The Once and Future World Read online

  We’re all aware that dramatic events have played out in the human relationship to the natural world, from the extinction of the dodo to the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery to the logging of the Amazon rainforest. Yet nature also seems somehow outside of history, always expressing itself in a weed poking up from a crack in the concrete—give it half a chance and it will erase our puny imprint as surely as it buried the pharaohs of Egypt in desert sand or the Mayan temples in jungle vines. We stand on a stretch of wild seashore or see a mountain covered with trees and make what the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus calls “the error of the historical present”—we assume that it is as it always was, at least by any measure of time that we can grasp. Nature was here long before we were, and will linger long after we’re gone.

  As a field of study, the history of nature is remarkably young. It doesn’t even have a settled name. “Natural history” was taken long ago as a catch-all for the natural sciences (botany, geology, paleontology, etc.), leaving us to struggle with descriptors like “environmental history,” “ecological history,” “historical ecology” and “green history.” None of these terms is even fifty years old, and the bulk of the research is more recent than that. The first ecological history of North America—The Eternal Frontier, by Tim Flannery—was printed in the twenty-first century.

  To find the roots of the science, it’s useful to look back to 1864, when the New England scholar George Perkins Marsh published a book titled Man and Nature. Marsh had an interesting life: self-described as “forest born” on a Vermont homestead where wolves and mountain lions still prowled, he went on to read and write in twenty languages, decide the final dimensions of the Washington Monument, and act as America’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Marsh lived at a time when entire new civilizations were being founded in places like Australasia and the Americas, while the riches of these regions renewed the empires of Asia and Europe. When Marsh wrote Man and Nature, popular belief still held that the natural wealth of the earth was infinite. There was not much reason to think otherwise: in North America at that time, for example, buffalo in the hundreds of thousands still roamed the Canadian Prairies and Great Plains, grizzly bears skulked through every mountain range in the west and more than half a century would pass before the last million-pound hauls of shad would be fished from the rivers of the Eastern Seaboard. Marsh’s accomplishment was to see what others of his day could not.

  Marsh was the first to popularize the idea that humankind is not the righteous redeemer of nature’s bounty, but instead a disturber of natural harmonies and a threat to life on earth. To today’s reader, that message—along with the book’s apocalyptic tone—is instantly familiar, if not hackneyed. At the time, it was shocking. Man and Nature made a major contribution to the rising interest in wilderness preservation that took hold in the late nineteenth century, leading to the establishment in 1872 of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, which today includes parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho; the book directly inspired the creation of Adirondack Park, which remains the largest protected area in the contiguous United States. Marsh’s relatively scholarly writing, however, was soon overshadowed by more poetic contemporaries such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, whose celebration of American wilderness has set the tone of conservationism ever since as a battle to defend pristine nature from human degradation.

  What was forgotten—what the world was perhaps not ready for in Marsh’s time—was Man and Nature’s more subtle point. Travelling the world 150 years ago, Marsh concluded that most of the planet was not a threatened wilderness, but had already been “much modified in form and product.” He notes, for example, that the papyrus plant used to make writing paper by the ancient Egyptians had, by his own era, nearly vanished from the Nile River. In Ravenna, Italy, he measured the doors of an ancient cathedral and found they were made of grapewood thicker than any vine that still existed.* He recorded that ostriches had once lived not only in central and southern Africa, but all the way north to the Mediterranean and across the Arabian Peninsula three thousand kilometres to the nation of Oman. Studying the histories of ancient armies, Marsh noted that many of the most arid and abandoned landscapes of Europe and Asia were once so fertile that large armies made long marches through them on local food supplies alone. In his own lifetime Marsh had seen earthworms, introduced to New England from Europe, go from being so rare that anglers kept secret the few locations they could be found, to so numerous that some freshwater springs were soured by the taste of their rotting bodies. He made note that many of the oak forests first witnessed by pioneers on the east coast of North America had been maintained in a “park-like” fashion by indigenous nations, and that seals used to visit the fresh water of Lake Champlain on the border of Quebec and Vermont, where they are utterly unheard of today. Marsh was the first to promote the now widely held idea that the collapse of the Roman Empire was in large part an ecological collapse—“rivers famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets”—and even speculated that the reason that writers from the age of classical antiquity failed to remark on the phenomenon of ocean phosphorescence was because they never witnessed it: that civilization since then had transformed the seas to such an extent that luminescent plankton were freed to set the waves aglow.

