President Donald Trump The World of Books
The news that President Trump is to withdraw the US from the Paris Accord on Climate Change may already be last month’s news, but a few comments of a cultural nature about the background might not be out of place.
It is to be hoped that given his hectic schedule the President will find the time to read the gift he received from Pope Francis, a copy of the encyclical letter Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home).
The truth is that though it has been one of the most powerful states and richest economies in the world, the US record on environmental matters is a very mixed and divided one. There is the admirable legacy in seeing that some of the continents wilderness areas are preserved, not for the future as is so often said, nor for the benefit of tourists, but for the care of our common home as the Pope has it.
Some of the great ecological disasters have taken place in the United States. Take for instance the appalling disaster that overtook the state of Oklahoma in the 1920s.
I first read about this in a book which has proved to be one of the most influential in my life: Edward Hyam’s Soil and Civilisation (Thames and Hudson, 1952). It may be an old book but it is never less one still relevant to our age. Indeed it is a very great book.
The reference to “civilisation” may be a little misleading, for what he is really writing about is the vital link that has always existed between the survival of human culture and the soil itself from which so much of our nourishment and our very life is drawn.
Themes
One of the themes of the book is what happens when that vital link is destroyed, through greed and arrogance of a few. Hyams, who also wrote on gardening, devotes one of his chapters to showing how the true health of a culture depends on its relations with the soil. The disaster in Oklahoma is one of his examples. This disaster is already familiar to may through John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, or the film version of it by John Ford.
A bit of history will make it all clear. On September 16, 1893 the Federal government threw open a long strip of disputed land in the Oklahoma panhandle to be settled. This is often seen in terms of perhaps the last great heroic event in the “taming” or “opening-up” of the West, or whatever cant phrase was current at the time. The Indians were resettled further west on marginal land.
The new settlers quickly set to work, turning the former open prairie into ploughed land. But as many of the original stakeholders moved further west to California, the land was ploughed over constantly without proper feeding or rest, the common care which ever gardener knows about.
With little more than a generation, their soil was dead, raped and ruined in the vivid language employed by ecologist of today. But it was hard for leaders to blame the people in a democracy for their role in making the disaster that overcame them.
It became the celebrated “dust bowl” from which Steinbeck’s Oakies are fleeing. The wonderful literary and cinematic record of the disaster was topped by Pare Lorentz documentary The Plough that Broke the Plains, and by vivid images of disaster taken for the Farm Administration Bureau.
Government
But the US government and its misguided people were not alone. In the Soviet Union a similar disaster happened as recorded by a famous example of Soviet realism Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov. There, too, a dust bowl was created, aided also by the fraudulent anti-genetic claims of the scientist Trofim Lysenko. Currently in Amazonia other hands are at work destroying the forest to create pasture and farm that in its turn will become a desert from which any initial profit will go elsewhere.
Climate change induced by man’s activity is only part of the problem. The exploitation of the Earth through greed and ignorance is the real problem. Promised jobs and production mean improvements rarely eventuate. President Trump has a lot of history to catch up on when he has finished Laudato Si’. He could do no better than Soil and Civilisation. But, alas, it seems he is not a reading person.