The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  Even where there is good news, it often supports the idea of a deep biological impoverishment. In the oceans, the cardinal species of salt water—from coastal seabirds to whales to salmon to sea turtles to sharks to cod—have in recent times recovered to about 16 percent of their historical numbers, up from an estimated low of 11 percent. Yet even this pale revival is led by only the few species that have benefited from conservation campaigns; many others continue to fade.

  Meanwhile, the older pattern of losses continues. Technology has made it newly possible to catch such fish species as the roundnose grenadier, which is usually found in the nightmare blackness between 180 metres and an incredible 2,600 metres beneath the waves. Roundnose weren’t commercially fished until the 1970s, but have since declined by more than 99 percent, with other deep-sea species suffering similar decreases. In fact, there is a theory that predicts these sorts of outcomes, known as the “factor of ten hypothesis” and first put forward by the marine biologist Ransom Myers. Myers proposed that human exploitation of a wild species tends to result in a decline to a fraction of the original population, at which point the creature in question is scarce enough that it makes less and less economic sense to pursue it. That tipping point, he said, is 10 percent.

  At the turn of this new millennium, Peter Kahn, the psychologist who first identified environmental amnesia among inner-city children in Houston, Texas, continued his research in Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal. He would later remember one conversation in particular. “I heard,” an eighteen-year-old told him on the banks of the Tagus River, “that some time ago, when there was none of that pollution, the river, according to what I heard, was pretty, there were dolphins and all swimming in it. I think it should have been pretty to see. Anyone would like to see it.”

  Anyone would like to see it. Counting up the ways we have wounded the earth quickly starts to feel like stacking skulls in a crypt, but the history of nature is not always and only a lament. It is also an invitation to envision another world.

  Picture a map, creased and yellowed, the paper as soft as cotton. Sketches and notations cover nearly every inch—a thousand wanderers’ memories of nature as it was. There are lions in the south of France, for example. Lions in Egypt, in Israel and Palestine; lions, for that matter, in a continuous belt all the way across southern Asia. The man often called the “father of history,” Herodotus, wrote of lions devouring the pack camels of the Persian army by night as it raided Greece in 480 BC. Not one of these places is home to wild lions today.

  These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice; we are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory, but in places where they are unimaginable today. Wolves in England and Japan and running in packs through the streets of a rising Paris. Elephants in China, brown bears in the hills of North Africa, California condors in Canadian skies, a thousand miles from the nearest condors today. Sailors report walruses at the mouth of the Thames River south of London, and in the Gulf of Maine. In the year 1377, a poet in what is now Germany speaks of entering the Great Wilderness, an unbroken forest that took three days to cross and was home to bison, wild boar, wild horses, wolves, bears, lynxes and wolverines: “Pleasantry and laughing had become hushed,” he writes. In 1885, an artist draws the Hamburg Harbour sturgeon market, twenty of the huge fish laid out on the killing floor, each as large as the barrel-chested human butchers. Three thousand sturgeon a year were then being pulled from the Elbe River, where a child growing up today will never see one, may never even hear that the water was once home to these giants.

  Let’s not forget the sounds. On the islands of New Zealand, a ship’s naturalist, a man who has sailed the far corners of the globe, is stirred awake at a distance of a quarter mile by forest birds, “the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard.” Five hundred years earlier, the music was wilder still; by the time European explorers reached New Zealand, the Maori culture had long ago driven the seabirds to offshore islands and wiped out half of New Zealand’s bird species, including the flightless birds known as moas, some species of which were among the largest birds ever to have lived and are known from studies of their tracheal bones to have sung deep, booming songs. One of the first generation of scuba divers, meanwhile, remembers his first dives off the coast of La Jolla, California, in the 1960s, when the spawning chant of huge white sea bass rising up from the depths was as loud as a freight train. A seventeenth-century sea captain sits in his quarters; by the light of an oil lamp he writes that sailors who lose their course in the Caribbean Sea can recover it, day or night, navigating by the noise of endless shoals of sea turtles making their way to their nesting beaches on the Cayman Islands. He does not say what it sounds like. Splashing? Breathing? Waves breaking across turtle shells?

  The sheer abundance of life recorded in documents ranging from naturalists’ journals to fisheries reports is an astonishment. In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in mid-ocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see; in the American South, alligators dwell in “every swamp, river and lake.” More than two hundred species of bird and nearly eighty of fish inhabit Manhattan. When the shad pulse up the Hudson River to spawn, they push a wave like a tidal bore in front of them, while across the continent, Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes. Every major land mass is criss-crossed by the migration routes of animals—ten thousand teeming journeys, many of them as breathtaking as the famous herds that can be witnessed on the Serengeti plains of Africa today. There are birds like you simply would not believe: loons “on almost every lake and moderate-sized pond” from Virginia to the High Arctic; brant geese “by the thousands and millions” that would “rise as one bird and literally darken the whole western sky”; little shorebirds that flocked up the coasts “like smoke rising from forest fires burning from horizon to horizon.”