  Man and Nature is today considered one of the founding texts of the environmental movement, and there’s no question that Marsh argued for the preservation of the wild. But he also went further. More than a century before the first Earth Day, Marsh was calling for the renovation, literally the “making new,” of an exhausted planet. His concern was not first and foremost how much land to set aside here or there in parks and protected areas—the question that launched a hundred years of battles for the world’s last and best wild spaces. Instead, Marsh asked whether we were changing nature itself into something new, something lesser, something our ancestors might not even recognize. He had written what can be thought of as the first principle of historical ecology: to know what is, you must know what was.

  That isn’t as easy as it might sound. I mentioned earlier that my childhood landscape seemed to have hardly any past, and this is true in a textbook sense. The first European to visit the area didn’t arrive until 1811. By that time, there was already steam-powered ferry service between New York and New Jersey, London had a population of more than one million, and Captain James Cook had circumnavigated Antarctica. The place where I grew up never saw war or revolution, was never dark and bloody ground. George Washington’s false teeth have a longer written history than my hometown.

  But then, no ordinary telling of history commemorates the caribou. Most people know caribou as the strange, bone-jutting beasts that survive on Arctic barrens, yet caribou were hunted within living memory on a plateau across the valley from my family’s kitchen window; it was probably there that a prospector in 1926 witnessed the animals being “wantonly slaughtered.” My parents worked at Cariboo College,* but not once while growing up did I hear that the name referred to the former presence of the actual animal.

  No one ever spoke of the elk, either, described in one account as “numerous and widespread”—their antlers were still bleaching in the hills as the twentieth century began. An early naturalist wrote that the Western rattlesnake could be found on some hillsides “coiled upon every ledge, stone and bare spot”; I saw just two rattlers in my entire childhood. The schools I went to never taught that the sage grouse, white-tailed jackrabbit, pigmy short-horned lizard and viceroy butterfly, among other species, had vanished from the hills. I knew that bounty hunts had helped to eradicate the wolf from much of North America, but had never been told that the landscape I lived on shared that history, or that the killing had gone far beyond wolves to include any animal that might steal a chicken, eat a kernel of wheat or otherwise intrude on human interests, from owls and eagles to sparrows and prairie dogs. Some were massacred in “ring hunts,” with the spirit if not the huge breadth of one recorded from eighteenth-century
Pennsylvania, when a man named Black Jack Schwartz organized two hundred settlers to circle an area fifty kilometres in diameter and then close in on every bear, buffalo, elk, deer, cougar, wolf, bobcat, wolverine, fisher, otter and beaver in the area—allegedly nearly a thousand animals in all.

  “The gun and the plough, the saw and the cow, the dam and the ditch”—so goes one abbreviated history of my hometown. By 1850, settlers’ cattle and cayuse horses had grazed whole horizons of grassland to the ground. Feed was shipped in, and with it came the seeds of the invasive plants—Kentucky blue-grass, smooth brome, diffuse knapweed, crested wheatgrass—that swept through the native prairie to become the familiar vegetation of my youth. The Christmas tumbleweed I remember so fondly was a stowaway from Russia.

