IRRIGATION: Adumbrating Its Evils
Environmental Resources
Dr. M. Mustoe

Water box on reclaimed desert lands Eastern Washington Photo ca 1970 by J. Mathews

In 1864 George Perkins Marsh wrote a seminal work on the implications of the impact human beings can incur upon the natural landscape. Man and Nature: Physical Geography As Modified by Human Action, was a possibilists treatise that realistically and scientifically set forth the understanding that committment to the land did not necessarily mean dominating it. Additionally, Marsh also suggested that what might look good on the surface, such as irrigation systems, for example, may not really reflect the impact these systems were having as they ate away at the environment in the long run. Just twenty short years later the German geographer, Freidrich Ratzel, would introduce a notion ultimately to become known as environmental determinism. In Antropogeography (1882) he would set the tone for a new paradigm about the evolution of human culture.

Steeped in teleological jargon and anecdotal research, the idea that man's cultural identity was locked into where he came from, literally....caught on quickly and in its own right dominated environmental and social thought in the United States well into the 1960s. At first one might think that of these two, environmental determinism, might be the most legitimate paradigm for establishing a starting point for a philosophical foundation working toward an environmental ethic. In fact, given the dependent role it places on culture and how culture is at predicated upon and at the mercy of the environment, it leaves little room for an objective human environmental ethic; since a good number of humans, by virtue of their environmental "upbringing", haven't the capacity for rational epistomological thought anyway.

Out of Ratzel's work came debutante Vassar graduate, Ellen Churchill Semple, not to be confused with Ellen G. White (1827-1915), founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Aimee Semple McPherson 1890 -1944, founder of the Four Square Gospel Church, or Mary Baker Eddy 1821-1910 founder of the Christian Science Church. It can get confusing, all those three-name-people (see Gilbert Gottfried!) just trying to keep you awake.......Although the three named Semple was not a religionist, she approached her subject with the zeal of someone on a mission from God. Two of her main works, (and she wrote voluminously) Influences of Geographic Environment (1911), and The Natural Environment in American History in its Geographic Conditions (1903) clearly represent her strong determinist leanings and both were steeped in the thought of her German mentor-teacher, Freidrich Ratzel.

The essence of Semple's determinist ideals is clearly stated in Influences in 1911 when she writes: "....the absence of artistic and poetic development in Switzerland and the Alpine lands can be ascribed to the overwhelming aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the mind. This reinforces the fact that, by contrast, the lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia, where nature is gentler, stimulating, appealing, and not overpowering, have produced many poets and artists. The facts are incontestable. They reappear in France in the geographical distribution of the awards made by the Paris Salon of 1896. Judged by these awards, the rough highlands of Savoy, Alpine Provence, the massive eastern Pyrenees, and the Auvergne Plateau, together with the barren peninsula of Brittany, are singularly lacking in artistic instinct, while art flourishes in all the river lowlands of France. Moreover, French men of letters, by the distribution of their birthplaces, are essentially products of fluvial valleys and plains, rarely of upland and mountain."

Really? Are the facts really incontestable? Is there any room for some negotiation of thought here? No! Not if you are owned and dictated to by the force of the natural environment. Because what Semple is expressing is that if you are literally born in the hills, you are not going to be literate. Is that the case? Why can't people born and raised at elevations above 2000 meters become poets, maybe even philosophers? The determinist attitude is steeped in paranoia, where every little issue becomes, a bigger issue and conversely the clarity of what real science sets out to do, namely, look at causal relationships, is set aside and eventually becomes clouded with agendas. Too quickly this kind of "science" usually slips into a debate around what is right, and what is wrong and neither is open for discussion, because the outcomes have already been set in stone. This perspective is clearly seen in the geopolitical aspiration of the determinist-based philosophies of the Nationalist Movement of Germany in the late 1930s. Adolph Hitler drew the term Lebensraum (living room) from Ratzel's writings. Accordingly, the Reich was right and all else was wrong.

The notion of an Aryan super race, evolving directly from the soils and climates of Germany is deeply rooted in determinist philosophy. Of course the outcome of this is known only trivially to some. For them it is simply a chapter in a history book called World War II. But to others, like my grandfather who died at Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria, it was quite a different story. As determinism's ugly head rears itself up under the auspices of the Nazi dictatorial regime a human era emerges that could only rival the times of Titus Flavius, for its fervor to rid the world of "inferior races" and those who might be thinking outside the plan. The idea was to ultimately dominate the world by virtue of this kind of psychosis. Who is in charge? Who owns who? Who is best?

In contrast to this determinist paradigm, the possibilist ideal suggests that human culture is not the product of superior soils, climates and elevations, but rather its inherent ability to make choices. There are possibilities out there based on our freedom to choose. Choices.....the one aspect of cultural anthropology which seems to separate us from the lower echelons of other animals. In the eighteenth century freedom to think and to engage in choice would become a central theme for the foundation of a new nation. But interestingly enough, this power of choice also comes with a price. Perhaps the cost can be summed up in a parallel to what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests about the power of understanding within the scope of a limited vocabulary. In essence he says, you can only know what you can cognitively dialog around. Your sense of your environment is limited to the capacity of your own vocabulary. Reality outside those terms, might exist, but not for you, because you have no way to rationalize (through vocabulary) the unexplainable. So, a pejorative question might be...how can you really "know God" if your vocabulary has no corollary for the eternal?

