by Tom Phillips
Still, the tale of the flaming river did its job, spurring national action. The nascent environmental movement, already primed by books like Rachel Carson’s 1962 work Silent Spring, began to coalesce (the first Earth Day was marked the following year). Congress was forced to take action, passing the Clean Water Act in 1972. Gradually the state of America’s waterways improved, to the point where they now hardly ever catch fire. In a rare example of a happy ending in this book, people actually did what they needed to do to make things better, and hahaha, there’s absolutely no chance that the Trump administration would ever attempt to overturn clean water standards because they’re worried industries aren’t allowed to pollute rivers enough. [Puts finger to ear.] Oh, I’m being told that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Large bodies of water erupting into flames may be one of the more dramatic examples of humanity’s unerring ability to take the natural world around us and make it worse, but they’re hardly alone. The world is full of examples of how we’ve managed to make a huge mess basically everywhere we’ve gone. Did you know there’s a vast “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a massive plume of mostly ruined sea, spreading out from where the fertilizer running off the agricultural lands of the southern USA has caused great algal blooms, the algae going hog-wild and robbing the water of oxygen, killing everything else that isn’t algae. Good work, guys!
Or how about our fondness for just throwing stuff away without really considering that it has to end up somewhere, which has given rise to the massive electronic wasteland of Guiyu in China, an infamous 20-square-mile graveyard of the world’s unwanted gadgets, piled high with outdated laptops and last year’s smartphones. Technically Guiyu is in the business of recycling, which is good! Unfortunately (until recently), it was also hell on earth, with thick plumes of black smoke filling the air, toxic heavy metals leaching into both the soil and the people after the scrap is washed with hydrochloric acid, and the smell of burning plastic everywhere. (That was until the Chinese government cracked down on it in the past few years, enforcing higher health and safety standards—after which one resident told the South China Morning Post that the air quality was much improved. “You can only smell the burning of metal when you are really close,” Yang Linxuan said.)
An electronic waste mountain in Guiyu, China
Perhaps our most impressive piece of work is the Great Pacific Trash Vortex. It’s almost poetic that in the middle of the ocean there’s a vast, swirling rubbish dump of crap we’ve casually disposed of—an area the size of Texas where the ocean currents of the North Pacific Gyre keep our waste products endlessly circling around the sea. Mostly made from microscopic particles of plastic and fragments of discarded fishing equipment, it’s invisible to the naked eye, but for marine life it is a very real thing. Scientists recently estimated that since we started the widespread use of plastic in the 1950s, we’ve made over 8,300 million tons of it. Of that, we’ve thrown away 6,300 million tons, which is now just hanging around the surface of the earth. Yay, humans.
But if you want the most poignant example of how humans can destroy their own habitat without really meaning to, you need to look to an island covered in massive stone heads.
Heads You Lose
When the first Europeans landed on Easter Island in 1722 (a Dutch expedition that was looking for a supposedly undiscovered continent that doesn’t exist, the idiots), they were baffled. How could this tiny, profoundly isolated Polynesian nation, lacking modern technology or any trees, possibly have erected the vast, elaborate statues—some of them 70 feet tall and weighing almost 90 tons—that covered major parts of the island?
Obviously, the Netherlanders’ state of curiosity didn’t last long: they quickly set about doing their regular European thing, namely shooting a bunch of the local inhabitants dead after a series of misunderstandings. Over the next few decades, further European visitors did more of the stuff that Europeans tended to do in places they’d just “discovered,” like introducing deadly new diseases, kidnapping the local population into slavery and generally patronizing the hell out of them. (See the later chapter on colonialism.)
Over the following centuries, white people would come up with a bunch of theories about how those mysterious statues could possibly have appeared on an island full of “primitive” people—mostly involving implausible ocean crossings from faraway continents, or sometimes aliens. (“Aliens must have done it” is a remarkably popular and obviously extremely rational solution to the conundrum of nonwhite people building things that white people can’t imagine them having built.) The answer to the question is, of course, obvious: the Polynesians put them there.
At the time they first landed on Rapa Nui (to give it its local name), the Polynesians were one of the great world civilizations who had explored and settled on islands across thousands of miles of ocean. Meanwhile, a few stray Vikings aside, Europeans hadn’t really got out of their backyards.
Rapa Nui was home to an advanced culture, with intergroup cooperation, intensive agriculture, a socially stratified society and people commuting to work: basically all of the bullshit that we generally associate with being fancy and proper. The statues—moai in Polynesian—were the crowning achievement of an art form common to other Polynesian societies. They were important to Rapa Nui’s society for both spiritual and political reasons, honoring the ancestors whose faces they depicted, while functioning as symbols of prestige for those who ordered their construction.
So the puzzle turned into a different one: not how did the statues get there, but instead, where had all the trees gone? Because however the Rapa Nui people got those statues into place, they’d have needed a ton of big-ass logs to do it. And how did the mighty civilization that put them there turn into the small society of subsistence farmers with threadbare canoes that greeted (and then got shot by) those first Dutch sailors?