  Earlier still was the fur trade, which drove an annihilation of wild mammals so total that trapped-out regions were sometimes called “fur deserts.” A typical pack train of the era involved three hundred horses, each loaded with twin eighty-pound bales of pelts, for a total of forty-eight thousand pounds of furs. The Scottish naturalist David Douglas, apparently outraged by a landscape empty of any furbearing animal larger than a chipmunk, told the chief trader of the fort that went on to become my hometown that “there is not an officer in it with a soul above a beaver skin.”

  Even the fur trade is not the beginning of the depletion. Millennia of indigenous settlement came before that, the tribes and cultures that, by the time they encountered men of European descent, were so thickly populated on the landscape that one early visitor reported he was never out of sight of campfire smoke. In one local legend, Buffalo charges at Coyote for disrespectfully kicking at the bones of Buffalo’s ancestors. “They were all killed, and my brothers and sisters were taken away,” Buffalo says. “I am the only one left.” The archaeological record shows that buffalo, also known as bison, roamed at least near enough to my home prairie that a herd could have covered the distance in a weekend. Never once while growing up did I hear that the land might have been buffalo country.

  In the year 2000, a local biologist named David Spalding, attempting to express in simple terms the reason so many species had disappeared, put it down to “the general increase in humans.” The soil itself was once crusted with a living skin of lichens and micro-organisms, hundreds of years in the making and now trampled into powder by livestock in most places. One such cryptogamic crust species, Diploschistes muscorum, is a living irony: it’s easily destroyed by grazing cattle, but looks like a cow-pie. The resemblance generates Abbott and Costello dialogue such as this, from a grasslands walk I took with a local conservationist: “There’s some lichens! Or maybe that’s just cowshit.” Today, a dubious milestone has been reached. In this overlooked corner of the globe, this place that seems so empty of history, the natural world has undergone so much change in just the past one hundred years that a person like me, raised so close to the land that my feet were stained the colour of it, wouldn’t feel at home in the original grassland. The prairie as it was is an unfamiliar country.

  Yet if I took you onto the remaining grasslands around my hometown today, they would seem to you as ancient and unchanging as anywhere on earth. You’d smell sage and the vanilla scent of ponderosa pine bark, and you’d hear meadowlarks, and the bunchgrass would rustle like the restless dead. Cicadas would zing in swales of aspen, and if you were lucky with the year and the season, the brittle prickly pear would be in lemon-yellow bloom. The breeze would suck across the hilltop balds where it has carried away the soil and leave you blinking as it dried your windward eye. In the dust you might see stripes where gopher snakes had lain to warm themselves in the morning sun. You might see an ant lion spitting sand as it tries to knock insects into its pit trap. You might see fox tracks. The whole of the landscape, from sky to soil, would have the look and smell and feel of what we call nature. It is an illusion that has in many ways created our world.

  * There’s an apocryphal story from my hometown of a fox-fur farmer who thought he could save on the cost of fences and cages by setting up on an island in a huge inland lake. Then a winter cold snap froze the lake’s surface, setting the foxes free.

  * The planks measured four metres long by half a metre wide, which Marsh said was far larger than any living vine he could find, “though I have taken some pains on the subject.”

  * I remember the devastatingly of-the-era CARIBOOZER sweatshirt, which featured the image of a drunken caribou; the college has since been renamed, erasing even this tentative connection to the past ecology.

  Chapter 2.

  KNOWLEDGE EXTINCTION

  In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind a gushing oil pipe one-and-a-half kilometres under the sea. The spill is already fading from memory. At the time, though, as the weeks passed and the disaster continued, the world watched each day’s new round of coverage with horror: oil-soaked pelicans, poisoned mangrove forests, debates about whether or not to set the ocean’s surface on fire. Two months into the calamity, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the cleanup of the spill would go beyond the “crisis of the moment.” He promised a long-term recovery plan that would return the Gulf Coast and its waters to “normal.”

