Eating Dirt Read online

  But eventually the societies of the Fertile Crescent stumbled and fell. After a few thousand years of aggressive agriculture, the land was worn out and depleted. Cutters had cut, and in their wake, farmers had plundered a rich accumulation of fertile sediments—what nature had taken millennia to bank. They’d logged their highlands and headwaters, causing heavy siltation downstream. Riverbeds clogged. Irrigation systems broke down, and the fields became salinized. Cereal grains refused to grow in the new salty conditions. Food yields dropped. Unable to feed themselves, Mesopotamian city-states became vulnerable to invaders. Today the cradle of civilization lies in Iraq, which when seen from space looks not green or blue but desert-brown. The once-abundant marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates valley are almost entirely gone; only 10 percent remain.

  The sacred trees featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh are believed to be the cedars of Lebanon, which once grew with fabled abundance in the region between Beirut and Tripoli. This was the land of the Phoenicians, who owed their wealth and status as a maritime trading society to the forests. Their cedars were a rare source of large-dimension, prime-grade wood, exactly the kind required for shipbuilding. But the Phoenicians hadn’t always been a seafaring culture. Around 4,500 BCE they emigrated from eastern deserts to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. They brought Mesopotamian farming methods with them and put these practices to good use in their new home. They tilled rampantly along the coastal margin. They cut down and traded away their upland forests to neighboring peoples who lacked trees of their own.

  As the population burgeoned the Phoenicians crept up the hillsides in search of more arable land, just as the Sumerians and Babylonians had done before them. But as they discovered, once the trees were gone, the rain washed the soils away. They terraced heavily to compensate for the loss, but in time so much fertile dirt washed out to sea that Phoenicia was forced to import much of its food from colonies at the far reaches of the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians lived this way, weakened and overextended, until their defeat by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.

  The cedar forests of Lebanon were important to many civilizations: Babylonians and Phoenicians, Assyrians and Ottomans. Cedar wood is mentioned seventy-six times in the Bible. The wood was used for the construction of temples and burnt as offerings in religious ceremonies. Egyptians used cedar in their mummification rituals. Castles were built from it. To have this wood inside one’s house was a symbol of noble extravagance. The Lebanese flag still bears the silhouette of a cedar tree as its national logo, even though the original forest—two thousand square miles of it—has dwindled down to a handful of reserves surrounded by dry, deforested hills.

  Logging has always gone hand in hand with civilization. It’s a part of who we are, how we’ve carved a home for ourselves in the world. But historically, the cost has been more than just the loss of scenery. Some scholars have argued that it is the razing of the forests, followed by long agrarian abuse, that has contributed to the collapse of many a now-defunct civilization. Especially in the Mediterranean, where the people once depended on trees to hold moisture, to keep the creeks and rivers running throughout the year. And when the trees go, the earth—the very foundational dirt—follows shortly thereafter.

  According to the stories of classical Rome, the Mediterranean basin was once thoroughly forested with pine, oak, cedar, fir, and juniper. Both the Greeks and the Romans lived among the trees and appreciated their thousand uses. But when they prepared for war, entire forests were sacrificed for the construction of triremes—those Hellenistic warships with wooden hulls, masts, and oars—at the peak rate of four or five boats per day. The original timberlands of Europe and Asia Minor may have been thousands of years old, but the life span of a Roman ship was a mere decade. No matter the outcome of battles, the fate of wooden warships was always the same. They burned, were left to rot, or ended up at the bottom of the sea.

  Rome fought wars over timber, and whole populations were defeated and subjugated in order that the empire might secure valuable natural resources. Wood was one of the reasons the Roman Empire became so huge. Once colonial territories had been cleared, new land became available for agriculture to feed growing urban populations. The Romans were responsible for much of the deforestation of Europe, and this is also one of their legacies, along with crumbling aqueducts and ruins. Not until the collapse of the empire did some of the woodlands in the outer reaches of the Roman territories begin to make a comeback after an absence of a few hundred years. Just in time for the assaults of the Middle Ages, when the population of Europe quadrupled and its citizens stripped the countryside of half of its remaining tree cover.

