the idea that these great (white, middle-aged, wealthy) men could exert supreme control over their environment and in doing so save the civilised world held an understandably strong appeal (for white, middle-aged, wealthy men). Subsequently, via rather indirect routes, this trend of practising forestry and conservation spread to colonial authorities in India, where one of the largest-scale programs of forest conservation was undertaken. Truly, the amount of area set aside for this was phenomenal. According to Barton, in 1936 the British Empire covered a quarter of the land surface of the world, and a quarter of the Empire was set aside as forest reserves (the word “forest” here is fairly all-encompassing). I question his maths, but he finally offers us the figure of 8% of the world’s land surface being theoretically protected by the British Empire alone.

If you can imagine his hands spreading seeds rather than telephone wires, I think this gives a decent impression—Rhodes' boots stomping down on Africa are certainly accurate.
If you can imagine his hands spreading seeds rather than telephone wires, I think this gives a decent impression—Rhodes’ boots stomping down on Africa are certainly accurate.

In this way, colonialism forms an important, if unacknowledged, precedent for the modern environmental movement in the role it gave the state in creating “scientifically sound” plans around land and environmental use to preserve the environment and avoid catastrophic environmental disasters and even climate change (please do remember we’re talking about 18th century science, so “scientifically sound” is definitely a relative term in this context). Now, if only we could somehow gloss over the way colonial authorities used this somewhat noble ideal for oppression and social control…

Academic Sources
Barton, GA 2002. Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Grove, RH 1996. Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Guha, R & Gadgil M 1989. “State forestry and social conflict in British India”, Past & Present, no. 123, pp. 141-177.

Hughes, JD 1997. “Rome’s decline and fall: ecological mistakes?”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 121-125.

Wacke, A 2000. “Protection of the environment in Roman law”, Fundamina, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 1-24.

  1. Jokes aside, that’s actually a really great page for a summary of environmentalism, its many aspect and history. ↩
  2. A note on some of the authors I’m looking at today: Grove and Barton both read as strong apologists for colonialism, and this is coming from someone who’s happy to argue that colonialism=evil is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, I think within their works they raise some interesting issues that are well worth addressing. ↩