the task of man, as the historian Keith Thomas put it, was to “level the woods, till the soil, drive off the predators, kill the vermin, plough up the bracken and drain the fens”.
Or rather, having signed up for it, watch someone doing that over the rim of my teacup.
Tim
It’s still quite hot here in the autumn. So I’m drinking nice cold water sweetened with brekky juice.
‘drain the swamps.’ Interestingly I saw a documentary that said delta blues was associated with the delta between (Miss and Yazoo) because they’d only got round to the draining the swamps, building the levees clearing it of scrub and the consequent the bears and cougars, early 20th Century. That meant a newly imported very young workforce on the newly planted cotton fields that wholeheartedly embraced the new thing.
This could be because they are juveniles not yet ready to reproduce – redwoods live up to 3,000 years – or because their cones only usually open up in the heat of a forest fire.
Reminder that forest fires are part of a natural cycle that’s billions of years older than Man and yet which anti-science “Green” morons keep pretending is All Your Fault for being alive.
I’m all for “kill the vermin”…
I planted some coastal redwoods (sequoia sempervirens) next to my cricket pitch about 25 years ago. The largest is now 3 feet diameter at the base and 60 feet tall, they’re really motoring now. Going to be seriously impressive one day.
When you think about the Agricultural Revolution, and what a tenuous thing it was, comprising of countless generations of back-breaking labour to turn wild lands into farmland, the perennial problem of itinerant thieves looking to murder your entire tribe and steal your land, and thanklessly striving to improve crops and animals over centuries of careful breeding, it’s a wonder it took off.
People in the olden days were better people than the ones we see now. Nowadays we can’t get a power station built, because some chinless spunkdribble will tell you it’ll take ten years before anybody benefits, so why bother?
@Jim. Next to your cricket pitch? Blimey! You don’t get that sort of class at Thompson’s place!
“level the woods”: I once read a historian who commented on the southern march of the early Germans. They were too lazy, he said, to clear the woods and preferred to take land off people who’d done the hard work already.