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Chapter 1: Environmental Hazards, Eighteenth-Century Style
- University of Virginia Press
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15 We today think we have problems with our environment.Our worries seem endless. We are anxious about global warming and greenhouse gas emissions ; the effect of aerosol sprays on the ozone layer; hazardous wastes in our water supplies; and toxic substances in our foods. But compared with the environmental problems faced by our nation at the very beginning of its history, our present difficulties and anxieties do not seem all that overwhelming . At least we now have the Environmental Protection Agency to look after us. Americans living in the republic at the end of the eighteenth century had no such governmental protection, and they faced a threat from their environment that we can scarcely appreciate. Americans of the early republic were told by the best scientific authorities of the Western world that the American natural environment was deleterious to all animal life. This was not a case of people’s use of energy warming the atmosphere or of some industrialists polluting the water here and there. The environmental problems of the early republic were natural and not man-made,and that was what made them so frightening. They were apparently inherent in nature itself. There was in fact something terribly wrong with the climate of the New World that made it harmful to all living creatures. This was not the conclusion of a few crackpots or of some fanatic European aristocrats eager to malign American republicanism. It was the conclusion of the greatest naturalist of the Western world,the French scientist George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. In the rambling thirty-six volumes of his Natural History , published between 1749 and 1800, Buffon presented a profoundly pessimistic but scientifically grounded picture of the American environment. There was in the New World, Buffon wrote, “some combination of elements , and other physical causes, something that opposes the amplification of animated Nature.” The American continents, said Buffon, were newer than those of the Environmental Hazards, Eighteenth-Century Style gordon s. wood s Gordon S. Wood 16 Old World.They had remained longer under the sea.They had, it seemed, only recently emerged from the flood and had not as yet properly dried out. America’s air was moister and more humid than that of the older continents. Its topography was more irregular, its weather more variable, its forests and miasmatic swamps more extensive. In short, America had an unhealthy climate in which to live. Animals in the New World,said Buffon,were underdeveloped—smaller than those of the Old World. America did not have any lions.The American puma was scarcely a real lion; it did not even have a mane, and “it is also much smaller, weaker, and more cowardly than the real lion.”The New World had no elephants; in fact, no American wildlife could be compared to an elephant in size or shape. The best that America had, Buffon wrote sarcastically, was the tapir of Brazil, but “this elephant of the New World” was not bigger than a six-month-old calf. In America there were no rhinoceroses , no hippopotamuses, no camels, no giraffes. All the American animals were “four, six, eight, and ten times”smaller than those of the older continents.Even the domestic animals introduced to America from Europe tended to shrink and dwindle under the influence of the New World’s climate . Apparently only the pig was able to hold its own in comparison with Old World animals. Buffon’s conclusion about the environment was stark and frightening: “Living nature,” he wrote, “is thus much less active there, much less varied, and we may even say, less strong.” The only living things that seemed to flourish in the dank, wet American climate were reptiles—snakes, toads, frogs, and other cold-blooded creatures that, said Buffon, often grew to gigantic sizes. It was unsettling enough to learn that the peculiar American habitat had affected animal life. But to learn that the environment of the New World was also unhealthful for humans was truly alarming.Buffon claimed that the American environment was responsible for the apparently retarded development of the native Indians, who seemed to be wandering savages frozen in the first hunting-gathering stage of social development without any structured society.The Indians,Buffon said,were like reptiles; they were cold-blooded.Their “organs of generation are small and feeble.”The natives of the New World had no hair...