Hoqqueah seemed to be making a project of enlarging the Captain’s horizons, whether he wanted them enlarged or not.
“Take agriculture,” he was saying at the moment. “This planet we’re to seed provides an excellent argument for taking the long view of farm policy. There used to be jungles there; it was very fertile. But the people began their lives as farmers with the use of fire, and they killed themselves off in the same way.”
“How?” Gorbel said automatically. Had he remained silent, Hoqqueah would have gone on .anyhow; and it didn’t pay to be impolite to the Colonization Council, even by proxy.
“In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years .before their official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off.
Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by farming that way. Furthermore the method was totally de-structive to the topsoil.
“But did they learn? No. Even after they achieved spaceflight, that method of farming was standard in most of the remaining jungle areaseven though the bare rock was show-ing through everywhere by that time.”
Hoqqueah sighed. “Now, of course, there are no jungles.
There are no seas, either. There’s nothing but desert, naked rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor airor so the people would view it, if there were any of them left. Tapa farming wasn’t solely responsible, but it helped.”