  The search for untapped forests is one of the reasons people have been attacking and sacking and invading and crusading, as far as we know, since the beginning of recorded time. If history is any indication, we’ve never been particularly nice to our woodlands. Over and over again, independently and through time, it’s as if people and forests were destined to exist in inverse proportion. We revere trees, adore their shade, their wood, and even the rustling, keening sounds they make in the wind. But we also can’t bear to leave them standing. Deforestation has been the price we’ve paid for warmth, light, and shelter since Prometheus stole fire from the gods. And for millions of dark nights and cold winters it’s seemed like a worthwhile price to pay for survival.

  Wood burns easily and produces heat. It also floats. It’s either soft or hard, depending on what you need it for. It is an insulator and warms to the touch. And when we cease to find it useful, it vanishes, recycling back down into the earth. A tree’s greatest strength is its tough, woody stem, which lifts its foliage skyward. But this is also a weakness, for with rigidity comes stasis. A tree can’t run away. Indeed it puts up no defense at all to our saws and axes. You can’t build a wall around a forest, hide it from poachers, or lock it away in a vault.

  Perhaps our fatal flaw is inquisitiveness. We don’t know how to let an opportunity go by. If an object exists in this world, it can’t stay intact, unexamined, unused. We’re biological capitalists. If it lives we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ve got to hunt, cook, and taste it. Whatever it is, we’ve got to harness and ride it, pluck it and transform it, shave it down and build it up. We just have to glue, mold, freeze, and melt it into something else that hardly resembles that thing in its virgin state. We’ve got to get our hands on every last scrap and transform it into something useful, even if we have a million of those things already. We’ve got to cut it down and wring it out until the final ounce is gone.

  ONCE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS had reached the Americas, the powers of Europe turned their attention to the western edge of the world. Flags were planted and entire territories claimed for the thrones of Europe and the church. Not much was known about the Native people. Or even the land beyond the beaches, which stretched for thousands of miles farther than ever imagined.

  Within a hundred years of first contact Europeans began to arrive on New World shores and to populate the continent anew. First the explorers and then the missionaries, the pioneers, and the pilgrims. They imported a totally new mode of treading the earth, a radical departure from the ways of life that had existed there for thousands of years before. Old World immigrants carried seeds and plant cuttings. They brought domesticated animals. Metallurgy and gunpowder. With these technologies and introduced species they imported the means to clear and build, to trample, plow, cut, and churn.

  For Europeans the dominion of humans on Earth was deeply ingrained in Christianity. In the entropy of the wilderness they saw original sin. According to this worldview they were predestined not just to arrive in the New World but to turn it up and strip it down before reforming it totally. This way of thinking has persisted right into modern forestry. For what is a clear-cut if not a fresh start? An opportunity to make a brand-new forest that is neither chaotic nor wastefully decadent. All the trees of a plantation are the same age and size—a convenient, improved design.

  America’s first c
olonists endured rustic living conditions, disease, and sometimes even starvation. But quite a few discovered not a cold, tangled wilderness or hostile terrain but a well-spaced forest, a sun-dappled, airy woodland. In many spots on the eastern seaboard new arrivals disembarked into grassy meadows, as if they’d been ready-made by nature for both pasture and plow. These forests were open and fertile—symbolic, it must have seemed, of the New World itself.

  Soon enough immigrants began to arrive from all stations and walks of life. Puritans and yeomen, indentured laborers and wealthy citizens with a hankering for land. As they spread out they encountered uninhabited Native villages, as if everyone had picked up and fled. They found the overgrown remains of agricultural fields that still showed signs of furrowing. This must have seemed fortuitous, if not divinely manifested—to arrive, after such a long and uncertain journey across the Atlantic, to find all the heavy lifting had already been done.

