The Once and Future World Read online

  Advance praise for

  The Once and Future World

  “A gripping and convincing look at the nature that humans lost and the perspective that we gained. MacKinnon leaves us wanting to be wilder.” Jennifer Jacquet, author of the Guilty Planet blog at Scientific American, assistant professor of environmental studies at NYU

  “MacKinnon is an eloquent guide through landscapes wild and tame. He takes the reader backwards through evolutionary time and forward into a delicate and unknown future. I devoured this book in a day and closed its covers marveling at our planet’s incredible abundance. Natural history at its best.” Charlotte Gill, author of Eating Dirt

  “Henry David Thoreau warned us, in 1862, that not in wilderness but in wildness is the preservation of the world. There’s a difference. In The Once and Future World, J.B. MacKinnon brings this distinction up to date. Wilderness may be gone forever, but wildness can be recovered, and it is time to get to work.” George Dyson

  “A lean, elegant and powerful essay on what we have done to the world—and what we might do to set things right. J.B. MacKinnon has made me think in new ways about our self-destructive trashing of the ‘luckless garden’ into which we were so lucky to be born.” Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

  “A re-enchantment with the natural world may be a necessary prerequisite to the changes we must make to keep that natural world more or less intact. This is deep and lovely thinking and writing.” Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

  “The 100-Mile Diet forever changed the way I see a plate of food and it is still with me today. The Once and Future World changed the way I see everything. One can only hope it spawns a movement like The 100-Mile Diet did—a moment of re-imagining, re-wilding and coming home.” Leanne Allison, filmmaker (Being Caribou, Finding Farley, Bear 71)

  “This book should make your blood run cold; or boil with furious rage against the despoilers of our planet. But perhaps all is not yet lost. MacKinnon tells us that the crisis in the natural world is not yet fatal … but it’s waiting. And then he tells us most convincingly what we can and must do to stop the rot. This is a handbook for those who hope to see the earth, and man, remain alive together.” Farley Mowat

  “Like Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez and Tim Flannery, J.B. MacKinnon is an exceptional writer with an intense passion for the natural world. In The Once and Future World, MacKinnon combines eloquent storytelling with painstaking research to provide a persuasive argument for the need to not only protect the wildness we have today, but to restore at least some of the abundance we have lost. It may be too late to bring back the Tasmanian tiger, but, as MacKinnon writes, there’s still time to create a planet that is far richer in natural wonders.” James Little, former editor of Explore magazine

  “J.B. MacKinnon is one of the finest essayists of the natural world writing today.” Andrew D. Blechman, managing editor of Orion and author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird

  “This book is a delight. MacKinnon shows us afresh the world we thought we knew through a kaleidoscopic lens of startling facts, illuminating insight and flat-out wonderful writing.” John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger

  Praise for The 100-Mile Diet

  (co-authored with Alisa Smith)

  NATIONAL BESTSELLER

  Winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize

  Finalist for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize

  “A compelling, relevant story without preaching or darkening our minds with guilt.” The Vancouver Sun

  “Eating locally isn’t just a fad like the various diets advertised on late-night TV—it may be one of the most important ways we save ourselves and the planet.” Dr. David Suzuki

  “Smith and MacKinnon are gifted writers, and their inexperience at food sourcing makes them naturally more sympathetic.” Winnipeg Free Press

  “Engaging, thoughtful essays packed with natural, historical and personal detail.” The New York Times

  “Good writing trumps anything, and in Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s 100-Mile Diet it brushes aside the inescapable but faint touch of preachiness. It’s a finely rendered account of a year of eating locally.” Maclean’s

  “The 100-Mile Diet is inspiring in its honest striving to discover what has been all but lost.” The Gazette

  “A fascinating personal journey narrated by two excellent writers that take us for an informative and highly entertaining trip into a world that just a generation ago was commonplace but now seems exotic.” Edmonton Journal

  Praise for Dead Man in Paradise

  Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

  “Dead Man in Paradise … works as travelogue, thriller and much-needed antidote to the ways in which history is often buried and forgotten.” Quill & Quire

  “The book is masterful. MacKinnon has the craftsmanship for the challenge. He uses flashback well, creates arresting images [and] has enough travel experience to take the bizarre in stride.” The Globe and Mail

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 J. B. MacKinnon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Excerpt from “Eden” by Ina Rousseau used by permission of the Taylor & Francis Group; the poem appeared in the 1954 A. A. Balkema book Die verlate tuin (The Deserted Garden). Translation copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2007.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission of the Peter Lampack Agency, Inc.