  When it comes to nature, normal is in the eye of the beholder. The discovery of this fact—perhaps the most important in our relationship to the living world—has its roots in an unexpected discipline: child psychology. In 1995, Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Batya Friedman, both of Colby College in Maine, published a study of the environmental views and values of children from a mainly poor, mainly Black community in Houston, Texas. Houston, located on the Gulf of Mexico’s coastal plain, is one of America’s more polluted cities, yet only a third of the kids reported that environmental problems affected them directly. In an attempt to explain this unexpected outcome, the authors write:

  One possible answer is that to understand the idea of pollution one needs to compare existing polluted states to those that are less polluted. In other words, if one’s only experience is with a certain amount of pollution, then that amount becomes not pollution, but the norm against which more polluted states are measured … Indeed, what we perceive in the children we interviewed might well be the same sort of psychological phenomenon that affects us all from generation to generation. People may take the natural environment they encounter during childhood as the norm against which to measure pollution later in their life. The crux here is that with each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.

  Ideas often arise simultaneously in disparate quarters. The same month that the child development study was released, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly published a commentary about what he called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Pauly had been inspired, in part, by the 1984 book Sea of Slaughter, in which author Farley Mowat reviews five centuries of explorers’ journals and pioneer accounts to expose the terrible toll of human hunting and fishing in the North Atlantic. The book had recently been revisited by three biologists who concluded, based on Mowat’s research, that biomass—the total weight of living things—off North America’s east coast may have declined by 97 percent since written records began. The failure of coastal residents and scientists to recognize such a shocking diminution seemed to Pauly explainable only by a long-term pattern of amnesia. Each generation of people saw the coast that they grew up on as the normal state of nature, and measured the declines of sea life against that baseline. With every new generation, the baseline shifted—“a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance,” Pauly said. We were forgetting what the world used to look like.

  Researchers have since found evidence of shifting baseline syndrome among people and in places as wide ranging as bush-meat hunters in Equatorial Guinea, birdwatchers in Yorkshire, England, and villagers along the Yangtze River in China. As chance would have it, one of the most startling studies was carried out in the Gulf of Mexico and adjoining Caribbean Sea. Marine biologist
Loren McClenachan, currently an associate professor of environmental studies at Colby College, compared big-game fishermen’s photos from the Florida Keys from the 1950s to the modern day. In the old black-and-whites, the biggest fish, strung up on the dock, are as tall and wide as the fishermen themselves, while the rest of the day’s catch—the fish have an average length of nearly one metre—is piled up in heaps. By 2007, the catch is dominated by snappers that measure just a little longer than a grade-school ruler; the “small” fish of past years are often larger than the trophy fish of recent times. Most striking of all is that the fishermen look equally pleased with themselves through the generations—the same wide smiles, the same backslapping-with-Hemingway pride. Many of today’s fishers responded to McClenachan’s research with flat disbelief.

  Another of McClenachan’s studies found that coral reefs across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico once were home to at least four tonnes more fish per hectare than they typically are today; to put that into perspective, four tonnes of fish is enough to feed a meal to twelve thousand people. To see those coral reefs in their glory, we’d need to reach back to the seventeenth century, when the waters were also home to an estimated 300,000 Caribbean monk seals (now extinct, the last confirmed sighting in 1952); or centuries earlier still, when as many as 91 million green sea turtles churned the waves (today’s numbers are less than 1 percent of that figure).

  Perhaps the most remarkable research involves two humble varieties of sea sponge, once so significant a part of the aquatic environment that in the first years of the twentieth century some twenty thousand tonnes of sponges were hauled ashore every year in Florida and the northern Caribbean alone. In 1939, the wild sponge population, already seriously depleted for uses ranging from household scrubbing to birth control, was hit hard by epidemic disease. It has never recovered. Sponges have an astounding capacity to remove microbes from water; in a single day, a sponge the size of a soccer ball can sieve 90 percent of the bacteria from more water than you will drink in your lifetime. The loss of the sponges damaged water quality throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a crash in the number of lobsters, and of an economy that had sustained thousands of sponge and lobster fishers.