  These amenable landscapes had little to do with the continent’s natural disposition. They were modified environments, created by Native societies over many generations before the influx of Europeans. Indeed, aboriginal people all over the Americas had made extensive renovations to their territories. What they lacked in steel and beasts of burden they made up for with flames. From Amazonia to Canada, fire was both axe and scythe. They burned their lands at regular short- and long-term intervals. Fire kept the forests in check. It opened clearings so that crops could be planted. Freshly burnt meadows sprouted back with tender grasses—fodder for deer and other game, which greatly enhanced hunters’ luck. Shrubs also proliferated, and these provided berries and medicinal herbs.

  And so the New World was not an insect-infested, ungroomed wilderness so much as an outdoor living room, a partially domesticated space. The local inhabitants weren’t hunter-gathering savages, picking randomly for forage, eating whatever got in the way of their arrows. Neither did they live in a pagan idyll, perfectly in tune with nature. They were just as willing to bend the land to their will as the Europeans were, though they did it in different ways. Regular broadcast burning improved their food stores and reduced workloads. It allowed them to build complex, well-populated societies. These cultures planted trees. They logged. They collected firewood, sometimes aggressively. Occasionally they even exploited their environment to the point of collapse.

  But almost as soon as the Old World met the New, a Pandora’s box of diseases began to wreak its devastations across both North and South America. Little more than a century and a half after the arrival of Columbus both continents were all but emptied of their original inhabitants. Up to 90 percent of indigenous populations had been decimated by deadly plagues—especially influenza, smallpox, and measles—to which the locals had no immunity. New immigrants weren’t the conquerors of an undiscovered country so much as its secondary inhabitants. Inheritors of a geography that had been shaped and mellowed long before their arrival. If the land looked wild at all, it was because the fire keepers had reduced in numbers to the point of near extinction. In their absence, the woods regenerated. The trees reclaimed the grasslands, and North America became more forested than it had been for ages.

  By the seventeenth century, the new Americans had made serious inroads into New England’s fine oak stands. Oak was cut for barrels, containers of choice for many an exported commodity. It was used for ships’ masts and hulls, lumber and charcoal. New England hardwoods were sent back to Europe by the shipload to feed the needs of a motherland that had long ago exhausted her domestic stocks. Plantation farming in the South also demanded clearing huge parcels of wooded land. But despite the many practical uses of wood, most of the primary forests of the colonies went up in smoke. To keep warm in the winter, a family could burn up to thirty cords of firewood in one year, all of it sent up the stovepipe or the chimney. By the time the colonies declared independence from the British, the forests of the eastern seaboard had been utterly transformed.

  By 1850, the population of the United States had increased tenfold. Once the first American states had been settled, frontiersmen and women moved into the territories in search of open terrain. A man could claim title by clearing a patch of forest and throwing up a log cabin, that quintessentially North American pioneer dwelling. Settlers pushed into the Midwest, cutting as they went. The forested frontier receded. As eastern forests became depleted, the sawmill towns of New England dried up and disappeared or were supplanted by the factories of the industrial age.

  But the Great Lakes states had white pine, and lots of it. As American cities began a phase of furious development, new logging towns sprang up in the Midwest to fuel all the building, smelting, and shipping. Soon enough, these new and growing towns required transportation links and hubs. Next came the age of the iron horse. Railroads consumed obscene amounts of wood, even before the steel had been melted, poured, and cast. By 1880 there were 100,000 miles of track in the United States. Each mile rested atop more than two thousand wooden ties.

  Logging passed from the hands of individual woodsmen into corporate boardrooms. The timber business always seemed to require a fresh new site, a virgin source, which it consumed before moving on to the next locale. In time, America’s white pine forests thinned, too. Logger barons shifted their gaze to untapped forests in the West. Great Lakes towns were left in environmental and economic ruin as the lumbering wave passed through like a locust plague in slow motion. It was an industry that seemed to contain the seeds of its own betrayal. The bust implicit in the boom.