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  MacKinnon, J. B. (James Bernard), 1970–

  The once and future world : nature as it was, as it is, as it could be / J. B. MacKinnon.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36220-9

  1. Human ecology. 2. Nature—Effect of human beings on. 3. Restoration ecology.

  I. Title.

  GF75.M23 2013 304.2 C2012-905605-7

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: Paul Fuller / Millennium Images, UK

  v3.1

  For my mother

  and in memory of my father;

  this was the last book he ever read.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FIG. I: THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

  1. Illusions of Nature

  2. Knowledge Extinction

  3. A Ten Percent World

  4. The Opposite of Apocalypse

  FIG II: THE NATURE OF NATURE

  5. A Beautiful World

  6. Ghost Acres

  7. Uncertain Nature

  8. What Nature Looks Like

  FIG III: HUMAN NATURE

  9. The Maker and the Made

  10. The Age of Rewilding

  11. Double Disappearance

  12. The Lost Island

  Epilogue

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Fig. 1

  THE NATU
RE

  of

  THE PROBLEM

  Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,

  does there still stand, abandoned, like

  a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails,

  the luckless garden?

  INA ROUSSEAU

  Chapter 1.

  ILLUSIONS OF NATURE

  Picture the first place you thought of as nature. Maybe it was nothing more than a vacant lot in the middle of a city, or a patch of scrub along a riverbank. It might have been a cottage or campground that you visited year after year, or perhaps your childhood home opened onto a forest, a beach, a mountain. Whatever your original vision of nature was, fix it in your mind.

  Myself, I grew up on a prairie that had no name. I’ve looked into the question, hoping to turn up some lost but interesting name like those I’ve known from other places—Joe’s Snake Field, or Our Lady of the O, or Fountain of Bones—and have come up empty-handed. The best explanation I can give for the anonymity of my home prairie is that it seemed to have hardly any history. Why give a name to a patch of grass where nothing much had happened?

  Even to say it was a prairie doesn’t seem quite right, because it wasn’t flat or even rolling, but instead spilled down from high ridges to a river valley. Still, it was grassy and open to the sky, and in every practical sense it was infinite. My childhood landscape was the northernmost tip of the rain-shadow drylands that sprawl up most of western North America, and I could have stepped out of my house and walked three thousand kilometres to Mexico and been thirsty all the way. It was rattlesnake country and black widow country, and as a boy I was brown-skinned and blond-haired and so much a son of that sun-baked earth that I wouldn’t flinch if a two-inch-long grasshopper thudded down on the bare skin of my ribs as I ran through the fields. I knew the prairie in the hands-in-every-crevice detail that only a child can, and it was, for me, a place of magic. The miracle of a mouse skeleton compacted in a pellet of owl scat! The mystery of snow flies hatching onto ice! One winter my father stopped his truck to chase down a giant, bone-dry tumbleweed that was pinwheeling in the wind. He set up that huge ball of prickles on the patio, threaded it with lights and sprayed it nightly with water until it glittered with golden icicles. It remains the most beautiful Christmas tree I’ve ever seen.

  The fiercest animal on the prairie, and therefore my boyhood symbol of wild nature, was the red fox. The sporty, lolling, yipping red fox. It’s an extraordinary animal. An adult red fox is able to run at seventy kilometres per hour. They’ve been observed trying to race airplanes down runways, the way dogs will chase the wheels of a car. When hunting, a fox can leap eight metres and land with enough precision to pin a mouse beneath its forepaws, meaning that at takeoff the fox has accounted for its own speed and trajectory, the speed and trajectory of the mouse, along with other factors such as wind and ground cover, all without ever actually seeing the prey. Such a pounce is so carefully controlled that a fox will, at times, beat its tail to one side or the other in mid-air to adjust its flight path. There were always fox dens on my home prairie.

  I finished high school and, as people do, I moved away, coming home to visit ever more rarely. One day I returned to find that the nameless grasslands had finally been given a name: the Royal Heights housing development. Suburban homes now spread across the land that held my first memory of snow and of my first night in a tent alone in wild country, and of a thousand other adventures.

  A small rump of prairie remained, and I went there looking for fox dens. I found none. As I walked away that day, I saw the red fox as a martyr for every harm ever done by humankind against the wild, an icon of the ceaseless retreat of fang and claw and the relentless advance of the bloodless and tame. Every year more grasslands were erased to make way for lawns or shopping centres, with the fox gradually disappearing from the unsung hills as surely as the buffalo once vanished from the Great Plains or the whales faded from the sea. My childhood home had become my lost Eden.