The answer is that the Rapa Nui people both got unlucky, and fucked up.
They got unlucky because, it turns out, their island’s geography and ecology was unusually vulnerable to the effects of deforestation. As Jared Diamond (he of the “agriculture was our biggest mistake” theory) explains in his book Collapse—which puts the people of Rapa Nui front and center—compared to most Polynesian islands, Easter Island is small, dry, flat, cold and remote: all things that make it less likely that the trees you cut down will get naturally replaced.
And they fucked up because, in their efforts to keep building better houses and better canoes and better infrastructure to move statues into place, they kept cutting the forest down, maybe not realizing that those trees wouldn’t come back, until suddenly there were no more left. It was the tragedy of the commons writ large. Nobody cutting down any single tree was responsible for the problem, up until it was too late: at which point everybody was responsible.
The effects were devastating to Rapa Nui’s society. Without the trees, they couldn’t make the canoes that let them fish in the open ocean; the rootless and unprotected soil started to erode in the wind and rain, becoming infertile and causing landslides that wiped out villages; in the cold winters, they were forced to burn much of the remaining vegetation to stay warm.
And as things got worse, competition between groups for increasingly scarce resources increased. This seems to have led to an outcome that was tragic but weirdly predictable, given how people often act in a desperate situation where they’re hungry for social standing, or morale, or just a bit of reassurance that they haven’t made a terrible mistake. They didn’t stop. In fact, they doubled down. The people of Rapa Nui appear to have thrown themselves into building ever larger and larger statues, because...well, that’s pretty much what humans always do when faced with a problem that they’re worried they can’t solve. The last statues carved on the island never even made it out of the quarry, while others lie toppled by the wayside, never having reached their destination as the whole project collapsed.
The Polynesians
weren’t any less clever than you or me; they weren’t primitive or unaware of their environment. If you think that a society faced with potential environmental disaster ignoring the problem and doing even more of the stuff that caused it in the first place sounds foolish, then, er, hi. Maaaaaaybe take a little look around you? (Then please turn your thermostat down and take out the recycling.)
In Collapse, Jared Diamond ponders the question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Which is a very good question, and one that’s pretty hard to answer. Possibly it was some Polynesian version of YOLO.
But maybe a better question might be what the Easter Islander who cut down the second-to-last tree, or the third-to-last, or the fourth-to-last was thinking. If the rest of human history is any guide, there’s probably a fairly decent chance he was thinking something along the lines of “Not my problem, mate.”
7 AMAZING SIGHTS YOU’LL NEVER SEE, BECAUSE HUMANS RUINED THEM
The Parthenon
One of the jewels of Ancient Greece, until in 1687 the Ottomans used it as a gunpowder store during a war with Venice. One lucky Venetian shot later—no more Parthenon.
Temple of Artemis
One of the actual Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, until 356 BCE, when a bloke called Herostratus burned it down because he wanted attention.
Boeung Kak Lake
The largest and most beautiful lake in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, until it was decided to pump it full of sand to build luxury apartments on it. Now a puddle.
Buddhas of Bamiyan
The magnificent statues of Gautam Buddha in central Afghanistan, over a hundred feet tall, were blown up by the Taliban in 2001 because they were “idols.” FFS.
Nohmul
A great Mayan pyramid, the finest Mayan remains in Belize, was torn down in 2013 by some building contractors because they wanted gravel for nearby roadworks.
Slims River
A vast river in Canada’s Yukon territory that completely vanished in the space of four days in 2017, as climate change caused the glacier it flowed from to retreat.
Ténéré Tree
Famously the most isolated tree on the planet, alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert—until 1973, when despite it being the only tree for 250 miles, a drunk driver still managed to drive his truck into it.
3
Life, Uh, Finds a Way
Alongside the development of planting crops, the first farmers all those thousands of years ago started to do something else that would change our world in strange and unpredictable ways—they began domesticating animals.
Actually, the very first domesticated animal almost certainly predates the development of agriculture by thousands of years—although that may have been more of a happy accident than a clever plan. Dogs were the original domestic animals, and they seem to have become domesticated sometime between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, in either Europe, Siberia, India, China or somewhere else (the uncertainty comes from the fact that dog DNA is a bit of a mess, because dogs will cheerfully shag pretty much any other dog they come across). While it’s possible that this happened because an enterprising hunter-gatherer ancestor of ours woke up one day and said, “I am going to make friends with a wolf and he will be a Very Good Boy,” it’s more likely that dogs were (at the start, at least) basically self-domesticating. The most plausible dog origin story is simply that wolves started following humans around, because humans had food and tended to discard their leftovers. Over time, those wolves started to adapt more and more to life with humans; meanwhile, humans began to realize that having some friendly wolves living with them was actually pretty useful for protection and hunting, and also they were all fluffy-wuffy, yes they were.
