Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Food is the urgent and recurrent need of individuals and of society. It dictates their activities in relation to their land at every stage of economic development, fixes the locality of the encampment or village, and determines the size of the territory from which sustenance is drawn. The length of residence in one place depends upon whether the springs of its food supply are perennial or intermittent, while the abundance of their flow determines how large a population a given piece of land can support.
Hunter and fisher folk, relying almost exclusively upon what their land produces of itself, need a large area and derive from it only an irregular food supply, which in winter diminishes to the verge of famine. The transition to the pastoral stage has meant the substitution of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance from savagery to civilization.108 From the standpoint of economics, the forward stride has consisted in the application of capital in the form of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde;109 from the standpoint of alimentation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow more steadily and rapidly; from the standpoint of geography, in the marked reduction in the per capita amount of land necessary to yield an adequate and stable food supply. Pastoral nomadism can support in a given district of average quality from ten to twenty times as many souls as can the chase; but in this respect is surpassed from twenty to thirty-fold by the more productive agriculture. While the subsistence of a nomad requires 100 to 200 acres of land, for that of a skillful farmer from 1 to 2 acres suffice.110 In contrast, the land of the Indians living in the Hudson Bay Territory in 1857 averaged 10 square miles per capita; that of the Indians in the United States in 1825, subsidized moreover by the government, 1-1/4 square miles.111
With transition to the sedentary life of agriculture, society makes a further gain over nomadism in the closer integration of its social units, due to permanent residence in larger and more complex groups; in the continuous release of labor from the task of mere food-getting for higher activities, resulting especially in the rapid evolution of the home; and finally in the more elaborate organization in the use of the land, leading to economic differentiation of different localities and to a rapid increase in the population supported by a given area, so that the land becomes the dominant cohesive force in society. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]
Agriculture is adopted at first on a small scale as an adjunct to the chase or herding. It tends therefore to partake of the same extensive and nomadic character112 as these other methods of gaining subsistence, and only gradually becomes sedentary and intensive. Such was the superficial, migratory tillage of most American Indians, shifting with the village in the wake of the retreating game or in search of fresh unexhausted soil. Such is the agriculture of the primitive Korkus in the Mahadeo Hills in Central India. They clear a forested slope by burning; rake over the ashes in which they sow their grain, and reap a fairly good crop in the fertilized soil. The second year the clearing yields a reduced product and the third year is abandoned. When the hamlet of five or six families has exhausted all the land about it, it moves to a new spot to repeat the process.113
The same superficial, extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Germans at the beginning of their history. Tacitus says of them, Arva per annos mutant et superest ager,114 commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity, the agriculture which accompanies it tends to become fixed, owing to the few localities blessed with an irrigating stream to moisten the soil. These spots, generally selected for the winter residence, have their soil enriched, moreover, by the long stay of the herd and thus avoid exhaustion.115 Often, however, in enclosed basins the salinity of the irrigating streams in their lower course ruins the fields after one or two crops, and necessitates a constant shifting of the cultivated patches; hence agriculture remains subsidiary to the yield of the pastures. This condition and effect is conspicuous along the termini of the streams draining the northern slope of the Kuen Lun into the Tarim basin.116
The desultory, intermittent, extensive use of the land practised by hunters and nomads tends, under the growing pressure of population, to pass into the systematic, continuous, intensive use practised by the farmer, except where nature presents positive checks to the transition. The most obvious check consists in adverse conditions of climate and soil. Where agriculture meets insurmountable obstacles, like the intense cold of Arctic Siberia and Lapland, or the alkaline soils of Nevada and the Caspian Depression, or the inadequate rainfall of Mongolia and Central Arabia, the land can produce no higher economic and social groups than pastoral hordes. Hence shepherd folk are found in their purest types in deserts and steppes, where conditions early crystallized the social form and checked development. [Rainfall map chap. XIV.]
Adverse conditions of climate and soil are not the only factors in this retardation. The very unequal native equipment of the several continents with plant and animal forms likely to accelerate the advance to nomadism and agriculture also enters into the equation. In Australia, the lack of a single indigenous mammal fit for domestication and of all cereals blocked from the start the pastoral and agricultural development of the natives. Hence at the arrival of the Europeans, Australia presented the unique spectacle of a whole continent with its population still held in the vise of nature. The Americas had a limited variety of animals susceptible of domestication, but were more meagerly equipped than the Old World. Yet the Eskimo failed to tame and herd the reindeer, though their precarious food-supply furnished a motive for the transition. Moreover, an abundance of grass and reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina), and congenial climatic conditions favored it especially for the Alaskan Eskimo, who had, besides, the nearby example of the Siberian Chukches as reindeer herders.117 The buffalo, whose domesticability has been proved, was never utilized in this way by the Indians, though the Spaniard Gomara writes of one tribe, living in the sixteenth century in the southwestern part of what is now United States territory, whose chief wealth consisted in herds of tame buffalo.118 North America, at the time of the discovery, saw only the dog hanging about the lodges of the Indians; but in South America the llama and alpaca, confined to the higher levels of the Andes (10,000 to 15,000 feet elevation) were used in domestic herds only in the mountain-rimmed valleys of ancient Peru, where, owing to the restricted areas of these intermontane basins, stock-raising early became stationary,119 as we find it in the Alps. Moreover, the high ridges of the Andes supported a species of grass called ichu, growing up to the snowline from the equator to the southern extremity of Patagonia. Its geographical distribution coincided with that of the llama and alpaca, whose chief pasturage it furnished.120 In contrast, the absence of any wild fodder plants in Japan, and the exclusion of all foreign forms by the successful competition of the native bamboo grass have together eliminated pastoral life from the economic history of the island.
The Old World, on the other hand, furnished an abundant supply of indigenous animals susceptible of domestication, and especially those fitted for nomadic life, such as the camel, horse, ass, sheep and goat. Hence it produced in the widespread grasslands and deserts of Europe, Asia, and Africa the most perfect types of pastoral development in its natural or nomadic form. Moreover, the early history of the civilized agricultural peoples of these three continents reveals their previous pastoral mode of life.
North and South America offered over most of their area conditions of climate and soil highly favorable to agriculture, and a fair list of indigenous cereals, tubers, and pulses yielding goodly crops even to superficial tillage. Maize especially was admirably suited for a race of semi-migratory hunters. It could be sown without plowing, ripened in a warm season even in ninety days, could be harvested without a sickle and at the pleasure of the cultivator, and needed no preparation beyond roasting before it was ready for food.121 The beans and pumpkins which the Indians raised also needed only a short season. Hence many Indian tribes, while showing no trace of pastoral development, combined with the chase a semi-nomadic agriculture; and in a few districts where geographic conditions had applied peculiar pressure, they had accomplished the transition to sedentary agriculture.
Every advance to a higher state of civilization has meant a progressive decrease in the amount of land necessary for the support of the individual, and a progressive increase in the relations between man and his habitat. The stage of social development remaining the same, the per capita amount of land decreases also from poorer to better endowed geographical districts, and with every invention which brings into use some natural resource. The following classification122 illustrates the relation of density of population to various geographic and socio-economic conditions.
Hunter tribes on the outskirts of the habitable area, as in Arctic America and Siberia, require from 70 to 200 square miles per capita; in arid lands, like the Kalahari Desert and Patagonia, 40 to 200 square miles per capita; in choice districts and combining with the chase some primitive agriculture, as did the Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois Indians, the Dyaks of Borneo and the Papuans of New Guinea, 1/2 to 2 square miles per capita.
Pastoral nomads show a density of from 2 to 5
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