The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  “Symbolically it’s quite an important step if we can deliberately cohabit with other species,” says American artist Adam Kuby, who has launched projects ranging from shields to protect urban amphibians from damaging ultraviolet rays, to public sculptures that incorporate nesting cavities. Kuby might best be described as a habitat artist. His inspiration did not come, as you might expect, from earlier artists such as Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the Austrian wildman whose blending of the built and natural worlds included “tree tenants” that lived in high-rise apartments. Instead, Kuby had mentors of a different order: two birds that flew in through a transom window of his art school and built a nest atop the incubating warmth of a fluorescent light fixture. The birds were ready to integrate with us, Kuby realized—why not the other way around?

  He’s a part of a small art movement, but at least it is a movement. In England, the London-based artist Gitta Gschwendtner’s fifty-metre-long Animal Wall, which matched the development of one thousand new apartments and houses for people in Cardiff, Wales, with one thousand nest boxes meant for such birds as pied wagtails, sparrows, starlings,* blue and grey tits, and even bats, is slowly filling with tenants. There are signs of change in more prosaic architecture as well; the free-tailed bats beneath the bridge in Austin have inspired a program to educate highway engineers and managers about how they can accommodate the thirty-seven U.S. bat species, including four that are listed as endangered, that are believed to roost in bridges if given the chance. Banff National Park, meanwhile, leads the world in underpasses and overpasses designed to allow wildlife to safely cross highways. Grizzly bears at first found them confounding; now they use them nearly every day.

  “We humans, we label things—this is a building, this is a cliff, this is a tree,” says Kuby. “Animals don’t see the world that way.” His work has made him more aware that other species will go to astonishing lengths to live among us, such as a pair of birds he saw flying in and out of a hole in the traffic light that hangs over the intersection of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, two blocks away from the glitz of Times Square. “The little birds just find these openings,” he says.

  Among Kuby’s dream projects—artworks no one yet has come to him to build—is something he calls Cliff Dwelling. It will involve building a niche into a skyscraper, then filling the alcove with an artificial rock roost suitable for peregrine falcons. The birds—which were long an endangered species after proving susceptible to pesticides such as DDT, but have since recovered to a stable and growing population—have been known to nest on inner-city high-rises in places like Chicago and Toronto. Still, a skyscraper has yet to be designed with falcons specifically in mind.

  Cliff Dwelling would be a challenge for any community, from its unusual architecture to the sight of falcons killing pigeons in city squares. But it would act as a daily reminder for urban dwellers of the rest of life on earth, of natural cycles and of the fact that we do not need only to rewild nature, but human nature, as well. In Kuby’s design, the birds would be visible through one-way glass from within the building. It would be, in other words, the opposite of a zoo. “Here the people are confined,” says Kuby. “The falcons are free.”

  * Formerly called “Przewalski’s horse.”

  * In 2004, a giant tortoise washed up, alive, on the east coast of Africa; it was a species known from the Aldabra atoll in the Indian Ocean, 740 kilometres away—the first direct evidence that prehistoric tortoises could have floated to remote islands.

  * Conversely, wood bison were extirpated in the U.S. but survived in Canada’s north.

  * Reports of deaths and injuries caused by buffalo in Yellowstone typically benefit from context. For example, the first person to die in such an attack was allegedly attempting to stand next to a wild bison for a photograph.

  * Barn owls are now in decline as older barns make way for new, impermeable outbuildings and small farms with groves of trees for nesting are lost to the huge, treeless fields of industrial agriculture.

  * Starlings are an invasive species in many places around the world, including North America, but are native to Great Britain.

  Chapter 11.

  DOUBLE DISAPPEARANCE

  The Hawaiian Hall of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu is three storeys tall and filled with enchantment. The huge room is deep-shadowed, as if the light was cast by torches, and everywhere you look are the scowling faces of totems, the silhouettes of sharks, the blades of daggers carved from the bills of swordfish. More unforeseen than any of these, however, is the lingering imprint of many, many birds.

