Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

food production and food demand as independent factors. He also neglected
to consider the time required for agriculturally accelerated erosion
to strip topsoil off a landscape or for intensive cultivation to deplete soil
fertility. Although his views seemed increasingly naive as England’s population
kept growing, political interests seeking to rationalize exploitation of
Europe’s new working class embraced them.
Malthus’s ideas challenged prevalent views of human impact on nature
in general and on the soil in particular. In Political Justice, published five
years before Malthus’s essay, William Godwin captured the fashionable
view of the inevitable progress of human dominion over nature. “Threefourths
of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The improvements to
be made in cultivation, and the augmentations the earth is capable of
receiving in the article of productiveness, cannot, as yet, be reduced to any
limits of calculation. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population
may pass away, and the earth be yet found sufficient for the support of its
inhabitants.” 16 In Godwin’s view, scientific progress promised endless
prosperity and ongoing advances in material well-being. The basic perspectives
of Malthusian pessimism and Godwinian optimism still frame
debates about the relationships between human populations, agricultural
technology, and political systems.
Published early in the Industrial Revolution, Malthus’s ideas were
adopted by those wanting to explain poverty as the fault of the poor themselves,
rather than an undesirable side effect of land enclosure and industrial
development. Taken at face value, Malthus’s ideas absolved those at
the top of the economic ladder from responsibility for those at the bottom.
In contrast, Godwin’s ideas of material progress became associated with the
movement to abolish private property rights. Naturally, Malthus would
have more appeal for a Parliament of wealthy landowners.
As intellectuals debated the earth’s capacity to provide sustenance, the
working classes continued to live on the verge of starvation. Vulnerability
to bad harvests continued well into the nineteenth century as European
agriculture could barely keep up with the rapidly growing cities. High
grain prices during the Napoleonic Wars further accelerated land enclosures
across Britain. Then in 1815, after the eruption of Indonesia’s
Tomboro volcano, the coldest summer on record produced catastrophic
crop failures. Food riots in England and France spread across the continent
when hungry workers faced skyrocketing bread prices. The price of a loaf
of bread remained a central point of working-class protest as the discontent
of the urban poor bred radicals and revolutionaries.
let them eat colonies 107