Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

  Agriculture was such an obviously great idea that it sprang up independently in loads of different places, all within a few thousand years of each other on several different continents—in Mesopotamia, India, China, Central America and South America at the very least. Except that there’s a school of thought that says agriculture wasn’t actually our greatest leap forward. In fact, it may have been a dreadful, dreadful mistake.

  For starters, the origin of agriculture was also the origin of the fun concept of “wealth inequality,” as elites began to emerge who had way more stuff than everybody else and started bossing everybody else around. It may also have been the origin of war as we know it, because once you have a village, you also have the danger of raids on it by the next village. Agriculture brings new diseases into contact with humans, while living together in ever larger settlements creates the conditions for epidemics. There’s also evidence that suggests people in nonagricultural societies ate more, worked less and may well have been healthier.

  Basically (this idea goes), an awful lot of what sucks about modern life was because thousands of years ago somebody stuck some seeds in the ground. Agriculture hung around not because it made everybody’s lives better, but because it gave societies that did it a Darwinian leg up over the ones that didn’t: they could have more children faster (agriculture can feed more people, and once you’re no longer moving around all the time, you don’t have to wait for your kid to be able to walk before having another), and they could claim more and more land, eventually chasing all the nonfarmers off. As the author Jared Diamond, a proponent of the “agriculture was a horrible mistake” theory, put it in a 1987 article in Discover magazine: “Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare and tyranny.” In short, we went for quantity over quality. Classic humans.

  But in addition to all...this [vaguely waves hand around at the state of the world], agriculture started us on a path that would lead to many more direct, more dramatic screw-ups. The dawn of agriculture was when we started to change the environment around us—after all, that’s what farming is. You take plants and put them in places they weren’t planning on being. You start to reshape the landscape. You try to get rid of the things that you don’t want so you can fit in more of what you do want.

  Anyway, it turns out that we’re really bad at thinking that kind of stuff through.

  The world around us right now is profoundly different from the one our ancestors first planted seeds in 13,000 years ago. Agriculture has altered the landscape and transplanted species across continents, while cities and industry and our natural tendency to just throw away any garbage we don’t want has changed the soil, the sea and the air. And without wanting to get all We Must Not Anger the Earth Mother on you, sometimes the natural world is not here for our bullshit.

  That’s what famously happened on the central plains of the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. As is often the case, to begin with everything was going pretty swell. America was expanding westward, and people were living out a version of the American Dream. Government policies encouraged people to move west and get farming, with settlers being granted free plots of land across the Great Plains. Unfortunately, by the beginning of the century most of the good farming land—basically the bits with a decent water supply—had already been claimed. People were understandably slightly less enthusiastic about heading out to farm dry, dusty land, so the government doubled the amount of dry, dusty land they’d be given. “Sounds like a good deal,” the settlers said.

  If that drive to farm every scrap of land doesn’t seem, with hindsight, like the greatest idea in the world, there were a bunch of reasons why people assumed it would be fine. There was the romantic—the nostalgic appeal of an agrarian nation of pioneers—and the pragmatic, a growing country’s basic need for food. But there was also some highly dodgy science, bordering on religion: the theory that “rain follows the plow,” that the simple act of starting to farm land would summon rain clouds, turning the desert fertile and verdant. Under this theory, the only thing stopping the expansion of farming in America was a lack of will. It’s like that Kevin Costner movie, but with cereal crops instead of ghosts playing baseball. If you farm it, rains will come.

  They really believed in this, so it almost seems mean to point out that the reason it so often started raining as soon as farmers moved into an area was that the middle of the nineteenth century, when the theory was developed, was simply an unusually rainy period. Those rains, unfortunately, would not hang around forever.

  Come World War I and suddenly all that farmland seemed like a great idea: Europe’s food production had ground to a halt, but America was able to pick up the slack. Prices were sky-high, the rains were good and the government kicked in some generous subsidies to farmers for planting wheat, so naturally farmers did, plowing up ever more prairie as they did so.

  After the war, though, wheat prices fell dramatically. Now, if you’re a wheat farmer, and you’re not making enough money from your wheat, then the solution is obvious: you need to plant more wheat. Farmers invested in new mechanical plows, tearing up even more of the soil. Even more wheat meant even lower prices, which...and so on.

  Then, suddenly, the rains didn’t come. The soil dried out, and the roots of the grasses that had held the topsoil together through previous droughts suddenly weren’t there. The soil turned to dust, and the wind picked that dust up into enormous, roiling clouds.

  It’s those fearsome dust storms—the “black blizzards” that blotted out the sun, choked the air and reduced visibility to a few feet—that became the symbol of the Dust Bowl. In the worst years, hardly a day would go by in summer without the storms whipping up, and even when the wind died, the dust clouds would still hang in the sky. Sometimes residents barely saw the sun for days. The dust storms had astonishing range, with some of them traveling thousands of miles, blanketing cities like Washington, DC, and New York in a thick soil smog, and coating ships hundreds of miles off the East Coast with a fine layer of dust.