  Behold the royal cloak of Kamehameha I, the political and military genius who united the Hawaiian Islands under one leader for the first time in history just as the colonial era was beginning in the late 1700s. The king’s floor-length cape is composed almost entirely of feathers, mainly from the Hawai’i mamo, a sparrow-sized, mostly black bird that happened to have patches of feathers on its wings and rump in the Hawaiian royal colour, yellow—in this case, the brilliant, golden yellow of the heart of a dandelion flower. Kamehameha’s cloak still shimmers more than two centuries after it was completed, and some of the feathers are older than that, handed down from at least eight other Hawaiian kings, who in turn had gathered feathers from their own ancestors and defeated rivals. All told, the royal garment is thought to include feathers from sixty thousand or more individual mamos.

  Feathered objects abound in the Bishop Museum, from capes to skirts to decorative helmets. Before it became the fiftieth U.S. state, before it was even settled by Polynesian wanderers, Hawaii was a kingdom of birds.* Its waters would have been thick with toothy sharks, jacks and other predatory fish, along with whales, dolphins and a species of monk seal—animals so perfectly streamlined for the sea that their ears are internal and their nipples retractable—found nowhere else in the world. Yet only two species of land mammal, both of them bats, ever made their way to the islands ahead of human settlement, leaving birds to fill every possible niche. Completely isolated, more than 90 percent of Hawaii’s bird species ultimately evolved into forms unique to the island chain. Many lost the ability to fly, untroubled by the predators that stalked much of the rest of the planet.

  Not only was the mamo found only on the Hawaiian archipelago, but it was also limited to its largest island, Hawai’i, often referred to today as the “Big Island.” Mamos fed on nectar, mainly from the depths of vase-shaped lobelia flowers that, like many of the plants on the Hawaiian Islands, had evolved into forms as distinctive as the birds. As a result, the mamo’s bill was long and downcurved, as though it was made of wax and its owner had passed too close to a flame. The song of the mamo is remembered as a plaintive whistle—the description brings to mind the traditional Hawaiian saying, “I fly away, leaving disappointment behind.” The call was never recorded, will never be known. The Hawai’i mamo is extinct. Even its skins and taxidermies are rare; only eleven specimens are known to exist in the world’s museum collections.

  Hawaii is the planet’s most remote island chain, more than three thousand kilometres from the nearest habitable landfall, and the first human settlers may have arrived there as late as AD 1250—less than eight hundred years ago. These first Polynesian seafarers, perhaps a hundred or so people sailing double-hulled canoes and navigating by sophisticated understandings of the stars, sun, waves, wind and behaviour of sea animals, carried with them a complete toolkit for survival. Their canoes were the arks of their culture, and any newfound land became a home to their pigs, dogs, coconut palms, banana trees, taro fields, medicinal plants—in all, more than forty species are known to have been brought to the islands by early Polynesians.

  The influx made an immediate impression. Studies of bones in ancient layers of sediment show that sixty species of bird, many of them large, flightless and presumably tasty, soon went extinct. Over the same time period, other desirable food species, such as sea turtles and the monk seal, suffered population crashes. Human hunting wasn’t solely to blame; the Polyn
esians’ pigs, dogs and stowaway rats are also thought to have ravaged birds and their nests, spooked seals from their resting places and breeding grounds, and devoured the seeds of native plants and trees. The lowland forests of the islands were quickly transformed, with many native species eclipsed by so-called “canoe plants.” The composition of the original forests is so thoroughly lost in time that no one is certain what they might have looked like. Some evidence suggests that trees and plants now known only from Hawaii’s high mountains were once found at the shoreline. The uplands may not be these species’ true habitats so much as their last refuges.

