The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  The fall of the big beasts is far from the whole story. The environmental historian I. G. Simmons describes the years since the Middle Ages in the most British of terms: “There was a widespread lack of generosity towards wild birds and small mammals.” Indeed. In the 1600s, the great auk was still abundant enough in some places that five tonnes of auk meat for salting could be taken in half an hour, but it had already been wiped out as a breeding species in the British Isles. The red kite, a scavenger and bird of prey once so common that children fed them bread and butter in the London streets, was extirpated by about the 1870s and was absent more than a century before it was reintroduced beginning in 1989. The story is similar for a long list of other species, among them the white-tailed eagle, bustard, osprey, capercaillie (a type of grouse), goshawk and wryneck woodpecker—each was eliminated from Britain, later to recover only slightly if at all through either assisted reintroduction or natural recolonization by birds from the continental mainland.

  At the enthronement feast of the archbishop of York in 1466, the following birds were served: 400 swans, 2,000 geese, 3,000 mallards and teal, 204 cranes, 204 bitterns, 400 herons, 400 plover, 2,400 ruff, 400 woodcock, 100 curlew, 4,000 pigeons, 104 peacocks, 200 pheasants, 500 partridges, 1,200 quail and 1,000 egrets. The abundance of stilt-walking cranes, herons, bitterns and egrets on this menu suggests marshes and fens more full of life than any known on the island today. The Eurasian bittern was once familiar enough that the town of Bemersyde in Scotland takes its name from the males’ booming call—like a tuneful foghorn—which was considered a harbinger of summer across northern Britain. The bittern is now seriously endangered on the island.

  One commentator from that era defended the slaughter as “innocent wars”—fought against “birds and beasts alone.” Britain is so well known for its role in the North American fur trade that it is often forgotten that the island once had its own. By the fourteenth century, fur-bearing mammals were already scarce enough that the right to wear fur was restricted to royals and nobles, and squirrel was a popular pelt—an aristocrat’s bedspread could require 1,400 squirrel skins. Later, church wardens were deputized to pay bounties on a wide range of species that had been declared vermin, including foxes, polecats, stoats, weasels, otters, hedgehogs, rats, mice and moles. In a dozen years during the mid-nineteenth century, hunters on a single Scottish estate shot more than a thousand of the targeted animals, including 198 wildcats, or about half as many of these native felines—beautiful tabby animals with bottle-brush tails—as still exist on the whole of the island today.

  Britain’s environmental history can approach the tragicomic. At a “floral fête” in the spa town of Cheltenham in 1933, a prizewinner’s bouquet contained twenty-two marsh helleborine orchids, then known to exist only in a single, three-acre bog. A funding drive in 1925 failed to protect a breeding ground of the Kentish plover from being converted into a golf course, and the bird was extirpated. More recently, Britons have worried that yet another species is disappearing from their shores. Black rats have called the island home for two thousand years, but today, the species that brought the Black Death to Europe has nearly vanished from Britain. Non-native brown rats—introduced from ships in the eighteenth century—have driven the non-native black rats—introduced from ships in the first century—to a last redoubt on the Shiant Isles off northern Scotland and to occasional appearances in British ports. “I’m just pleased to have seen a black rat,” a local rat-catcher told the BBC after a rare encounter in Cornwall in 1999. The fur, he said, was “like velvet.”

  Much of this history is still recorded on the landscape. Place names, also known as toponyms, are one record of what used to be. A map can’t always be trusted, of course: a place can be called Tiger Mountain because it’s striped with white rock, or Wolf Creek because a man with the surname Wolf used to live there. Often, though, the connection is plain. Britain lost its beavers but is littered with places named after them, from Beverley (beaver glade) and Bevercotes (beaver homes) to Beverstone, Beversbrook and Beaver Hole. On the other side of the world, the state of California has more geographical features named for bears than for any other animal, including two hundred references to grizzly bears specifically. Grizzlies appear on the flag of “the Golden Bear State” and give their name to the University of California’s varsity sports teams, yet the closest wild grizzlies to California can now be found eight hundred kilometres from the state’s northeastern boundary.* There are bear rivers and bear mountains, bear meadows and bear canyons, bear gulches and bear buttes—a poem written over the landscape for those who know how to read it.

  Place names are a measure of the relationship between people and their surroundings. In 1947, a study of the Pamue people in Equatorial Guinea examined nearly 3,500 toponyms, many translating into such singsong terms as Pass Quietly Elephant. The Pamue proved to have a strikingly deep day-to-day awareness of biological diversity: Among other species large and small, their place names record forty kinds of mammal, including nine distinct primates; fifty-seven varieties of fish; and at least 178 species of wild plants. By comparison, one toponym researcher remarks that the place names of the entire English-speaking world might tally “a score or two” of native plants. By the time the British began to influence global culture, they had been distanced from wild nature for centuries, if not millennia.

