Difficulties of Agriculture.—Another and even greater handicap of the equatorial forest is the difficulty of carrying on agriculture. When our forefathers cleared the forests of America their task was child's play compared with the clearing of an equatorial forest. Not only did they encounter smaller trees than those of the tropics, but they cut pine, birch, beech, and other soft woods most of the time, and not mahogany, teak, rosewood, and other tropical species as hard as oak. They cut the trees in the cool bracing autumn or in winter when a man wants to work fast in order to keep warm. Think how different it would have been if they had had to cut oak trees on the muggiest kind of hot summer days. When the trees have been felled the difficulties of the would-be farmer in the equatorial rain forest have only begun. On our farms at home it is hard work to keep down the weeds, but suppose the weeds grew a foot or two a month, and kept on growing twelve months in the year. How could anyone keep them down! The useful plants would be choked almost before they sprout from the seeds. That is what happens in the equatorial rain forest. Unless the inhabitants possess a vigor far surpassing that of the best farmers of the temperate zone, successful agriculture is impossible.
Natives and White Men in the Equatorial Rain Forest.—We are apt to look down upon the almost naked Papuans of New Guinea, Pygmies of Central Africa, and aboriginal Indians of the Amazon basin. We wonder at people who still live by hunting with poisoned arrows, who make their homes in little huts in the trees or on poles, who run and hide at the sight of a stranger, and who have nothing that can be called civilization.. We ought rather to pity them, for even we, with all our opportunities, have not yet learned how to cultivate the lands in the equatorial forest, maintain good roads, and avoid the enervating effect upon health and character. We do these
things in the Panama Zone where many people are gathered in a small space, where vast sums of money are available, and where everyone is under government orders, but that is very different from the ordinary forest region. No wonder the natives make little progress.
Vegetation grows so rapidlyin regions of equatorial rain forests that they might be the most productive parts of the whole world, provided men knew how to cultivate them. As yet, however, we obtain from them only rubber, chewing gum, quinine, mahogany, and other forest products. The natives are employed by the white man to search for the trees from which these products are derived, but such work does not advance civilization. In temperate regions trees of one kind often cover many square miles, but within the tropics a great variety of species usually grow together. So the natives wander through the forests, climbing tall trees sometimes to look out over the top of the forests and pick out specimens of the species they are seeking. Then they tap the rubber trees and collect the sap, or call the axman to chop down a fine rosewood tree. Their overseers are often brutal white men who have come to the tropics simply to get rich. Un checked by the restrictions of civilization such men use the most outragous means to gain wealth or to compel the natives to do what they wish. Disappointment and ill health make them more and more brutal, so that they often treat the natives most cruelly. Altogether the natives are by no means improved by their work for the white man. They merely get a pittance which they spend for drink or for useless finery. They are isolated not only from the rest of the world, but from one another, for their mode of life permits only the scantiest population. For in spite of our twentieth century progress the equa torial rain forest still remains almost the worst environment for man.