  It was the usual pattern of human history: we came, we saw, we left a deep scar. “Even modest human impact has a pretty significant ecological signal,” says Alan Friedlander, a marine biologist with the University of Hawaii. For a century or two after the islands’ discovery, Polynesian sailors may have continued their daring journeys back and forth between the archipelago and other South Pacific islands. Then, for reasons no one has yet been able to explain, they stopped. For at least five hundred years, the Hawaiians lived in total isolation. They had no trade with the outside world, no other place to turn for the necessities of life; any islander could, with a walk to the nearest hilltop, see the limits of Hawaii’s natural wealth. For all intents and purposes, they were living on a tiny, fragile planet surrounded by outer space.

  During that long period of seclusion, something special began to happen. The rate of species extinctions appears to have slowed dramatically. The coral reefs, overfished in the first centuries after the Polynesians’ arrival, entered an era in which they declined little, if at all. Some creatures, such as sea turtles, appear to have partially recovered from their earlier depletion, and large areas were left only lightly touched by human hands. Incredibly, the human population increased at the same time, to at least 400,000 people and perhaps as many as 800,000—not far off the 1.4 million inhabitants found in Hawaii today.

  Even the birds endured, despite the fact that their feathers became symbols of status and prestige. The Hawai’i mamo had the most desirable feathers of all, and yet the little birds remained plentiful; they would vanish only in the early twentieth century after the arrival of the first Europeans to the islands. In this case, what’s most compelling about the species is not its ultimate extinction but rather its long survival. The lesson of the mamo lies not in what went wrong, but what went right.

  Twenty years ago, Ray Rogers, a Canadian environmental philosopher and one-time commercial fisherman, turned his thoughts to extinction and extirpation. In many cases, he realized, the loss of a plant or animal also marks the end of a human relationship to that species. As bears faded across Europe, for example, so did the festival of Chandelours—the word translates as “bearsong”—that celebrated the end of the animals’ winter hibernation in early February. Similarly, as wildlife populations vanished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so did the “market hunting” profession, along with such wild foods as brant goose, diamondback terrapin, bison tongue and Olympia oysters, each of which was once common on dinner tables and restaurant menus in North America. Rogers described each broken link between people and nature as a “double disappearance,” a form of environmental amnesia that went beyond mere memory to hollow out our sense of community with the rest of the living planet.* We were losing species from our social networks.

  For many people today, the idea of having a social relationship with nature is distant enough to sound ridiculous, as though you could invite a sea lion to a dinner party or exchange email with an ostrich. Our personal connection to—or disconnection from—non-human life, however, continues to shape the world. In 2010, John Waldman, a biologist at Queens College in New York, argued that the decline of spawning fish runs on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard was not only an environmental crisis, but an ongoing social breakdown. The region’s major fish species, such as eels, salmon, shad and the “river herring” called alewives, were once astonishingly plentiful, and people of that time created traditions like the “shad bake,” gathered to watch salmon leap up waterfalls and recognized the natural abundance in place names such as Sturgeon Pool in New York. As dams and overfishing tilted the fish into decline, the people who depended on them for employment or food, or who simply enjoyed their presence, often did protest. But the double disappearance was underway. Fishermen found other jobs and largely forgot about the fish, while communities soon were feeding themselves with agriculture or imports from faraway places. In the end, the absence of fish made the health of streams and rivers less important, and they were put to other uses, for example as dumping grounds for sewage and toxic waste. Today, East Coast shad bakes no longer serve shad, only a few hundred wild Atlantic salmon remain in the United States, and there are no sturgeon in Sturgeon Pool. In fact, of the seaboard’s two sturgeon species, the shortnose sturgeon is endangered and the fishery for Atlantic sturgeon is expected to remain closed until at least 2040. Most other fish stocks in the region have declined by 90 percent or more.

  “As species disappear,” Waldman says, “they lose both relevance to a society and the constituency to champion their revival, further hastening their decline. We need to rewind important historical connections.”