  The land itself remembers. In some cases, the hedgerows that mark the boundaries of many British fields were first established more than two thousand years ago, and old wildwood plants and animals have managed to survive in them. Some, like hawthorn and holly, two common hedge plants, contain mysteries. At a glance, hawthorn appears to be well protected from browsing animals, given its long, stiff thorns. Curiously, though, the thorns are spaced widely enough that Britain’s deer can easily eat the hawthorn’s leaves. Holly, meanwhile, is a plant of two moods: its lower leaves are famously spiky, for protection, while its upper leaves are smooth-edged to create more surface area for converting sunlight into energy. What’s strange in this case is that the shift from prickly to smooth takes place about five metres off the ground—far higher than necessary to guard against today’s browsing animals. Hawthorn seems oddly under-defended, while holly is weirdly over-defended.

  The solution to these riddles appears to lie in the deep past. Both plants evolved at a time when huge, plant-eating animals still roamed the world. Hawthorn is not adapted to defend against deer, but against megafauna. Animals like ground sloths, which resembled giant bears but were committed vegetarians, could not afford to daintily browse on individual leaves. Instead, they had foreclaws as long as a person’s forearm, designed to hook thick clusters of vegetation toward their mouths; hawthorn’s spines served to discourage such damaging browsers. Similarly, holly is designed to ward off animals tall enough to feed through the windows of a second-storey apartment, despite the fact that the plant hasn’t encountered such threats for thousands of years. Holly and hawthorn are memory incarnate. They are ecological ghosts, manifestations of a world that no longer exists.

  Ecological ghosts can be found almost everywhere on earth. Buy an avocado at the grocery store, and you’re purchasing a seed designed to pass through a digestive tract larger than that of any living animal in the avocado’s native habitat today. The same is true of the osage orange, a bizarre fruit that looks like a cross between a grapefruit and a human brain and piles up to rot at the base of osage orange trees across eastern North America. The osage orange is not eaten by modern man or beast, but fits the fossilized molars of mastodons the way soap sits in a soap dish. A survey in Brazil found 103 plants that showed adaptations to the past presence of megafauna. With no living animal able to effectively eat and disperse their seeds, some of these plants are now uncommon; others, such as the cacao bean from which chocolate is made, rely on cultivation by people. At least one, the tucum palm, is now found almost exclusively on riverbanks. Where once its seeds might have been carried far across the landscape by roving megafa
una, it now relies mainly on a huge, fruit-eating fish called the pacu; the pacu, meanwhile, is threatened by a poorly regulated commercial fishery.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary example of an ecological ghost is the pronghorn antelope, the fastest land animal in North America. At high speed, pronghorn can cover nearly ten metres between each footfall, meaning they can run an American football field in 3.5 seconds while touching the ground only ten times.* When breathing hard, they consume oxygen nearly as efficiently as a bat—pronghorn are, in a sense, built to fly without wings. Their major potential predator on the North American plains, meanwhile, is the coyote, which is laughably outmatched by prey that can accelerate from zero to one hundred kilometres per hour in a matter of seconds and sustain seventy kilometres per hour over long distances. Even a pronghorn fawn can outrun a coyote. The best current explanation for the overbuilt nature of the pronghorn is that the animal evolved among much faster, more explosive predators. Until the arrival of human beings and the fall of the megafauna, North America was home to lions, hyenas, supersized wolves and long-legged bears. Then there was the American cheetah. They were larger than the cheetahs that survive in Africa today, which are the fastest land animals on the planet and have been clocked at speeds of 102 kilometres per hour—just a little faster than a pronghorn.†

  Ecological ghosts are more than just interesting quirks; in some cases, they may be dramatically shaping the planet. One theory for the reason that much of the American West is choked with woody shrubs—much despised by ranchers because it makes poor fodder for cows—is that the big browsing animals that once beat it back, making way for grasslands, have been gone for thousands of years. If so, then not only individual species but whole landscapes can be thought of as relics of another time. Many of the ways we relate to the natural world, too, reflect changes that took place long ago. Looking again at Britain, the wholesale price of Atlantic cod—once considered “pauper’s food”—can be twice as high as the cost of prime fillet beef. Cod, once so easy to catch that the first European fishermen in the Americas didn’t even bait their hooks, have crashed nearly everywhere, and British fish and chips are now typically made with cod from Iceland or the Arctic Ocean—if they’re made with cod at all. Britain’s home cod fishery failed in 1920, and one historian has pointed out that more Britons today work in lawnmower manufacture than in the net fishing industry—this on an island nation, surrounded by the sea.

  Like other European countries with devastated fisheries, Britain now buys the right to fish off other nation’s coasts. These faraway waters are a part of Britain’s “ghost acres,” the distant reaches of land and sea that help make the island wealthy and populous, but without which it could not sustain itself. In the 1840s, only 5 percent of British food was imported from anywhere farther away than Ireland. Having passed through a frightening World War–era bottleneck when up to 70 percent of food was coming from overseas, Britain’s governments have focused on improving the United Kingdom’s self-sufficiency—but 40 percent of what Britons eat still comes from outside sources. Wood imports began in the year 1230, and by the time Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh underwent a major expansion in the early nineteenth century, all of the necessary timber was coming from the Baltic states and Scandinavia. In the 1740s, London was lit by five thousand whale-oil lamps, but even at that time, all of the whaling was done far from home ports. Faced in part with a domestic energy crisis, Britain became the world’s first economy dependent on a non-renewable resource—coal—and then only reluctantly. Even feathers had to be imported; in the first ten years of the twentieth century, Britain shipped in six thousand tonnes of them, including, during a 1902 fad for feathers on women’s hats, the equivalent of nearly 200,000 herons—one of the birds that had formerly been common in the island’s marshlands.

