Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
on 21 April the
San Francisco Examiner
's headline announced “the Water
Front Destroyed / to Resume Business at Once.” the conservationist Mary
Austin noted a sign in one ruined building: DON'T TALK EARTHQUAKE /
TALK BUSINESS.”
35
Austin was an eloquent critic of this rush to rebuild. As
she pointed out, “the greater part of this disaster—the irreclaimable loss of
goods and houses, the violent deaths—was due chiefly to man-contrivances,
to the sinking of made ground, to huddled buildings cheapened by greed, to
insensate clinging to the outer shells of life . . . for most man-made things
do inherently carry the elements of their own destruction. How much of all
that happened of distress and inestimable loss could have been averted if
men would live along the line of the Original Intention, with wide, clean
breathing spaces and room for green growing things to push up between?”
Austin's critique reflected lessons she had learned from native Ameri-
cans, whom she credited with knowing how to “live off a land upon which
more sophisticated races would starve, and how the land itself instructed
them.”
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She was not entirely alone in seeking out the perspective of native
Americans after the devastation of 1906. Anthropologists interviewed the
few surviving members of the Wintun tribe, located about eighty-five miles
north of San Francisco. the tribe was of two minds on the meaning of the
earthquake and its many aftershocks. to some it seemed to be the onset of
the “great levelling” of the world, which would flatten the mountains and
possibly destroy all life in the process. Others believed it betokened the
“stretching” of the world by Old Coyote Man, in order to make room for the
growing numbers of whites. Yet the Wintuns agreed that “ultimately there
would be a great upheaval and levelling which would obliterate all things
at present upon the earth.” the anthropologists seemed to sympathize with
the Wintuns' tragic vision.
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natural scientists tended to be more optimistic. the geologist t. C. Cham-
berlin, better known for his theory of the greenhouse effect, suggested that
the earthquake might liberate the public from unwarranted fears: “If, for
instance, it shall later be shown, as I think not improbable, that the earth
is now in a general way receding from a period of special deformation into
one of relative quiescence, and that catastrophic action is on the decline,
it will be a contribution of no small value to the comfort of mankind. the
public is now very generally depressed by needless apprehension of great
impending disasters, if not a universal and final catastrophe, apprehensions
derived from the narrow and pessimistic views of the past. From my point
of view, which is doubtless a partial one, a contribution of supreme value
to the happiness and well-being of mankind is likely to grow out of recti-
fied views . . . derived from the prosecution of the earth sciences.”
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