  The stories go on—here is the author John Steinbeck in the Gulf of California in 1940, when “the swordfish in great numbers jumped and played about us”; here is Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard when hunters could harvest 100,000 diamondback terrapins a year for the famous turtle soups of Baltimore and Philadelphia; here are pearl oyster reefs as tall as a five-storey building and more than ten kilometres long, creating a form of seascape that is completely unknown today.

  But let me add just one personal account to this miscellany. Once, in Argentina, I saw a city disappear. I was visiting an expatriate brother, and we had grown tired of the seething core of Buenos Aires. We made our way to a park along the River de la Plata, and had just started down the crest of a dike beneath an arcade of trees when two fork-tailed flycatchers scissored the air in front of us. Small and shaded in white, black and grey, they would be unremarkable birds if it weren’t for their two tail feathers, which are long and endlessly alive to the breeze. They’re the kind of birds you’d expect to find in paradise.

  I know people who can’t see a bridge without also seeing in their mind’s eye the blueprint of its structure, or who imagine what every stranger looks like beneath his or her clothes. In that moment in Argentina, I had my own perception of hidden things. The city’s smog and high-rises seemed to fade, and what remained were the flood plains of the silver river, its reedy oxbows, its wooded islands, every inch alive with birds and insects and unseen, bustling beasts. This was the understory of Buenos Aires—the place that lived before the living city. But the vision couldn’t hold. The flycatchers moved along; in the distance, the car horns resumed their endless honking.

  When I returned home, Buenos Aires wouldn’t leave me. In that strange way that awareness transforms into coincidence, a title later caught my eye in the rare books section of a library: An Account of a Voyage Up the River de la Plata, and Thence Overland to Peru. The author was the French traveller Acarete du Biscay, who disembarked in Argentina in the late 1650s, more than three centuries ahea
d of my own visit. In his “Description of Buenos Ayres,” du Biscay opens with the frogsong that followed the rain in sultry weather. The natural world had not yet been cleaved from the city, and the Frenchman spoke of it in tones of astonishment:

  The River is full of Fish … there are abundance of those whales call’d Gibars,* and Sea-dogs who commonly bring forth their young ashore, and whose Skin is fit for several uses … there are likewise a great many Otters, with whose Skins the Savages Cloath themselves … most of the little Islands that lie all along the River, and Shore sides are cover’d with Woods full of Wild Boars … there are likewise a great many Stags.

  The landscape that du Biscay witnessed could hardly be considered untouched. As he planted his feet in the mud streets, some two dozen Dutch tall ships swung at anchor offshore, waiting to fill their holds, while nearly five thousand residents worked to clear grasslands for crops, cut forests for wood and hunt the vast plains known as the Pampas for game (including the one-pound eggs of the rhea, a flightless bird as tall as a man). The European conquest of the Americas was well underway, but the human touch was nothing new. Thousands of indigenous people, the Querandí, had lived in the area for millennia, though at the time of du Biscay’s visit their numbers were falling to the holocaust of diseases introduced from Europe. The Querandí, meanwhile, were only one of dozens of tribes living in succession up the river system to the headwaters 2,500 kilometres to the north. The earliest Spanish visitors, too, had left their imprint, abandoning livestock that went on to invade the Pampas, changing the grasslands before later settlers could even set eyes on them. What the Pampas looked and smelled and sounded like before they were grazed by feral cattle and horses was not recorded. It will never be known.

  Still, du Biscay was in awe of the natural wealth of Argentina, and in return the people of Buenos Aires told him a story. From time to time, they said, the settlement was threatened by buccaneers or foreign armadas, and when these enemy ships appeared on the horizon, the men would mount their horses and haze the grasslands. They would herd together the free-ranging bulls and cows, the mules, asses and horses, and also the native animals, the llama-like guanacos, the deer, the vicuñas with their wondrous wool. Then they would drive all of these animals thundering toward the shore. Picture the scene, the air shuddering, dust ballooning, every living thing without a hole to hide in driven forward as if chased by a brush fire—tortoises, snakes, lizards, voles and mice, armadillos, foxes, wild cats, ground birds, songbirds, even vultures, even locusts. All would crush to the river’s edge, there to seethe and buck and blow, a storm lit from within by the flash of teeth and the whites of eyes, and in that moment the strategy was complete:

  ’Tis utterly impossible for any number of Men, even tho’ they should not dread the fury of those Wild Creatures, to make their way through so great a drove of Beasts.

  A wild abundance so overwhelming that it could be used as a military defence—this is one way of picturing the living world of the past. Today, the Environmental Atlas of Buenos Aires lists no creature larger than the rhea, which is found only “in captivity or partial freedom”; the maguari stork, which “appears occasionally”; and the capybara, the world’s largest rodent, listed as “receding.”

  In the end, it didn’t prove impossible. We did indeed make our way through so great a drove of beasts.

  * Apparently humpback or fin whales.

  Chapter 4.

