As the previous lecture's discussion of Malthus suggests, people have been concerned about resource depletion for a long time. In fact, we have good archaeological evidence of some ancient civilizations that did collapse because of resource failures. Drought evidently destroyed the irrigation many of the irrigation-dependent cities of the Maya of southern Mexico and northern Guatamala over 1,000 years ago. Satellite radar imagery of the Sahara Desert reveals traces of the large-scale irrigation systems of an ancient North African society that vanished as their soils eroded away.
Historically, crises of resource depletion are generally a consequence of an incomplete property rights system, where critical resources are collectively owned (like Hardin's common) rather than privately owned. Many cultures have experienced the transition from a frontier world of practically limitless resources to a world of resource scarcity. Property rights are largely unnecessary if resources are limitless, and are typically established only as resources get scarce. The American frontier experience is a case in point.
Some random riffs on American history
The argument over which Europeans first discovered America isn't quite settled yet, although we know it wasn't Columbus. Archaeologists have excavated 1,000-year-old Viking sites in Newfoundland. America's fisheries attracted Europeans to the New World hundreds of years before Columbus arrived at what is now the Dominican Republic. When John Cabot "discovered" Nova Scotia, he encountered a vast fleet of Basque cod-fishing boats there, including on-shore salting operations. The Basques had been fishing the American coast for cod for hundreds of years, commuting seasonally from the Bay of Biscay, but kept it a trade secret.
The first Europeans triggered the worst epidemiological crisis in human history. They introduced European diseases into the Native American tribes they encountered, causing smallpox epidemics that decimated many tribes before European settlers were barely aware of them. Other major killers were measles, influenza and typhus. Settlerss also brought diphtheria, tuberculosis, mumps, pertussis, plague. The native populations had absolutely no immunological defenses against the lethal microbes to which Europeans were well adapted. Europeans basically conquered America's aboriginal societies with disease, not guns. The small companies of Spanish conquistadors led by Pizarro and Cortez could never have conquered entire empires (Inca, Aztec) if they hadn't already been nearly wiped out by disease. Mexico's pre-Columbian population is estimated to have been about 20 million; by 1618 it was about 1.6 million. Within a decade of Columbus's first encounter with the inhabitants of Hispaniola, over 90 percent of the island's population had died from smallpox. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1999) provides some remarkable insights into the causes and consequences of this crisis. Native American and European populations had evolved entirely separately for tens of thousands of years, developing their own diseases and resistances to them. Columbus's hosts in the Carribean did send back a disease of their own that ravaged Europe for a while: siphilis.
The first European pioneers into the North American interior were fur trappers, followed by farmers, then tradespeople. America's immigrant communities tended to have a natural distaste for regulation of resource use. Immigrants to America were land-hungry, often dispossessed of land in their home countries, resentful of land closure, poaching laws and other regulations that clearly favored privileged landowners. Consequently many resources remained in common rather than private ownership until they were overused and degraded.
From the beginning of European settlement, North America's colonial economies were largely based on resource extraction: meat, furs, tobacco, grain, fisheries and timber. This was where America's comparative advantage vis-a-vis Europe lay. Britain was so de-forested that the British Navy was completely dependent on America for its ship timbers, including masts harvested from marked "crown trees"
American soils were fresh and highly productive, although crops such as cotton and tobacco depleted the soils of many Southern farms, forcing many farmers to migrate westward to new land. Incentives for soil conservation were weak or non-existant: new land in the West was cheap and plentiful, and soil conservation techniques were not widely known.
At the time of independence, the US economy was mostly agrarian. The Federal government's land disposal policy, established in 1796, promoted rapid privatization of newly-acquired public lands. Almost the entire country east of the Appalachians was clear-cut before 1800. As the population increased rapidly due to immigration, industries developed in coastal and river towns, borrowing new technologies from Britain's Industrial Revolution. The Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to eastern coastal cities and the Atlantic, was completed in 1825.
The Louisiana Purchase (1803) added the entire Mississippi River drainage system to the US. It was a bargain opportunity for Jefferson: Napoleon has just conquered Spain, placed his brother on the Spanish throne, and needed to liquidate Spanish assets, including Spain's Louisiana Territory, in order to raise more cash to sustain his military campaign in Europe. Settlement of the Louisiana Territory became a strategic necessity: if the US couldn't settle its lands fast enough, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Russian settlers with no allegiance to the US who would.
Immediately after completing the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark to find a water route across the country to the Pacific Ocean. They ascended the Mississippi system from St. Louis north and westward, crossed the Continental Divide over the Bitterroot Mountains into the Columbia River system, and reached the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia River. They were preceded everywhere by European diseases that had all but wiped out many of the tribes they encountered, and they found Indians possessing European trade goods obtained from trappers all along the way. Lewis catalogued a large number of new animal and plant species, but they never did discover a functional trade route.
