Gold was for the rich, of whom at that
period there were precious few, even among the owners of land and the
wielders of power.
Country folk barely scratched the surface of the earth. Roads were wheel
tracks in the mud. Bridges were fords that became more or less
impassable with high water.
These assertions sound strange and romantic to the modern beneficiaries
of asphalt and reinforced concrete. They were the lot of most Europeans
and North Americans when our great grandfathers and great grandmothers
were in their prime.
What has made the difference between their use of the earth and ours?
Chiefly, the newly tapped sources of energy and the wide variety of
minerals--whose names were unknown except to scholars and scientists
before 1750. It is the new sources of energy and the only recently
utilized metals that have made the difference.
Farm land can be used and abused many times before its productive
possibilities are exhausted. Even then, with foresight, technical
proficiency, the investment of labor and capital, agricultural land can
be restored to fertility. Iron ore, tin, copper and tungsten are
extracted from the earth, refined, put to some use or wasted as the case
may be, but they are gone. They may be replaced by other minerals.
Through geological ages they may redeposited in the earth's crust. But
to all intents and purposes, they are finished.
It is a source of pride to promoters and propagandists for the status
quo that western man has removed more metals and minerals from the
earth's crust in the past two hundred years than his predecessors
removed during the previous two thousand years.
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