what the land is for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham’s
mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we regard this
assumption is inverse to the degree of our education.

The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the
community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He
knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may
never be fully understood.

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an
ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto
explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic
inter-actions between people and land. The characteristics of the land
determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men
who lived on it.

Consider, for example, the settlement of the Mississippi valley. In the
years following the Revolution, three groups were contending for its
control: the native Indians, the French and English traders, and the
American settlers. Historians wonder what would have happened if the
English at Detroit had thrown a little more weight into the Indian side
of those tipsy scales which decided the outcome of the colonial
migration into the cane-lands of Kentucky. It is time now to ponder the
fact that the cane-lands, when subjected to the particular mixture of
forces represented by the cow, plow, fire, and axe of the pioneer,
became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and
bloody ground had, under the impact of these forces, given us some
worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? Would Boone and Kenton have held out?
Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri? Any Louisiana  Purchase? Any transcontinental union of new
states? Any Civil War?

Kentucky was one sentence in the drama of history. We are commonly told
what the human actors in this drama tried to do, but we are seldom told
that their success, or the lack of it, hung in large degree on the
reaction of particular