Interestingly enough George Perkins Marsh in his possibilist treatise, Man and the Land: Physical Geography As Modified by Human Action, begs an answer for the same question. Ironically, he starts this scientific text with a quote in the preface from a preacher: H. Bushnell, who states:

"Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionize the earth as man, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it............The material world is no evidence for God..."It is a poor Divinity which rests its claims to godhead on the instincts of the beaver or the sagacity of the ant."

The first question might be, why does Marsh start a text on the "evils of irrigation, (one of the text's sub titles) with a posit on a proof for the existence of Deity? Furthermore, what do ants and beavers have to do with proving whether God exists or not? And why do I care? Assuming that Bushnell does, he sets forth an assumption. That is, there is something inherently different about a beaver and you, there is something different about an ant and my son, my kitty cat and me. Furthermore it's implied that no anthropologist can deny it. No sociologist can get around it. No economist can invalidate it with a contract. What it is, is, the power of choice. And according to Bushnell, it is that latent power in humans that provides the proof for the existence of God. The ant is a slave to instinct, and "knows", in the evolution of its kind, nothing more than instinct. But human beings produce their environments, both mechanically and perceptually and they do it within a matrix of cognitive choices. They weigh things out intellectually, they place value on issues and resources, they manipulate and message them and exploit them to their own personal gain. In some cases it's strictly the physical environment that's controlled and manipulated. In other cases, it might be the cultural landscape and even people themselves.

I once had an office on the second floor of a community college in Texas. Texas is well endowed with ants. I like honey, and I keep honey in my office. One afternoon there was a column of ants coming up the wall stealing my honey. Obviously the ants, didn't take the elevator. Somehow it was determined by the ant army that I had honey in my office and well, no mater what it takes to get into Mustoe's office, honey is life, and so they went after it and somehow got in. The ants were, like the old lyric says, "doing what comes naturally". It is instinctual. Nothing more. Their 'reason" for stealing from me was simply for survival. They had no agenda against me. I had honey...but I was not obliged. So, I bought a can of RAID and flew over the ant army column. Needless to say, I wiped out the enemy. Who is in charge? Who makes the choices?

Consider running your hand under your table at the next restaurant you eat at, or even your desk in this room. You wouldn't want to do that? Why? Because you might run into some chewing gum down there. That's not where it is suppose to be, but that's where someone chose to put it. The instinct of the beaver assist the beaver in a consistent design for his dam. The sagacity of the ant forces the ant to go wherever there is a picnic. This is instinct, and nothing to write home to God about. But this entity who holds the RAID can, who decides he can own other human beings, and wipe some off the face of the map, who chooses to dump nuclear waste into the Barents Sea, or its garbage at the end of the culdisac......this entity, works his wonders in the "image of God"...well outside the scope of instinct. It's this entity who can choose to fly jet aircraft into buildings killing thousands, and "move on" like nothing has ever happened. This is why Bushnell suggests that the rationale for the deity of God rests with his human creation. For in them is a power that goes well beyond the instinctual responses of the little ant or the furry little beaver. Humans can exploit choices and for Bushnell, that one thing distinguishes people from the critters and conversely reveals the design and power of God.

In 1864, for Marsh to suggest that irrigation was evil, was almost evil in itself. After all, are we not to dominate and take dominion over the earth? Isn't bringing forth a material economy productive and righteous? Marsh said that there were choices to be made and that these choices needed to be made within the scope of understanding the long-term implications of our decisions. Irrigation, he suggests can lead to soil degradation and erosion, misuse of water resources, and inadvertent demands on other agricultural systems. But most of all, what Marsh was suggesting was there was latent power within the possibilist perspective; where choices, made outside the realm of paranoia, had to prevail so as to assure the sustainability of crucially limited resources. In the days of the homestead act, bankers and land speculators had one set of values and they had little to do with the ethical treatment of the land. Rather, it had everything to do with their "survival".

Aldo Leopold, in Sand County Almanac, even goes as far as to suggest that it's not enough to simply have the power of choice. We also need to make choices on the basis of ethical postulates and establish a true moral ground in dealing with the environmental ground to which we have been entrusted. Morality and ethics then must drive our value system, beyond the limits of materialism and possession for the sake of possession. In fact it will, by default. It must. Because even in the context of the most ridged of economic systems, the incredible human drive for choice and an environment of freedom in which to perform it, prevails as a character of human endeavor. It cannot be stopped. Even Nazi Germany thought, in all it's religious righteousness, that it would never fail. A land ethic is clearly needed to manage the resources of the future. Possession by dominion, rather than attempting to understand the intrinsic nature of our relationship to the environment has already proven its counter-productivity.

It is interesting to note that after the disaster at the Twin Towers in New York City, rescue officials found a little kitty cat at the bottom of all that rubble; a little gray coloured kitty cat feeding a litter of kittens. She was only doing what came naturally; what she had evolved to do, and that is, respond to her instinct. I think Bushnell would of delighted in this story. A little mommy kitty cat listening to what nature was telling her to do, in the midst of death, chaos and destruction brought on by a few humans listening to what God was supposedly telling them to do.