  By 1900 half the original forests in the United States were gone. Industrial logging finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Just in time, at the start of the Great Depression, for the invention of the world’s first mass-produced chain saw.

  WE’RE UNDER the gun, production-wise, says Adam at the morning meeting. So it’s going to be an extra long shift.

  Everyone groans. For some reason we are always under the gun or behind the eight ball, though it is tough to imagine planting trees at gunpoint or even to explain why reforestation need be frantic when in fact it is a gentle occupation. The seedlings have nothing to do once they’ve been stuck in the ground but grow for a whole human lifetime.

  And, he adds, I want you guys to tell me when I’m driving like an asshole.

  Adam usually gets us to work and home again as if it’s an emergency. He attacks the task like a drag racer, pupils zipping back and forth across the road from object to object, stone to corner to puddle. He points his forehead over the wheel, eating the road with his eyes. Only two weeks remain on this contract in Holberg, and after that we will begin anew in a fresh locale.

  We hardly ever tell him to slow down. We can’t get home fast enough, even though it’s not home, not really, not in any committed sense of the word. It’s the place where we gather our food and dirty laundry. The place where we lather and feed and smoke up and then crash into bed like tired waves gliding their way to the shore. Rarely do we tell Adam to ease off on the gas. But there are times when we think, I’ll just shut my eyes.

  One afternoon, Helen rides in the passenger’s seat—as she often does, since they have a nice way about them, Adam and Helen. They share the fond, silly banter of grown-ups who are romantically immune and therefore safe in each other’s company. Three guys ride in the back seat: Pierre, Kyle, and the new kid with poet glasses who earned the nickname Quick Dry after wearing summer trousers and an acrylic sweater to a freak spring snowstorm. Their luggage sits heaped in the truck box, and it jostles in time with the chassis.

  The sun dips. The view out the window is beige rock and rushing cut block. Then forest, cut block, and forest again, like curtains parting, one after another. Every time they turn their ears to the windows, a different earthly music drones by. The open air of the clear-cut, the low shush of tree trunks thrumming past. They careen from the cut block back to the village of Holberg. A sunset, so rare in winter, turns the sky from cool pink to molten yellow. The outdoors looks transformed on warm afternoons like this, a remi
nder that the sun is shifting its attentions between hemispheres.

  Adam and crew have worked late, and the sunset beams at a near-horizontal slant. Their truck tears around a corner, ripping a line of dust through the afternoon calm. The tires bump and shudder over corrugated ruts. They lift over a rise. As they round the bend the cab is set ablaze with oblique golden light. The windshield is filmed with layers of rain and road dust that no one has bothered to clean. Adam squints into it. Helen shields her eyes with the back of her hand. The sun blinds them all for a floating second, so they can’t tell where they are, as if dangled in time and space.

  The truck plunges abruptly into shadow. From bright blitz to sudden dark relief, all the crannies and intricate contours of the landscape resume all at once. Adam stomps on the brakes. A streak of roadside grass. The truck whistles by one of those quarries at the side of the road that engineers use for road building. A rock face blown out of the ground with dynamite, a deep pond filled with stagnant rainwater that could be shallow or bottomless or rimmed by jellied clouds of tadpole eggs.

  When the tires leave the gravel, all the truck’s passengers lift from the seats, momentarily cut free from pull of the earth. They can’t see the water, but perhaps they smell it underneath them, feel moist air touch their skin. The engine whines. Clothing lifts away from limbs. Body hair stands straight. There is the tug of centrifugal force on the skin. The sudden clenching of muscle. And that peculiar cool detachment of those who’ve succumbed to fate and small errors.

  Adam hits the buttons on the armrest with his fist, and all the windows in the truck hum down. The cab billows with the strange wind of a roller coaster, blowing everyone’s hair around in confused gusts. Later, it will occur to Helen: He thought to do that. As if he’d done all of this before, crashed a truck into a pond only to discover that the openings fail once the electronics have submerged. Or as if he’d read it in a survival manual.