But once agriculture kicked off in earnest, humans began to work out that the thing they were doing with plants might also work with animals, and would save everybody the bother of going out hunting. Around 11,000 years ago, goats and sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia. Five hundred years after that, cattle were domesticated in modern-day Turkey, and then again in what is now Pakistan. Pigs were also domesticated twice, about 9,000 years ago—in China and again in Turkey. In the Eurasian Steppe, probably somewhere around Kazakhstan, horses were domesticated between 6,000 and 5,500 years ago. Meanwhile, in Peru, around 7,000 years ago, humans first tamed the guinea pig. Which, granted, sounds slightly less impressive but honestly was pretty cool.
Domestication of animals had a lot of useful upsides—a ready supply of protein, wool for clothing and manure for fertilizing crops. Of course, it wasn’t all good news, as we mentioned in the previous chapter. Keeping animals at close quarters makes it a lot easier for diseases to jump from animals to humans; keeping horses and cows seems to have been linked with the origin of wealth inequality; and the military uses of horses and elephants made war a lot more...warlike.
In addition, the domestication of animals gave us a very clear idea that we were the masters of nature, and that from now on animals and plants would do our bidding. Unfortunately, as we’ll see in this chapter, that’s not exactly how it always works out. Humans’ persistent belief that we can make living things do exactly what we want them to has a rather nasty habit of backfiring on us.
For example, let’s rewind to the year 1859, when Thomas Austin was feeling a bit homesick.
Austin was an Englishman, but had arrived in the colony of Australia as a teenager. Now, a couple of decades later, he was a prosperous landowner and sheep farmer, presiding over a vast spread of 29,000 acres at his home near Victoria. There he replicated the pursuits of his ancestral lands with enthusiasm: a keen sportsman, he bred and trained racehorses and turned much of his acreage into a preserve for wildlife and hunting. His estate gained such a reputation in Australian high society that the Duke of Edinburgh was a regular visitor on his trips to Australia. When Austin died decades later, his glowing obituary said that “a better representative of the real old English country gentleman could not be found, either here or at home.”
His determination to live the life of a traditional country squire on the far side of the world led him to do everything in his power to replicate a little bit of England in the Antipodes. And that, unfortunately, is where it went to shit.
That’s because Austin decided that his hunting would be vastly improved with the importation of some classic English animals to shoot (wallabies, presumably, just didn’t quite cut it for him). He had his nephew ship over pheasants and partridges, hares and blackbirds and thrushes. And crucially, he imported 24 English rabbits. “The introduction of a few rabbits,” he said, “could do little harm and might provide a touch of home in addition to a spot of hunting.”
He was very, very wrong about the “little harm” bit. Although in fairness he was right that they would indeed provide a spot of hunting.
Austin wasn’t the first person to bring rabbits to Australia, but it was his rabbits that were largely responsible for the catastrophe that was about to strike. The thing about rabbits is that they breed like...well, rabbits. The scale of the problem should probably have been evident from the fact that in 1861, just a couple of years after Austin’s initial shipment arrived, he boasted in a letter that “English wild rabbit I have in thousands.”
It didn’t stay in the thousands. A decade after Austin introduced them, two million rabbits were being shot each year in Victoria without denting their population growth in the slightest. The rabbit army soon spread all across Victoria, moving at an estimated 80 miles a year. They were seen in New South Wales by 1880, in South Australia and Queensland by 1886, Western Australia by 1890 and the Northern Territory by 1900.
By the 1920s, at the height of the rabbit plague, Australia’s rabbit population was estimated at 10 billion. There were 3,000 of them for every square mile. Australia was quite literally covered in rabbits.
The rabbits didn’t just br
eed; they ate (breeding is hungry work, after all). They stripped the land bare of vegetation, driving many plant species into extinction. The competition for food brought a number of Australian animals to the brink of extinction, as well, while without plant roots to hold the soil together the land itself crumbled and eroded.
The scale of the problem was clear by the 1880s, and authorities were at their wits’ end. Nothing they tried seemed to be capable of stopping the floppy-eared onslaught. The government of New South Wales placed a slightly desperate-sounding advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, promising to pay “the sum of £25,000 to any person or persons who will make known...any method or process not previously known in the Colony for the effectual extermination of rabbits.”
A horde of rabbits drinking at a watering hole in Adelaide, Australia, 1961
Over the following decades, Australia tried shooting, trapping and poisoning the rabbits. They tried burning or fumigating their warrens or sending ferrets into the tunnels to flush them out. In the 1900s, they built a fence over a thousand miles long to try and keep the rabbits out of Western Australia, but that didn’t work because it turns out that rabbits can dig tunnels and, apparently, learn to climb fences.
Australia’s rabbit problem is one of the most famous examples of something that we’ve only figured out quite late in the day: ecosystems are ridiculously complex things and you mess with them at your peril. Animals and plants will not simply play by your rules when you casually decide to move them from one place to another. “Life,” as a great philosopher once said, “breaks free; it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers—painfully, maybe even dangerously. But, uh, well, there it is.” (Okay, it was Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park who said that. As I say, a great philosopher.)