  THE OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE

  People often say that only a disaster will convince us to change our ruinous relationship with the natural world, or that our grandchildren will curse us for the damaged planet that we’ll leave them. The history of nature suggests that neither statement is likely to prove true. Our own ancestors handed down a degraded globe, and we accepted that inheritance as the normal state of things. As our parents and grandparents did before us, we go about our lives in the midst of an ecological catastrophe that is well underway.

  Our baselines have shifted. But it’s one thing to recognize that amnesia, and another to say what the original baseline actually is. Where in the billions of years of life on earth could we possibly draw that line?

  In the Americas, there is a traditional answer. In fact, the baseline can be nailed down not only to the day, but almost to the hour: about 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492. That’s when a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana, under the command of Christopher Columbus, spotted what would come to be known as the New World. Beginning with that moment, nothing would ever be the same.

  It’s still widely believed that the European explorers made landfall on a wild landscape, in which the Native Americans were a part of the natural balance or at worst a minor disturber of its harmonies. That view has helped shape the Americas—and, by extension, the world. In 1963, for example, the zoologist Starker Leopold authored a committee report that became a grounding philosophy for America’s globally influential national parks system. “As a primary goal,” he wrote, “we would recommend that the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man. A national park should represent a vignette of primitive America.”

  In the public imagination, the original state of nature in Australia, the South Pacific, and much of Africa and Asia has also been widely understood to be the world as it was witnessed by the first European explorers and conquerors. A different standard has been applied to Europe itself, and to other regions—such as China and the Middle East—that are popularly recognized as having had advanced societies that transformed their landscapes earlier in history. As Europeans grow more interested in restoring some vestige of pristine nature to their continent, however, the question soon arises: Restore to what? Looking for a turning point at which hunting, land clearing and fishing suddenly accelerated, many draw a line at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Russia’s zapovednik (zah-po-VYED-nik) protected areas—the oldest of which were created not long after the first U.S. national park—were established with the intention of maintaining etalon, a word usually translated as “baselines,” and any human use other than research is technically forbidden.* It is an unmistakably biblical view of natural history: before civilization, there was Eden.

  North America remains the world’s most iconic fallen garden, having gone from an apparently endless wilderness to a settled super-civilization in just five hundred years. Perhaps the greatest symbol of the price of that transition is the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon was a bird of eastern North America, quite similar to a modern-day city-park pigeon, except that where those urban birds shimmer grey, purple and green, passenger pigeons glittered blue-steel and rust. In the early 1800s, they were thought to be among the most abundant birds on earth. The ecologist Aldo Leopold eulogized them as a “living wind,” John Muir recalled their “low buzzing wing-roar,” and every town in the eastern U.S. seems to have seen them blot out the sun or set down in such numbers that they snapped the limbs off oak trees. It’s often forgotten that they lived in Canada, too, but Toronto knew them in flightlines one hundred yards deep and stretching as far as the eye could see. That city’s neighbourhood of Mimico is said to take its name from the Ojibway word omiimiikaa, meaning a gathering place for passenger pigeons.

  Unlike the bison, the pigeon did not survive the colonial onslaught. The last known passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The species is extinct. The passenger pigeon has lived on only as a transgenerational memory of the astonishing natural plenitude that existed ahead of the colonial era, and the ultimate cost of human greed.

  Today, the symbolic importance of the passenger pigeon is being questioned. In his book 1491, author Charles C. Mann presents evidence that the awe-inspiring flocks of passenger pigeons remembered from the nineteenth century were not natural, but rather “pathological”—symptoms of an ecological system thrown wildly out of balance. Others, such as University of Utah wildlife biologist
Charles Kay, argue that all the familiar examples of wild abundance taken from history—the thundering buffalo herds, the immense salmon runs, the seemingly endless supply of beavers—were nothing more than unnatural population outbreaks that took place when those animals were suddenly freed from hunting pressure and competition for food. The missing hunter and competitor was none other than Homo sapiens, human beings—in this case, North America’s indigenous people. Lacking immunity to foreign diseases such as smallpox and scarlet fever that were introduced by European explorers, the native people of the New World died in epidemics that may eventually have claimed 90 percent or more of their number; in many cases, the diseases spread from tribe to tribe so quickly that whole cultures were devastated before they had encountered a single pioneer. By the time European settlement began in earnest, the natural world was going wild on a landscape that was more empty of human influence than it had been for millennia. Before that, according to Kay, “Every inch of North America was artificial.” He argues that the normal state of nature before Columbus was a landscape on which people had hunted wildlife into scarcity, a condition he refers to as “aboriginal overkill.”

  Anthropologists and archaeologists have known for decades that the indigenous people of North and South America were not mainly scattered hunter-gatherers, but instead had complex, advanced and often densely populated societies. That idea has been slow to find mainstream acceptance. The founding stories of Canada and the United States have long rested on the justification that European explorers settled a wild and thinly populated continent. Surviving indigenous people, on the other hand, reject the suggestion that they have no real claim to the territories that historically sustained them, though they also benefit from the myth that they once lived in perfect harmony with nature. To accept that native cultures had the numbers, knowledge and power to transform entire continents lays waste to the widely treasured ideal of wilderness.