Histories Etched
~ Ian Ferrier
warehouses ransacked and abandoned for the south.
light footprints of our passing through the snow.
Who would we talk to? And how could they answer?
the bridges fall and there are less of us each year.
of the city underground.
the tunnels terminate in breathing walls of ice.
within the stone walls of the ancient hospital
below the copper roofs
and buried by the glaciers on all sides
anchored in breathing and inflexible resolve
we have sent this letter to the next world.
whose sign is fire whose feet are locked in ice
or permafrost a football field below.
Genyornis depicted in Prehistoric Art |
New evidence tightens the noose on humans as the decisive factor in the extinction of the last of the megafauna in Australia and North America. |
Such images that celebrate the complexity, ferocity and diversity of life are all by way of introduction to a monumental book I have been reading, that chronicles the opposite in devastating detail – called Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. It is an enormous scholarly work, published by Michael Williams in 2002. It’s way beyond the scope of one broadcast to include even a fraction of the deforestation he catalogues, so I’m going to concentrate on the earliest evidence he has amassed, because it pertains to the pivotal role of our species in affecting the entire cycle of life and climate on Earth.
The prehistoric human activity exhaustively documented in the book emphasizes two revelations that become critical as more people awaken to the ongoing and accelerating obliteration of Earth’s biodiversity, when they often wonder how our species, which I call Homo Eradicatus, can be simultaneously so conscious, and so stupid.
One is, that we were never any more considerate of the environment, in some fanciful romantic past era of peaceful hunter-gathering tribes. This is borne out by the recent gruesome discovery of a brutal stone age massacre widely regarded as the first irrefutable evidence of warfare between non-sedentary tribes 10,000 years ago – and by the way there is a fascinating radio interview with one of the researchers, where she describes herself as “almost overwhelmed” by the savagery, the elaborate weaponry, and the ruthlessness of the attack, which she attributes to competition over resources. Also interesting is the number of fossilized bones of animals - everything from giraffe to rhinos and zebras - left after being butchered on the shores of Lake Turkana, which was lush, fertile and verdant at that time. Since then it has become a parched barren landscape, a progression of desertification repeated at sites around the world.
The other striking conclusion from the book is that, contrary to popular impression, humanity never made a sudden fatal turn to agriculture – that we could have chosen to avoid had we only been wiser or less greedy. There never was a magic moment when our species could have taken a different path away from increasing complexity and civilization. Rather, it was a long, slow, incremental and inevitable process embedded initially in the simplest acts of hunting and gathering. It began with selectively collecting beneficial plants, encouraging their habitat, and eliminating less favorable forests – first with fire – to facilitate access to preferred prey animals, then to horticulture and animal husbandry, and eventually to factory farms.
A study just published in the journal Anthropocene proposes that the astounding penetration of plastics into all aspects of the world should mark the beginning of the geologically measurable impact of humans, but after reading about the extent of deliberate deforestation beginning over 10,000 years ago, and the vaster consequences to other forms of life, I find ever more reason to think the geologists should dispense with the Holocene altogether and replace it with Endocene, beginning with the extinction of the megafauna and concurrent deforestation.
So great was the deforestation in the Americas that scientists theorize when the Europeans brought diseases that decimated indigenous populations, the continents reforested so rapidly that somewhere between 2 and 17 billion tons of CO2 were rapidly sequestered from the air, leading to the sudden cooling in Europe known as the Little Ice Age between 1500 and 1750. This may or may not be the primary cause, but what is true and indisputable is that pre-Columbian indigenous people had caused massive deforestation, biodiversity alteration, and species extinction.
The first chapter of the book Deforestation expounds on the development of forests as they emerged and spread at the end of the ice age. The meticulous research is amazing. Scientists reconstruct the shift of species from studies of pollen, and track the extensive travel of seeds by river and wind, as well as animal dispersal. The changing flora reminds us that there has always been extensive transport even before explorers like Maria Merion collected thousands of samples and sailed them over the oceans. The book details what it calls the “dynamism of vegetation taxa in the continent as it adjusted to the retreating ice and changing temperatures”. This marks a sharp contrast to the wholesale, universal decline of forests that began with acid rain in the last century and is currently worsening with the deposition of airborne pollutants.
“However, the long-held view has been that prehistoric peoples were a nonfactor in environmental change and degradation. Their numbers and densities were too low to bring about significant change; their technology was insufficient to cause alteration; and their livelihood (particularly that of non-Western “primitive” peoples) was in perfect harmony with nature: “we must understand, in their minds, all aspects of life are harmonized into a whole,” Janaki Ammal asserted of early India. Not all agreed: Carl Sauer was more realistic, and had no doubt that widespread fire was endemic and integral to early human life, and that with domestication “the natural land became deformed, as to biota, surface, and soil, into unstable cultural landscapes.”