  Hawaii is one of the best places on earth to carry out that rewinding: a microcosm where culture and nature were completely intertwined. In the centuries ahead of the first visit by European explorers, the Hawaiian islands were monarchies, ruled by royal families who divided the land first into regions, and then again into communities called ahupua’a. (AH-hoo-poo-ah-ah. The apostrophe marks a glottal stop, or catch in the throat, like the sound represented by the hyphen in the phrase uh-oh.) Ahupua’a were typically wedge-shaped sections of land that ran from the uplands to the sea—“from mauka to makai,” as Hawaiians put it today. In many cases they enclosed the entire drainage, or watershed, of a stream or freshwater spring, but their boundaries depended most on the need to provide each community with the resources to sustain itself independently. For the Hawaiian living in an ahupua’a, care for the land could not have been more obviously linked to survival—misuse your land or waters, and you could not assume that your neighbours would be able to come to your aid.

  “If you did something wrong here, the whole system would feel it really quickly, whereas in a continental system, if you do something wrong, well, it’ll be a long while—probably generations—before impacts are actually felt and recognized,” says Kawika Winter, the director of the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, a branch of the U.S. National Tropical Botanical Garden on the north shore of the island of Kaua’i. “The things that our ancestors figured out are applicable in whatever watershed on the planet you go to, whether it’s the Mekong Delta or the Nile or the Mississippi. It’s all still a watershed, it’s all the same issues.”

  The Limahuli Valley is one of the few historical ahupua’a that has not been subdivided. It’s a spectacular landscape, with a tumbling creek that spills into the valley as a 250-metre-high waterfall and verdant forests that climb the convolutions of volcanic ridges and spires. At the foot of the valley, looming above the coastal plain, stands Makana, a mountain of such primeval presence that it was made an icon of all things exotic as the fictional island of Bali Ha’i in the classic film South Pacific. Just over three kilometres from its uplands to the shore and not much larger than New York’s Central Park, Limahuli was once home to as many as two thousand people.

  Traditionally, the highest reaches of the valley, hidden in mountain folds, were the wao akua, the realm of the gods. It was a locus of spiritual intensity, entered almost exclusively by bird hunters—historical photos remember them as wild-looking men with bushy afros and far-seeing eyes—in search of precious feathers. Strict rules applied to these sacred woodlands; in some cases, cutting down a single ancient ’ohi’a lehua tree, which might stand thirty metres tall, would require a human sacrifice. People had more freedom in the forests below the waterfall, where they gathered products rangin
g from hardwoods—the islands had no sources of metals—to ceremonial flowers to edible and medicinal plants. The village was built mainly on rocky ground, saving the richest soil for crops. Farther below, where the Limahuli Stream reaches the sea, the Native Hawaiians built and managed fish ponds. Even that was not the end of the ahupua’a—every reef and coastal fishing ground was assigned to a community.

  The bird hunters in the wao akua have been replaced by bird biologists today, but you can still find traditional gatherers in Limahuli, as well as terraced fields and fish ponds. The ahupua’a has proved to be a system that makes ecological sense. The protected upland forests harbour biodiversity, prevent soil erosion, and suck up water like a sponge to be slowly released even in dry weather. Lower down, canals known as ’auwai divert up to half of the creek’s water to irrigate the crops and then return the remaining flow to the natural channel, which is one of only two streams on Kaua’i that has retained all five native species of freshwater fish.* During the island’s sometimes savage rainstorms, mountain runoff from less well cared for land turns Kaua’i’s coast a muddy red-brown, threatening to choke out life on the reefs. In the Limahuli Valley, the forests hold the soil, and silt that does reach the creek settles first on the croplands, fertilizing them, and later in the fish ponds, where it triggers algae blooms that help feed plant-eating mullet and milkfish. By the time the stream reaches the sea, its water is clearer than it would be if people were not present.

  “Humans are a part of ecosystems—that’s the approach we take,” says Winter. “When you talk about saving ecosystems, humans are a part of that equation.”