The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  * The fish are gobies, and four out of the five species have developed suction cups on their bellies that they use, along with their mouths, to hold their own against the steep creek’s rushing water or even to climb waterfalls.

  * In the Bible, the first living thing created is grass.

  * Rothschild went on to gather the largest zoological collection ever amassed by an individual, including 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 bird eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies, 30,000 beetles and thousands of skins, bones and taxidermies of mammals, reptiles and fishes. He was famously photographed running a carriage through London pulled by zebras, and also wearing a top hat while astride a Galápagos tortoise.

  Chapter 12.

  THE LOST ISLAND

  Islands have always been good places to contemplate our relationship to the earth as a whole. Every island is a world unto itself, and the world is ultimately an island. Islands can, as in the case of Hawaii, provide insights that may be useful to the future of the planet. They can also provide our greatest warnings of what may befall us if we fail to change our relationship with nature.

  The story of Easter Island is the most celebrated of these cautionary tales. Small enough to get lost in any major city, it is one of the most remote locations in the world, jutting out of the South Pacific some 1,600 kilometres from the next inhabited island and 3,200 kilometres from the nearest continental mainland. Like Hawaii, it was settled first by Polynesian sailors. If the two stories begin the same way, however, they play out much differently.

  As the Polynesian population increased, Easter Island’s forests—millions of trees—began to decline. Faced with dwindling natural wealth, the people turned to the spirit world for protection. They dedicated themselves to the construction of moai, the haunting, hollow-eyed stone heads, the largest standing twelve metres tall and weighing a hundred tonnes, that have become symbols not only of Easter Island but of the pure essence of ancient mystery. Nearly one thousand of the statues were ultimately carved, all of them, incidentally, staring not out to sea but landward, toward the people themselves. Said to have been rolled across the countryside on conveyor belts of logs, the production of moai increased the rate at which the woodlands were cleared. Perhaps the most enduring image from this history is that of the island’s last tree. At some point, common sense would tell us, the Easter Islanders must have found themselves with only a single tree left standing. Too far gone to restrain themselves, they chopped it down. Within a generation or two, the idea that there was ever a forest would have sounded fanciful, if not plainly unbelievable. Children would have wondered: Could there ever have been plants that grew up to touch the sky?

  There is no happy ending. Struggling to survive on an increasingly barren landscape, the Easter Islanders descended into factionalism, war and human sacrifice. Cannibalism was common; anthropologists have noted that to this day a local insult translates as, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.” When James Cook became the third European captain to stop over on the island, in 1774, his ship’s naturalist estimated that it was home to just seven hundred people, all living a desperate existence, their canoes nothing more than patched-together fragments of driftwood. As a society, Easter Island had collapsed.

  That’s the familiar story.

  A competing narrative is emerging, with a more subtle, perhaps even more chilling, message. Recent research suggests that the Polynesians did indeed arrive and clear swaths of trees to make way for their crops, but that they may not have been solely responsible for the demise of the woodlands. The island’s trees were probably similar to the Chilean wine palm, which can stand more than thirty metres tall and is the largest palm in the world. Nonetheless, these big trees were vulnerable to seed-eating rodents, which had not lived on the island ahead of human arrival. If the introduced rats were the unstoppable force in the forests’ decline, then the island’s last tree may simply have grown old and decayed, or blown down in a storm, leaving no seedlings behind.*

  The Easter Islanders themselves likely played a leading role in other disappearances. At least twenty major forest plants, six land birds and several seabirds went extinct during the Polynesian era on the island. Yet research now suggests that society did not collapse at all. Instead, the islanders adapted and carried on, living in more and more barren surroundings. When archaeologists studied discarded animal bones to determine what the Easter Islanders ate, they found that 60 percent of the bones came from the introduced rats. The islanders also developed what is known as “lithic mulching”—rock gardening, essentially. Using lava stones that gradually released their nutrients and sheltered young plants from the harsh elements of the treeless landscape, they managed to produce enough food to sustain a population density similar to places like Prince Edward Island, Sweden and New Zealand today. Adequately fed, the people used their leisure time to quarry and carve their moai and build grand altars for communal rituals. When the first Europeans reached the island—members of Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen’s expedition, in 1722—they reported an impressive two to three thousand inhabitants. The people of Easter Island, which is now often referred to by the Polynesian name of Rapa Nui, appear to have been living comfortably, and were more eager to trade or even swindle for hats—no one quite knows why—than for food or any other item. Tests performed on skeletons of Easter Islanders from this era suggest they suffered less malnutrition than people in Europe did at the time.

