left behind), and a sophisticated culture. It had a cover of forest, fer-
tile soil, and at one time supported over 20,000 people. Towards the
end of the thousand years of their occupation of the island, their
society clearly deteriorated and they had felled all the trees, so that
by AD500, there was no way to build a boat and leave the island. The
people literally died out.
Of all the violations we have committed against the beautiful
and fertile planet we call home, the destruction of the forests is the
hardest to comprehend. The effects of such actions are so quickly
apparent, in terms of soil depletion, or in extreme cases, of erosion
of the living soil layer by rain or wind, and indeed, through climate
change. The great floods of the Rhine in recent years, and the dev-
astating floods in Bangladesh and the mud slides in Assam and
Honduras have been caused demonstrably by deforestation in the
mountains. In spite of this, the tree felling continues. When the
European immigrants settled in North America, there was continu-
ous forest from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
Five thousand years earlier the great Midwestern prairies and
the grasslands of Argentina were also forested. The deep soils of the
temperate latitudes were created over hundreds of thousands of
years by rich natural forest. (Grasslands do not produce deep soils.)
And within a hundred years we have ruined these, first by intensive
cultivation, and then by chemical poisoning. The American prairies,
and the East Anglian wheat fields have lost on average half their soil
depth. When in 1999, over 30,000 people died in mudslides in
Venezuela, scientists blamed the weather! The obvious lessons are
not being learned, which suggests that our 'experts' are completely
out of touch with reality, a complaint frequently voiced by Viktor
Schauberger!
We are told that the critical point may soon be reached when
there will not be enough forest to produce sufficient oxygen to sup-
port high quality life. For the forests are the lungs of the Earth,
breathing in carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and exhaling oxygen (O). When
the trees are felled, and again when they are burned, they contribute
to the mass of carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas.
Recent analyses of fossilized amber have shown that their air bub-
bles contained 38% oxygen. Today the average oxygen content of air
is 19%, which suggests that the human body was designed to oper-
ate at twice today's concentration of oxygen. In some larger cities
the oxygen content has deteriorated to as low as 12%.HIDDEN NATURE