  The drought and the dust storms persisted for almost a decade. It was economically ruinous, and several million people were forced to abandon their homesteads. Many never returned, settling instead even farther west, a large number in California. Some of the land never fully recovered, even when the rains came back.

  The American Dust Bowl is one of the more famous examples of the unintended consequences of messing around with our environment. But from mass-scale geo-engineering to tiny plastic beads, from deforestation to rivers doing things that rivers definitely shouldn’t do, it’s not the only one.

  Take the Aral Sea, for example—although you’ll have to move quickly, because there’s not a lot of it left to take.

  The Aral Sea, despite its name prominently involving the word sea, is not actually a sea. Instead, it’s a saltwater lake, though a very, very large one—at over 26,000 square miles, one of the largest lakes in the world, or at least it was. The problem, you see, is that it is not 26,000 square miles anymore.

  A dust cloud in Colorado during the American Dust Bowl, 1936

  It’s now about 2,600 square miles, although that kind of goes up and down. Once almost the size of Ireland, it’s down to a tenth of its former size, and it’s lost over 80 percent of its water. It’s also not a single huge lake anymore—it’s now, roughly, four much smaller ones. “Roughly,” because one of the lakes may have vanished entirely. What little is left of the Aral Sea is now virtually dead, a lifeless ghost sea surrounded by the rusting and decaying skeletons of long-stranded ships that are now miles from any water.

  Which prompts the question: How, exactly, do you lose an entire bloody sea? (Well, an entire big lake.)

  The simple answer is: you divert the two rivers that used to flow into it, because you’ve had the bright idea of growing cotton in the desert. That’s what the Soviet author
ities did from the 1960s onward, because they really wanted to have more cotton. So they undertook a huge project to redirect water from the Amu Darya (which flowed into the Aral Sea from Uzbekistan) and the Syr Darya (which reached the sea through Kazakhstan) so that the bone-dry plains of the Kyzylkum Desert could be converted into a monoculture that would supply the Soviet Union’s cotton needs. Now, in fairness, the plan to irrigate the wannabe farms of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan was a partial success—albeit a hugely wasteful one, because the thing about deserts is that they’re quite dry and absorbent, so as much as 75 percent of the diverted river water never even made it to the farms. (There was also the issue of the defoliant chemicals used on the cotton, which caused sky-high rates of infant mortality and birth defects.)

  But while this was good-ish news for the infant cotton industry of Central Asia, it was devastating for the Aral Sea and its surroundings. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody—or they simply didn’t care—that when you stop water flowing into a lake, you quickly end up with much less lake.

  Immediately from the sixties, but at an accelerating pace from the late eighties until the present day, the Aral Sea began to shrink. Only about a fifth of the water that had flowed into it before came from rainfall, with the rivers supplying the rest. So once they were virtually gone, there wasn’t enough water left to replace that lost to evaporation. The water level started dropping, and new islands and isthmuses began appearing; by the turn of the millennium, the lake had split into two: a small northern section and a larger southern section with a massive island in the middle of it. The waters kept falling, so that the island kept growing until only a tiny ribbon of water connected the eastern and western halves of the southern sea. Eventually they split, too, and then in the summer of 2014, satellite photographs revealed that the eastern section had dried up entirely, leaving only desert in its place. That eastern lake now just kind of comes and goes, depending on what the weather’s like.

  This would have been bad enough, but the thing when a lake disappears is that all the stuff in the water...doesn’t. Salt, particularly. While the Aral Sea receded, the salt continued to hang around, making the waters saltier and saltier and less and less capable of supporting life. The salt density rocketed by a factor of ten, which killed virtually every living thing in the lakes, destroying a thriving fishing industry that had supported 60,000 jobs. Not just that, but the pollutants from industry and agriculture became more concentrated, and then got laid down on the exposed surface of new lands emerging as the waters drew back. Deserts being what they are, the wind then picked up tons and tons of toxic dust and salt from the newly arid landscape and dumped it right on the villages and towns surrounding the former lakes where millions of people lived. Respiratory disease and cancer shot up.

  It’s not necessarily all over for the Aral Sea; recent (very expensive) efforts to divert some water back to it have led to a bit of an improvement in the small northern sea, with fish stocks gradually returning, although the southern sea is pretty much a write-off. But it still stands as a testament to our capacity for thinking we can just make large-scale changes to the geography of our environment without there being some sort of blowback.

  Weirdly, this isn’t even the first time this has happened to one of the rivers involved. I’m not sure if there’s a world record for “most consistently diverted river,” but the Amu Darya has to be in with a shout. For centuries, interventions by both nature and a series of human regimes have repeatedly changed its course from flowing to the Aral Sea to the Caspian Sea (or sometimes both) and back again. In the second century CE it’s thought to have flowed into the desert, where it evaporated, before at some point switching to the Aral Sea. In the early thirteenth century, a particularly drastic intervention by the Mongol Empire changed its course again (more on that in a later chapter), sending at least part of it toward the Caspian, before it returned to the Aral Sea sometime before the 1600s. In the 1870s, long before the Soviet Union came into being, the Russian Empire gave serious consideration to diverting it back to the Caspian, on the grounds that they thought the fresh water was going to waste pouring into a salty lake. Which...is not how it works, guys.