  Just about everyone on earth, I suspect, has his own version of this same story—the childhood wilderness despoiled. For me, it was the beginning of a journey that would change the way I see the natural world. I came to realize that we, you and I, cannot hope to make sense of this thing we call nature by looking at what surrounds us, or even by seeking the wilderness. Instead, as science has begun to recognize, we need to reach back and revisit the past—tens, hundreds, even thousands of years ago. What we find there is the living planet at its most extraordinary, often so far beyond what we know today that it challenges our expectations of what life on earth can be. The good news is that time travel is just the way we imagine it, full of marvels and surprises, odd beasts, ancient mysteries, and lands that have never known a human footfall. But the history of nature also takes courage. It calls on us to remember losses, not only in the wild, but within ourselves. The past asks us how, what and why we allow ourselves to forget.

  When I began to look into the story of the foxes, I expected to uncover the usual sad chronicle of decline, another species vanishing point by point like stars obscured by city lights. Instead, I learned that the foxes of my youth had trotted onto the scene only a few decades ahead of my own arrival as a five-year-old boy—that they were, really, not much more a part of the natural order than the housing development that had displaced them. In fact, if you live in North America and have ever seen a red fox, have ever taken some delight in the briskness of its movement and intelligence of its expression, then what you have seen is almost certainly an animal that is not a part of the native wildlife.

  When the first Europeans to settle in North America arrived on the east coast, they found themselves in a land apparently devoid of the red fox. Beginning in the 1700s, they began to import the animals so that they could pursue them for sport as they had done back home, in English-style horseback hunts. Some foxes escaped and, like the European colonists themselves, began to drift westward. People later introduced red foxes in other corners of the continent, accelerating their spread.* By about the 1980s, the canine known to science as Vulpes vulpes had taken over North America from east to west.

  Biologists consider the red fox an invasive species—they can do serious harm when they move into a natural system they were not a part of before. Red foxes threaten some two dozen rare animals in California, including such federally endangered species as the Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, least Bell’s vireo, blunt-nosed leopard lizard and giant kangaroo rat. Introduced red foxes have caused major declines in many of Australia’s wonderfully named small beasts, from rock-wallabies and brush-tailed bettongs to quokkas and numbats. They can spread diseases such as rabies, distemper and mange. Not every introduced species is a problem, but the red fox makes the top 100 list of the world’s worst, as compiled by the Global Invasive Species Database.

  In places, introduced red foxes have even driven native fox species off the landscape, and this is where the issue becomes confusing. As it turns out, North America actually was home to red foxes before Europeans introduced the animals, but these native foxes were adapted only to northern boreal forests and to certain mountain ranges in the west. I hoped to discover that I grew up among native foxes, but biologists considered it unlikely and every clue I turned up suggested that foxes were not present in the past. In the 1860s, for example, a pair of British immigrants began hosting English-style hunts over the sagebrush hills around my hometown. The events were complete in detail right down to the imported hounds and the cries of tally-ho. Only one part of the fox hunt broke from tradition: they didn’t hunt foxes. Finding none in the area, the hunters pursued coyotes.

  To learn that the red fox, my personal symbol of the wild, was not deep-blooded on the landscape, not “natural,” felt like a blow to my sense of self. I told one of my brothers what I had discovered and he said, “I don’t believe you.” I began to reel off the evidence and he said, “Nothing you can say will make me believe you.” You think you know the truth of a place, and then—you don’t.
The fox, however, was only the beginning.

  Nature is a confounding thing. The question of whether humans are a part of nature or stand apart from it has probably been debated since the days of the first campfire. In one sense, the answer is obvious enough: whether you believe human beings are the result of a lengthy process of evolution or a sudden act of divine grace, there is no question that we are flesh-and-blood animals, carbon-based life forms spun from the same celestial dust as the rest of creation. At the same time, we have always sought to define ourselves as separate from all other species, whether through our capacity for self-awareness and rational thought or the presumed existence of the human soul. Such efforts often carry more than a whiff of desperation: one philosopher saw a sign of human exceptionalism even in the fact that our noses are a “marked projection” from our faces—apparently unaware of, say, the proboscis monkey, which has a hugely bulbous nose that dangles down to below its mouth.

  The same contradictions pervade our relationship to the landscape as a whole. When the German biologist Ernst Haeckel sat down in 1866 to give a name to the study of nature’s systems, he began with the ancient Greek word for “house,” oikos, and coined the term “ecology.” The living planet is our home. As of 2008, however, a global majority of people live in cities, where that idea is increasingly distant and abstract. We’re surrounded by a world that is, by our own description, “man-made” and “artificial”; nature is what rises up at the edges of cities and towns, or wherever else it has not been beaten back by human hands. We often put the two—natural versus unnatural—in opposition, weighing whether or not to preserve the former or make way for the latter, all the while assuming we can distinguish one from the other. This is nature by our most ordinary definition: the sum total of everything that is not us and did not spring from our imaginations.