  Even the deep love of nature that many associate with the people of Britain, and which has so greatly influenced the rest of the world, is touched by the haunting. During the industrial revolution—which laid waste to many of the island’s remaining forests, witnessed the invention of both urban smog and suburban sprawl, and polluted some rivers so badly that their water could be used in place of ink in fountain pens—a countercurrent emerged among British poets. I don’t even need to use their first names: nature appreciation in the tradition of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the rest of the Romantics has called on us to see the face of God in every grain of sand ever since.

  “Wheresoe’er the traveller turns his steps, / He sees the barren wilderness erased, / Or disappearing,” wrote Wordsworth in 1814, though it is not for such warnings that the Romantics are remembered. Instead, we celebrate the poets for seeing the sublime in a wild landscape that others found dark and savage. It’s been said that the Romantics taught us to see the wonder in a sunset, and while this is surely an overstatement, their love of field and stream helped inspire the global ideal of wilderness and laid a foundation for the modern appreciation of such seemingly charmless creatures as the hagfish, the warthog and the vampire bat. Yet the Romantics’ love of the wild was ironic: It was a reaction against the destruction of nature, but also a product of that destruction. When the boy named William Blake walked out of London to the fields of Peckham Rye and first saw “heaven in a wild flower,” a moment that could reasonably be considered the dawn of the romantic age, he lay down in a tamed landscape that could no longer endanger even a child. If the Romantics fomented a revolution in the way we perceive nature, it was in part because they had opened their eyes to a new reality: almost every threat posed by the wild landscape had been vanquished. By the early nineteenth century, Britain was much as we know it today—a deforested island, its fauna largely reduced to butterflies, birds and hedgehogs.

  The pattern repeated itself on the American shore. Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden from a Massachusetts forest already emptied of large and fierce animals. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the most influential books of modern nature writing, plays out in a similarly denuded Virginia, and even Edward Abbey, that singular voice of wildest America, went to his deathbed never having seen a free-living grizzly bear. Such versions of nature still inspire wonder. In fact, one might argue that the works that have brought us closest to nature have depended on that wilderness being safe enough to approach and feel at peace in. But a greater truth should be foremost in mind: Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.

  Today, there are efforts to rewild Britain, though the steps are necessarily small ones. Many Britons are fiercely attached to the wide open countryside they have always known, so that even the reintroduction of trees has, in places, been fiercely contested. One of the most ambitious reforestation projects is taking place in Glen Affric in the Scottish Highlands, an area of 1,500 square kilometres with no through-roads. I crossed the valley from end to end, spending a night in Great Britain’s most remote hostel, and while the Caledonian pine is a magnificent tree,* spreading its gnarled limbs into the endless wind, no one who has passed time in deep wilderness would mistake Glen Affric for such a place. It is a beginning, a turning. Meanwhile, several beavers taken from Norway were released in 2009 in the Knapdale Forest on Scotland’s west coast, an easy drive from Glasgow. The five-year trial reintroduction, closely monitored, came at the end of an official process nearly fifteen years long. Many legitimate concerns were raised, from the potential for beaver dams to block the spawning runs of fish to the fact that the beavers were returning to an island that lacks any natural predator large enough to control their population. The most common reason given for active opposition to the return of the beaver, however, was a lack of interest. Having lived four hundred years without beavers, many people saw no reason to undertake any effort, expense or risk on their behalf.

  “People in this country are kept in ignorance of what their landscape represents,” says Mark Fisher of the Wildland Research Institute at the University of Leeds in northern England. Fisher is among those who hope to eve
ntually see the reintroduction of species as demanding on the human psyche as the grey wolf and Eurasian lynx, though he acknowledges that the rewilding of Britain must first begin with trees, with beavers. He’s acutely aware of the history of nature in his country and its various social and ecological costs, and yet when I ask him which of the losses he feels is Britain’s greatest warning against allowing the whole of the planet to drift down the same path, his answer surprises me. “I think you lose a lot of human freedoms,” he says. “The human freedom to experience wild nature.”

  The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained only by physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so many of us are drawn to nature as a counterpoint to the world of regulations and traditions, grids and networks, that we live in day to day. Yet when that nature is a landscape of straightened rivers, cleared forests and drained wetlands, beneath skies emptied of birds, it is only more of the same, its meanings already decided by other people in other times. It was surely this truth that inspired the American philosopher Aldo Leopold to write his most enigmatic line. In the final words of his 1949 eulogy to the Colorado River, which would eventually be dammed and diverted so completely that it no longer flowed into the sea, Leopold writes, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”