What is particularly surprising to many environmentalists is their unfamiliarity with Dr. Burke and his role in the environmental movement. Historically, it is not uncommon that pioneers are forgotten as was the case of the Dutch painter Vermeer, who was rediscovered almost 100 years after his death. In Dr. Burke's case, part of this may be due to the difficulty in categorizing him only as an "environmentalist" whereas prominent names like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner and Donella Meadows are often identified as being more exclusively within the environmental community. Dr. Burke was no less an environmentalist but was also deeply involved in a variety of other issues which he artfully interwove with environmental topics.
This, and other sections of the site, will provide examples of his incredible ability to "connect the dots" between what sometimes appear to be mutually exclusive events but that, in reality, have profound effects upon each other.
The excerpt below from Enough Good Men in the chapter Dirt, People and History is a fine example of how Dr. Burke related historical events to the environment around us. The only aspect missing is this is merely the printed word, and misses the timing and the inflection in the way Dr. Burke presented it:
Origin of "A Pact With the Unborn" Dr. Albert E. Burke - 1961
The Raft River Valley has been sheep country for sixty years. Around 1900 it ranked with the best winter pasture lands in the nation. Its thick heavy stands of grass had fed and supported a heavy wildlife population for thousands of years. But fifty years after the turn of this century, the Raft River Valley changed. One day a rancher put a flock of eight hundred and seventy-six sheep out to winter pasture. The next day he returned to see another of the many faces of death; this time on the land. All his sheep were dead.
Thousands of sheep died in the Raft River Valley that year; and thousands of others died in nine western states where a plant called halogeton was found growing on many parts of the two million acres.
Halogeton is an unusual plant, the only one to be honored by a special act of Congress. In 1952, halogeton was found to be spreading like wildfire around our western states on lands where too many sheep and cattle had been kept too long, killing the grass cover. On that abused land the halogeton grows, beautiful and deadly, because it stores oxalic acid in its leaves and stems. It is a poison. One-half pound of this plant will kill a full-grown sheep. Three pounds of it will kill a full-grown steer. As a result, pasture and range lands covered in part by this plant can feed and fatten less than half as many animals today as they could in 1900. However, in 1900 there were less than half as many Americans demanding lamb chops and beef steaks as there are today.
How did those lands get that way?
Because of the kind of American history that began the day the Pilgrims came ashore in New England. The early colonies in America were originally financed by trading companies that wanted profits from their risky investments. The Plymouth Pilgrims were among the many people in Europe who wanted freedom from political and religious persecution, but their contract with their backers said that for the first seven years they would work to turn profits out of the new American land. They had no great concern about what happened to the land in the process of working off that debt.
This is not the kind of history we get in our history books, but it is American history, and it explains a really incredible record of land abuse for over three hundred years.
When the first colonist from the Old World set foot on North America in the 1600s there was enough soil covering the surface of what are now the United States to make an even layer nine inches deep across the continent. Keep in mind the fact that it takes about seven thousand years of geological and biological action to turn out one inch of that soil. That nine-inch layer represented about sixty-five thousand years of soil development.
Since men began to farm, graze, and deforest America in the early 1600s, one-third of that original nine inches is gone, destroyed by misuse and abuse. In three hundred years, Americans managed to destroy as much soil as had been laid down in North America in about twenty thousand years. Most of that land loss came from five hundred million acres that were originally good for farming at no great expense.
One hundred million acres were destroyed by men like that farmer in Oklahoma after the Land Rush in 1889. Another hundred million acres were so damaged by men like those ranchers in Idaho as to make the growth of halogeton possible.
As President Kennedy put this same matter to Congress in February, 1961, too much of our soil is still being washed and blown away. The process began with colonists and settlers like the Pilgrims (who first wanted to go to Guinea, where they hoped to find gold and easy riches) and colonists like John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, who came to America to regain the wealth and social position he had lost at home.
What began with many of the early colonists who saw the New World as a quick step to fame and easy riches has been carried on by their descendants. In the State of Washington not long ago, one of those descendants, a lumberman, objected to a law which said that he had to put in seedlings to replace every tree he cut down. The lumberman objected on two grounds. First, he said, the land belonged to him and no one had the right to tell him what to do with it. That law, he said, was a violation of his right to hold and enjoy private property. His second objection was that reseeding and re-stocking his land denied him a reasonable profit from lumbering.
The lumberman's case went to the United States Supreme Court in 1950. It marked an important turning point in American history, as was made clear by the title of the decision handed down: it was called A Pact with the Unborn.
That lumber operator, said the court, had the responsibility to see that future generations of Americans would also be able to benefit from the use of the land. His interests and rights were no longer the only matters involved. The nation's future was involved. In Ancient Greece, Plato spelled out the same problem for the people of his country. The Supreme Court spelled it out for Americans of the Twentieth Century.
That Supreme Court decision in 1950, and the Halogeton Act passed by Congress in 1952, put American dollars and our science and technology to work, not to make America richer and stronger, but to keep America from becoming poorer and weaker. It is vitally important for us to realize that this is not the historical road America has traveled in the past to become a rich and powerful leader of nations.
On some of the richest lands to be found anywhere on this planet, using some of the richest, highest quality resources on earth, we built this nation. In the beginning the cost was low to use our lands, and the profits were high. The difference be-tween those low costs and high profits has always added up to our high standard of living. But the Halogeton Act was one of the new facts which has been eating into those profits. No nation ever became wealthy, or remained powerful, by frittering away its profits to correct the mistakes made by irresponsible men. That was why the Supreme Court decision of 1950 as an important turning point in American history. It served notice that this nation cannot afford any more irresponsible men. This is important, not because our high living standards are at stake, or our power, or our ideas about justice. It is important because our kind of freedom is at stake.
That kind of freedom grew among a people with elbowroom; few Americans in a big land. With plenty of elbowroom, twenty-three million Americans back in 1889 were free to turn their Oklahoman upside down irresponsibly; and they didn't mind too much when the United States government stepped in to help them. Today's much larger American population has less of that "elbowroom," on farmlands, in mines, in good water, good air, or in any natural resource. Today's American has less, and poorer quality resources to work and live with. We are no longer free to do as we please with them; but many among us today still mind very much that, since stepping in to help deal with problems like that emergency in 1890, the government has never really stepped out of what were once our private affairs.
This resentment has led to a new parlor game in this country during the last thirty years, a dangerous game of name-calling called "creeping socialism." It is played by too many Americans today who simplify things too much. Often they know little to nothing about the kind of American history made by irresponsible men who forced the government into what were then our private affairs. That record clearly shows what happens when individual Americans misuse their private affairs by making them public problems. When that point is reached, the government always steps in.
Americans who play this dangerous new game of "creeping socialism" see that government, their government, as one of the greatest dangers to our future as a free people. In doing so they misuse the word "socialism" and they misread their own history. The problem has never been "creeping socialism" in our American government. It has always been creeping irresponsibility among too many Americans.