The US later got Florida and New Orleans from Spain in 1819, annexed Texas in 1845, got what is now Oregon, Washington and Idaho from Britain in 1846, and won what is now California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona from Mexico in 1848. These acquisitions largely completed the continental US.
Throughout the 18th century the Federal government was perpetually land-rich and cash-poor, and desperate to sell off public lands for whatever they would bring. The 1849 California gold rush brought tens of thousands of miners to California, and gave the US economy a badly-needed monetary stimulus that ultimately helped the Union finance its military defeat of the Confederacy.
The Morrill Act (1862) granted universities in each state large western landholdings which were sold off to finance creation of the Land Grant Colleges (UD's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources is one of these). The Transcontinental Railroad Act (1862) financed the rapid development of American railroads with grants of alternating 1-mile-square blocks of land within 6 miles of any rail line they chose to build. The Homestead Act (1862) granted 160 acres for free to any settler who simply agreed to farm the land for five years. The first transcontinental rail line was completed in 1868.
The General Mining Law (1872) granted mining companies the mineral rights on Federal lands for as little as $2.50 per acre; the law is still in effect today, and claims can still be had for $5/acre! The River and Harbor Act (1875) charged the Army Corps of Engineers with dredging and other large-scale water projects to promote navigation and flood control. Flooding and soil erosion were increasingly problematic as watersheds were stripped of their vegetative cover, and lost their soil and water retention capacities.
Many US ecosystems were invaded by various exotic species that quickly displaced many native species. Exotic plant pests include purple loosestrife, water hyacinth, Rosa rugosa, Phragmites, Russian olive, cheat grass and tumbleweed. Exotic animal pests include pigeons, starlings and Norway rats. Many grass species of the great American tallgrass prairie have been driven almost to extinction by the invasion of European grasses. The great bison herds were almost completely eliminated by 1880. Only semi-arid lands remained available for homesteading. Western rangelands were rapidly degraded by heaving livestock grazing. Market hunting and then poaching decimated many of America's native bird and animal species.
The development of the North American continent has completely transformed the landscape and disrupted virtually every ecosystem. In the last three centuries Americans drained most American wetlands, dammed up rivers for navigation and industry, clearcut most of the Eastern forest, ploughed up and degraded the prairie soils, overgrazed much of the semi-arid West, and exterminated countless native species.
The 20th Century and the Rise of a Conservation Ethic
By the close of the 19th century there was a growing awareness that the American frontier was closing, and that America's natural resources were no longer unlimited. A new conservation ethic gradually took hold in the US. In 1872, thanks to the efforts of conservationists such as John Muir and the photographer William Jackson, Congress established the first National Park at Yellowstone, setting aside 2.25 million acres as a "pleasuring ground" for Americans. Concerned about the rapid depletion of timber, New York State created the Adirondack Reserve in 1888, stipulating that it should remain "forever wild.". Congress passed the Forest Reserves Act in 1891, which authorized the President to establish what would later become National Forests.
Teddy Roosevelt, a conservation-minded outdoorsman, became president in 1901, and appointed Gifford Pinchot as head of the new US Forest Service in 1905. Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, authorizing the President to preserve lands with unique scientific or historic value. Responding to the collapse of migratory geese populations in the major flyways, the US negotiated the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada, which Congress ratified in 1916. The National Park Service was created in 1916. In 1924 the Forest Service established the first National Wilderness area.
At the start of the 20th century the US conservation movement had a largely utilitarian orientation. Gifford Pinchot promoted a "multiple use" management objective for public lands--a principle the Forest Service still subscribes to today. This basically means developing public lands for maximum economic return. John Muir favored a stricter preservationist approach, rejecting Pinchot's utilitarian attitude in favor of keeping large tracts of public land in a pristine state.
The Great Depression brought great economic hardship, but Roosevelt's New Deal programs included some important new resource conservation initiatives, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put thousands of Americans to work in reforestation.and other conservation efforts. Drought and wind erosion in the Dust Bowl motivated creation of the Soil Conservation Service and passage of the Taylor Grazing Act (1934)--the first-ever regulation of practices on public grazing lands. The Taylor Act established what eventually became the Bureau of Land Management, which now controls more land in the US (268 million acres) than the Forst Service (191 million acres), the Fish & Wildlife Service (86 million acres), the National Park Service (73 million acres), or any other agency.
The 1970's brought new public attention to long-standing environmental and resource issues in the US. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) explained the environmental costs of the pesticide DDT, a persistent, bio-accumulating broad-spectrum toxin that was subsequently banned in most countries. The National Environmental Policy Act (1969) was the first in a long series of modern Federal legislative initiatives to protect America's environment and manage its natural resources more efficiently. We will discuss modern US policies in a subsequent lecture.