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1 " The changes which the destruction of forests, the clearing of plants and the cultivation of indigo have produced within half a century in the quantity of water flowing in on the one hand, and on the other the evaporation of the soil and the dryness of the atmosphere, present causes sufficiently powerful to explain the successive diminution of the lake of Valencia . . . By felling the trees that cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations, the want of fuel and the scarcity of water. "
― Ramachandra Guha , Environmentalism: A Global History
2 " Countries that are situated in opposite hemispheres, Lombardy bordered by the chain of the Alps and Lower Peru inclosed between the Pacific Ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes, exhibit striking proofs of the justness of this assertion. "
3 " Representative here are these remarks, dating from the 1860s, of a British forest officer on the Baigas of central India, a tribe that lived in valuable forests that the newly established Forest Department wished to take over. The officer wrote of this community of swidden farmers that they were ‘the most terrible enemy to the forests we have anywhere in the hills.’ It was sad ‘to see the havoc that has been made among the forests by the Baiga axes.’ In some areas ‘the hills have been swept clean of forests for miles; in others, the Baiga marks are tall, blackened, charred stems standing in hundreds among the green forests’—it was ‘really difficult to believe that so few people could sweep the face of the earth so clear of timber as they have done. "
4 " Marsh himself was not interested in power; his language was sober rather than choleric, but his conclusions were equally disturbing. Taking a global view, he remarked that Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste . . . There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon . . . The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence . . . would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. "
5 " In Marsh’s view man was an agent of destruction as well as regeneration, with the potential, as he so beautifully put it, to be a ‘restorer of disturbed harmonies. "
6 " The beds of rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rain falls on the heights. The sward and the moss disappearing with the brushwoods from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course, and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, beat down the loosened soil and form these sudden inundations that devastate the country. Hence it results that the destruction of forests, the want of permanent springs and the existence of torrents are three phenomena closely connected together. Countries that are situated in opposite hemispheres, Lombardy bordered by the chain of the Alps and Lower Peru inclosed between the Pacific Ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes, exhibit striking proofs of the justness of this assertion. "
