Nobody can say we weren’t warned. Over and over and over again.
‘Denuding of Forests for Profits Cause of Floods’ by A. Cornell from Socialist Call. Vol. 2 No. 99. February 6, 1937.
The Ohio Mississippi Valley floods are another gruesome spectacle of disaster indirectly attributable to our ruinously and recklessly exploitive system. This short-sighted and planless system has to its eternal discredit, among other things, the ruin and plunder of our American forests in particular.
One of the advantages afforded by forests is their beneficent influence on the flow of neighboring streams.
Forests Govern Streams
The Lincoln Library of Essential Information says in its article on forests: “Finally, forests exert a very noticeable influence upon the flow and character of neighboring streams. This effect has three principal causes:
“First: The trees break the direct force of the rainfall so that the earth on wooded hillsides is not cut up and washed into the valley.
“Second: Water accumulates in the porous bed of the forest and escapes to the stream gradually, thus tending to produce a continuous flow rather than a series of sudden disastrous flows.
“Third: Trees draw from swampy ground a large amount of water, which is evaporated through their leaves, thereby substantially decreasing the volume to be drained off by streams.”
Profit Greed Causes Floods
Why are not the states of Oregon and Washington, noted for their heavy rainfall and snows, visited with disastrous floods? Perhaps their forests, still standing because of the higher cost to cut and market than those of the East and Middle-West, partially explain their immunity?
Let us see if we can find any connection between depleted forest areas and floods. The Encyclopedia Brittanica states, “In the United States of America the original forest has shrunk more than 40 per cent in the course of three centuries.” I quote the following from the Encyclopedia Americana, “After an enormous exploitation, the original forests are now approaching exhaustion.”
Denuded Forests
The Encyclopedia Americana states most significantly, “There are five great forest regions in the United States, three stretching from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Great Plains, which are destitute of timber, except along the margins of the streams and on occasional elevations; and two west of the Great Plains.”
It thus becomes apparent that those rivers having their tributaries in the East and Middle-West flow through regions “which are destitute of timber.” It is obvious then that deforestation, carried on by plundering capitalists and syndicates; is largely to blame indirectly for the repetitive and ever more violent floods which now devastate the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys almost annually.
Useless Deaths
For instance, from 1881, the year of a flood in the Ohio-Mississippi Valleys which took 220 lives, until 1912, a period of 31 years passed with but one major flood in that region.
However, from 1912 until early 1937, a period of 25 years, there occurred in the Ohio-Mississippi Valley Ave major floods, the cost of which in death and homeless, in human misery and property damage are enormous.
The recent flood, the most catastrophic of all, claimed 400 lives, left 1,000,000 homeless and caused property damage to the extent of $400,000,000.
In recent years, the exploiters, reaping in floods the results of the rape of our forests, have tried haphazard flood control and levee construction, paid for mostly by taxes at the expense of the people who have suffered stand to suffer as the outcome of capitalistic exploitation.
It is the people who not only pay in personal misery for capitalist blunders, but it is also the people who pay in taxes to help the capitalists cover up their blunders by building levees, which they in turn order dynamited when some fellow capitalist’s property is threatened, for even the capitalistic insurance companies will not insure against flood.
Capitalism Responsible
Is it not clear that as long as there exists the present system, necessarily inhuman and short-sighted in its point of view, so long will such disasters visit us at periodic intervals–now floods, now unemployment, now depressions, now wars, and so on, ad infimum?
These evils and their consequences we can with certainty look forward to until, as workers, we became sufficiently politically conscious and intelligent to demand the eradication of the barbarism of capitalism and the institution of Socialism.
Socialist Call began as a weekly newspaper in New York in early 1935 by supporters of the Socialist Party’s Militant Faction Samuel DeWitt, Herbert Zam, Max Delson, Amicus Most, and Haim Kantorovitch, with others to rival the Old Guard’s ‘New Leader’. The Call Education Institute was also inaugurated as a rival to the right’s Rand School. In 1937, the Call as the Militant voice would fall victim to Party turmoil, becoming a paper of the Socialist Party leading bodies as it moved to Chicago in 1938, to Milwaukee in 1939, where it was renamed “The Call” and back to New York in 1940 where it eventually resumed the “Socialist Call” name and was published until 1954.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-call/call%202-99.pdf