  It was agriculture that first led us to change the environment in dramatic ways, often with unforeseen consequences, but it’s not the only way we do that anymore. Agriculture has in many ways been outpaced by the rise of industry, and human beings’ apparently unquenchable desire to dump stuff we don’t want into the environment without really thinking about the consequences.

  An example of those consequences would be the way that, late one morning on a warm summer’s day in 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire.

  Rivers, to be clear, aren’t meant to do that. For any readers who are still vague on the general concept of rivers, they’re medium to large natural channels of flowing water, and water is not commonly regarded as being especially flammable. Rivers do an awful lot of things—transporting water from high ground to lowlands, providing a metaphor for the passage of time, forming oxbow lakes so children can at least remember something from their geography lessons—but bursting into flames is absolutely not supposed to be one of them.

  The Cuyahoga River did, though, and what’s more it wasn’t the first time it had done it. Not even close. In fact, the Cuyahoga—which meanders slowly through industrial northern Ohio before bisecting the city of Cleveland and plopping into Lake Erie, and which was described by one nineteenth-century mayor of Cleveland as “an open sewer through the center of the city”—was so polluted that it had caught fire no fewer than 13 times in the previous 101 years. It burned in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912 (when five men died in the resulting explosions), 1922 and 1930. In 1936, the fire was so bad that it raged for five days—which, to reiterate, is not traditional behavior for rivers. It burned again in 1941 and in 1948 and then most destructively in 1952, when the two-inch-thick slick of oil that lay across its surface lit up, sparking an enormous conflagration that destroyed a bridge and a shipyard and caused as much as $1.5 million worth of damage.

  In comparison to 1952, the 1969 blaze was comparatively small stuff. Caused by the ignition of a coagulated mix of oil, industrial waste and debris that had combined to form a sort of flammable trashberg floating down the river, it put on an impressive show (the flames were five stories high) but was under control inside half an hour, the Cleveland fire department clearly being on top of their river-fire-extinguishing game by this point. The people of the city were apparently so used to this sort of stuff that the goddamn river catching fire only merited five paragraphs of story deep on the inside pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

  But if Cleveland’s long-suffering populace were kind of “oh, that again” about river fires by 1969, the nation as a whole was not. Things had changed since the last time the Cuyahoga burned. It was the sixties, after all, and society was being shaken to its core by a series of revolutionary new ideas, such as “having fewer wars,” “not being quite as racist” and “maybe trying not to fuck the planet up entirely.”

  So when Time magazine cottoned on to the fire a few weeks later, they wrote it up in a story on the state of the nation’s rivers titled “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism,” which included this memorable description of the Cuyahoga: “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows...an open sewer filling Lake Erie with scummy wavelets.” Time’s article grabbed the country’s attention and prompted widespread demands for change—largely thanks to the jaw-dropping picture that accompanied the story, a dramatic shot of a boat engulfed in the flames of the burning river as fire crews struggled to contain the blaze. Actually, that picture wasn’t of the 1969 fire; it was an archive photograph from the 1952 blaze, because the 1969 fire had been dealt with so quickly that it was out before any photographers or film crews managed to turn up. The picture hadn’t caught the national imagination back in 1952, but now it worked a treat. Someti
mes timing is everything.

  1952 Time magazine photo of a boat engulfed in flames on the Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Ohio

  Since the 1800s, the industries of Ohio had been cheerfully spilling both the by-products and indeed the products of their work into the Cuyahoga. This led to regular bouts of the media, politicians and public saying things like, “Uh, maybe we should do something about this?” followed by nobody really doing anything about it. A few half-hearted measures were implemented in the years after the war, but they were mostly concerned with making the river safe for shipping rather than making the river not inherently flammable.

  Still, it was perhaps slightly unfair that the Cuyahoga became the national symbol of humanity’s inaction in the face of environmental destruction, if only because the year before the fire, the city of Cleveland had actually passed some laws to finally get the river cleaned up. Quite a few local officials sounded a bit miffed at the fact that they had become the poster river for the filthy state of the nation’s waterways (to the extent that there were even songs written about it). “We were already doing the things we needed to clean up things there, and then the fire happened,” one said plaintively.

  After all, theirs wasn’t even the only burning river in the country at the time. The Buffalo River caught fire in 1968, the year before Cuyahoga, while the Rouge River in Michigan burst into flames just a few months after it in October 1969. (“When you have a river that burns, for crying out loud, you have troubles,” the Detroit Free Press lamented in the aftermath.) Cuyahoga wasn’t even the only river in the US to have caught fire on multiple occasions—in the nineteenth century, the Chicago River saw conflagrations with enough regularity that the community would come out and watch like it was a Fourth of July display—although it definitely takes the prize for Most Consistently on Fire River, North American Category.