In Belize in 1973 when I was briefly in the army, the Army Air Corps choppered me around in a Sioux helicopter – one with the glass bubble. It was fun but it was an opportunity to observe the landscape.
A Mennonite settlement stood out because the land had been cleared and laid out in a grid pattern of fields, hedges and roads similar to the European landscape. Everywhere else was jungle with little villages, no more than a few huts, where crops had been planted on a few acres of jungle that had been slashed and burned. The wood ash made the land especially fertile. Eventually the villagers moved on and nature re-asserted itself. Palm oil plantations in in the 20th century were likewise on land that had been rain forest but was burned.
WG Hoskins (The Making of the English Landscape) provides evidence “that Neolithic man cleared woodland by burning” but “all the English examples are late in date (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), showing that this method of clearance was being employed in medieval England”. However, it was quickly recognised that “timber played the part played by steel, concrete and coal in the modern economy, in the building of houses, ships and churches; in the making of farming implements, household tools, and in repair work of all kinds; and in supplying domestic fuel. Fire must have been regarded generally as a rather desperate expedient, to be employed in a frontier-economy and not after the establishment of a settled economy”.
The Making is informative and WGH wears his heart on his sleeve, making his ruminations enjoyable, especially when he gets onto the Industrial Revolution. He approves of its beginning in the early 18th century when factories and mills “tended to be in more or less remote places, partly because of the need to be near a falling stream for the supply of power, and later to escape too close an inspection and regulation of their uninhibited activities”. He also likes the lunar landscape of Cornwall – spoil-heaps from the china-clay industry around St Austell. Also in Cornwall the abandoned tin mines receive his approbation: “the windowless engine-houses, the monolithic chimney stacks against the skyline, the ruined cottages of an old mining hamlet, and the stony spoil-heaps – a pure nineteenth-century landscape, and perhaps because of its setting, the most appealing of all the industrial landscapes of England, in no way ugly but indeed possessing a profound melancholy beauty”.
He does not mince his words describing the later stages of the Industrial Revolution when steam-power allowed new towns to built around factories across the Midlands. “No scruples weakened their (industrialists) lust for money; they made their money and left behind their muck.”
Tim Clissold in Mr China describes a similar evolution in China when he was looking for factories to invest in. ” … it was the choice of location that struck me most. The factories were in the most incredibly remote locations, far from the cities, out at the edge of the world, hidden right up in the highest mountain passes. Several times we drove for an entire afternoon up a dirt road through steep-sided ravines to find a vast factory at the head of the valley, churning out red smoke and dirty, foaming water.”
Slash and burn in Belize, Indonesia and medieval England was adopted for more or less the same reasons and it’s tempting to think that China’s industrial revolution under Mao reflected our own, some two hundred years earlier. But read on and Clissold explains that Mao fell out with Kruschev and moved factories to remote valleys to protect them from Russian bombers, so history only sometimes repeats itself. Don’t jump to conclusions, was the lesson I learnt.