“Once started, the fires were fanned by the desiccating nor’westers that then, as now, sweep from the mountain across the foothills and the rain-shadow plains on the eastern side of the South Island during the hot, dry summers. The mixed broadleaf-conifer forests were completely destroyed. It could not withstand fire, did not regenerate, and was replaced by bracken, fern, tussock, and scrub. The denudation initiated the first great cycle of humanly induced soil erosion that buried old forests near present-day Christchurch under 12 ft of detritus. About a hundred years later the interior beech forests went the same way. By 1250 there were barely any moa left to hunt, and by the time of European colonization they were extinct. Thus, by the mid-thirteenth century a mere 8,000—12,000 people in South Island had destroyed “not less than 8 million acres of … forest,” and driven the moa to the verge of extinction. By the time of the fairly precise European vegetation surveys of circa 1800, the forest, particularly in the North Island, had been reduced even further; subsequent clearing for extensive agriculture and sheep grazing completed the task of denudation begun 1,500 years earlier by the Maoris.
Another exposition of the profound way humans altered the environment is found in a short article called The Trees that Miss the Mammoths, which explains how the prehistoric hunting of megafauna to extinction drove trees that relied on them for seed dispersal to the edge, and sometimes over, the cliff of extinction.
A rigorous assessment of this sort of human behavior during the earliest times of our past tends to lead to a deterministic analysis of our inherent tendency to overshoot natural constraints – but it is only depressing to those who harbor the illusion that we are somehow special and superior to other species, whose imperative to grow is also only inhibited by outside limits. If you accept that we are biological organisms propelled by instincts that took a few million years to evolve, it shouldn’t be surprising to find that we have outstayed our welcome on a finite planet, unable to defy our collective innate programming. It is worth thinking about the staggeringly long period of time it required for us to become us, and how essential fire, and cooking meat, was to our evolution.
If it is still too hard to accept that humans have never been a benign force, and you feel afflicted with a bitter disappointment in our performance, it might help to look at several studies examined in a post at Desdemona Despair, which separately and from disparate vantages suggest that the habitability of earth has been in an inexorable decline for far, far longer than mere human mortals could hope to influence. I highly recommend deep contemplation of each of the metrics exposed in the research. And if that’s not calming enough, consider the meaninglessness embedded in the notion that there is not only no end, but, according to a new theory, there is no beginning.
Coloured aquatint, ca. 1862, depicting a man covering his mouth with a handkerchief, walking through smoggy London |
As long ago as 1880, the scourge of bad air is imagined in the title of a novel, The Doom of the Great City. A wonderful review can be found at Bad Air: Pollution, Sin and Science Fiction, which has evocative pictures from newspapers of the 19th century you can find on my blog.
“Important Meeting of Smoke Makers”, a cartoon featured in Punch (1853) |
Cartoon featured in Punch, November 1870 |
‘”Old king Coal” and the Fog Demon’, a cartoon featured in Punch, November 1880, the year in which Hay’s novella was published |
Specifically I thought you might want to consider the 6th mass extinction as more precisely an analog for the Permian, not the PETM. This is what I wrote about it on my blog last fall:
The Permian-Triassic extinction (265 mya), the worst of the past big five and the only one in which trees and insects died off significantly, is a closer analog to the current 6th extinction, which is usually compared to climate change in the PETM event (65 mya). The earlier extinction also was precipitated by massive poisoning of plants, from erupting traps, leading to the same spread of fungus/algae (rampant lichen) that can be seen today. Now, humans are erupting prodigious amounts of toxic aerosols.
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/39/9/883.abstract and http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/43/2/159.abstract ]
I am writing you as I am hopeful that, should you choose to investigate, you have a voice that is not easily dismissed.
“Biodiversity of plant communities is sensitive to N added by air pollution. Nitrogen-loving species are often favored and increase in prominence as ecosystem nitrogen availability increases. Forests and woodlands in many regions of the world show large changes in epiphytic lichen communities in response to chronic atmospheric nitrogen deposition. These lichen community impacts occur at [low] nitrogen pollution thresholds …it can also have adverse effects such as increased soil acidification, biodiversity impacts, predisposition to insect infestations, and effects on beneficial root fungi…”
Sincerely,
Gail Zawacki
“Concern about acid deposition, commonly referred to as acid rain, as a widespread pollution problem with severe ecological consequences has heightened public awareness. Many authorities fear that acid deposition may be the worst environmental crisis of our industrialized society because of both the global implications and possible widespread, irreversible damage to lakes, soils, and forested ecosystems. Neither state nor international boundaries are exempt from the transport and deposition of airborne pollutants resulting from local and distant emission sources. The dilemma and debate will continue as long as society requires fossil fuels for its energy needs without regard to emission constraints. This book started as a modest attempt to provide a status report on atmospheric transport, the chemical processes which produce acidifying agents, and resultant ecological and economic consequences. The materials in this book have been substantially revised from those presented at the conference in 1983. It became obvious that additional chapters were required when sudden and profound changes occurring in European forests were reported. It is felt that perhaps such damages could be an early warning to forested ecosystems in the northeastern United States and Canada as well as other places throughout the world.”
In another outbreak, a forester discusses a beetle in California that is spreading a fungus, which is killing hundreds of different species:
The consequences of a wide-ranging infestation could be enormous. Common city trees, such as American sweetgum and maple, would become public branch-dropping hazards. Native trees such as the California sycamore and the coast live oak have started to succumb, creating a fire risk in the form of dead, dry tinder. Avocados and other crops could face huge financial losses.
Update: Even the rich nations, today, cannot seem to refrain from destroying the most precious and irreplaceable old growth tracts that remain – see the story about logging currently proposed on Vancouver Island.
Source: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2016/01/histories-etched.html
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