Americans and the land By JohnSteinbeck
I have often wondered at the savagery and thoughtlessness with which our early settlers approached this rich continent.  They came at it as though it were an enemy, which of course it was.  They burned the forests and changed the rainfall; they swept the buffalo from the plains, blasted the streams, set fire to the grass, and ran a reckless scythe through the virgin and noble timber.  Perhaps they felt that it was limitless and could never be exhausted and that a man could move on to new wonders endlessly.  Certainly there are many examples to the contrary, but to a large extent the early people pillaged the country as though they hated it, as though they held it temporarily and might be driven off at any time.
This tendency toward irresponsibility persists in very many of us today; our rivers are poisoned by reckless dumping of sewage and toxic industrial wastes, the air of our cities is filthy and dangerous to breathe from the belching of uncontrolled products from combustion of coal, coke, oil, and gasoline.  Our towns are girdled with wreckage and the debris of our t
oys—our automobiles and our packaged pleasures.  Through uninhibited spraying against one enemy we have destroyed the natural balances our survival requires.  All these evils can and must be overcome if America and Americans are to survive; but many of us still conduct ourselves as our ancestors did, stealing from the future for our clear and present profit….
On the East Coast, and particularly in New England, the colonists farmed meager lands close to their communities and to safety.  Every man was permanently on duty for the defense of his family and his village; even hunting parties went into the forest in force, rather like raiders than hunters, and their subsequent quarrels with the Indians, resulting in forays and even massacres, remind us that the danger was very real.  A man took his gun along when he worked the land, and the women stayed close to their thick-walled houses and listed day and night for the signal of alarm.  The towns they settled were permanent, and most of them exist today with their records of Indian raids, of slaughter, of scalpings, and of punitive counter-raids.  The military leader of the community became the chief authority in time of trouble, and it was a long time before danger receded and th
lande mystery could be explored.
After a time, however, brave and forest-wise men drifted westward to hunt, to trap, and eventually to bargain for the furs which were the first precious negotiable wealth America produced for trade and export.  Then trading posts were set up as centers of collection and the exploring men moved up and down the rivers and crossed the mountains, made friends for mutual profit with the Indians, learned the wilderness techniques, so that these explorer-traders soon dressed, at, and generally acted like the indigenous people around them.  Suspicion lasted a long time, and was fed by clashes sometimes amounting to full-fledged warfare; but by now these Americans attacked and defended as the Indians did.
For a goodly time the Americans were travelers, moving about the country collecting its valuables, but with little idea of permanence; their roots and their hearts were in the towns and the growing cities along the eastern edge.  The few who stayed, who lived among the Indians, adopted their customs and some took Indian wives and were regarded as strange and somehow treasonable creatures.  AS for their half-breed children, while the tr
ibe sometimes adopted them they were unacceptable as equals in the eastern settlements.
Then the trickle of immigrants became a stream, and the population began to move westward—not to grab and leave but to settle and live, they thought.  The newcomers were of peasant stock and they had their roots in a Europe where they had been landless, for the possession of land was the requirement and the proof of a higher social class than they had known.In America they found beautiful and boundless land for the taking—and they took it.
It is little wonder that they went land-mad, because there was so much of it.  They cut and burned the forests to make room for crops; they abandoned their knowledge of kindness to the land in order to maintain its usefulness.  When they had cropped out a piece they moved on, raping the country like invaders.  The topsoil, held by roots and freshened by leaf-fall, was left helpless to the spring freshets, stripped and eroded with the naked bones of clay and rock exposed.  The destruction of the forests changed the rainfall, for th
e searching clouds could find no green and beckoning woods to draw them on and milk them.  The merciless nineteenth century was like a hostile expedition for loot that seemed limitless.  Uncountable buffalo were killed, stripped of their hides, and left to rot, a reservoir of permanent food supply eliminated.  More than that, the land of the Great Plains was robed of the manure of the herds.  Then the plows went in and ripped off the protection of the buffalo grass4 and opened the helpless soil to quick water and slow drought and the mischievous winds that roamed through the Great Central Plains.  There has always been more than enough desert in America; the new settlers, like overindulged children, created even more.

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