  “Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success,” write Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, two University of Hawaii anthropologists who’ve led research on the island since the late 1990s. They point out that the Easter Islanders used human ingenuity and perseverance to build a lasting culture as their surroundings turned empty and desolate.

  The question of what really happened on Easter Island is now hotly disputed between collapse believers and resilience theorists, but for our purposes it hardly matters. What the Easter Island stories represent are the two possible end points for our global culture if we continue on our current course toward an ever more simplified and degraded natural world. In the first telling, the fates of nature and humanity are entwined and both go down together in a social and ecological catastrophe. In the second telling, human and non-human life take different paths. The planet’s ecosystem is reduced to a ruin, yet its people endure, worshipping their gods and coveting status objects while surviving on some futuristic equivalent of the Easter Islanders’ rat meat and rock gardens.

  A question lingers: If the decline of the natural world didn’t reduce Easter Island to the pitiable state witnessed by Captain Cook and his crew, then what did? The answer is a familiar one. By the time of Cook’s arrival, the islanders had been suffering lethal epidemics of European diseases at least since a Spanish ship’s visit four years earlier, and possibly since Roggeveen’s stopover five decades before. With as many as two out of every three of its people dead, Easter Island’s society finally began to fail. Perhaps a lethal pandemic or some plague carried by an alien life form will one day reduce our own global society to chaos in a similar way. No one can say. But if you’re waiting for an ecological crisis to persuade human beings to change their troubled relationship with nature, you could be waiting a long, long time.

  People still live on Easter Island, including descendants of the original islanders, who never did, after all, go extinct. Their enduring presence is a testament to the human spirit. The natural world of the island, however, has only continued its slide. Birds other than chickens are now essentially absent. The island’s flora is heavily grazed by sheep and goats, and introduced weed species outnumber native plants. Visit Easter Island today, and the most visible free-living wild creatures are a few invasive species of fleas and flies.

  It took centuries to reduce tiny Easter Island to what it is today; it has taken tens of millennia for our species to transform the planet as a whole. Even if we reversed course as of this moment, suddenly striving for a wilder world, it would be year
s before we could count our first successes. Standing on the globe as we know it today, among people who are predominantly urban, who often spend more time in virtual landscapes than in natural ones, and who in large part have never known—do not have a single personal memory—of anything approaching nature in its full potential, it is hard even to wrap one’s head around where to begin.

  So: we might begin with an island. Not just any island, but the last major landform on earth to be discovered. It’s a rich and fertile place, happens to be large enough to sustain tens of thousands of people, and yet has no history of human occupation. It also doesn’t exist, of course, outside of the imagination. Let’s call it Lost Island. It looms into view wherever fisheries scientists pass around a bottle of whisky or field biologists stay up late around a campfire, or, for me, every time I stand in a strangely empty landscape, wondering what it looked like when it was full of life.

  We’ve always needed such phantom islands, from the Greek vision of Hyperborea, so remote that disease and old age never reached its shores, to the never-ending search for Atlantis. Buss Island, named for a kind of fishing boat, was described by those who claimed to have explored it as “a champion country,” “fruitful” and “full of woods,” and appeared on maps of the North Atlantic for nearly three hundred years, despite the fact that all that could be found at its coordinates was deep, cold water and rolling waves. Even today, the world of islands can surprise us: after a close look at the latest satellite imagery in 2011, the number of known islands worldwide increased by 657, while entirely new landforms still emerge from the sea in places like the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland, where the ocean floor is still slowly rising after shedding the weight of its ice-age glaciers. What we seek in such places is the empty slate that allows us to dream of what might have been, or what could be. Or both.

  Suppose we approach by sea. Perhaps the first sign we are nearing land is an odour, like the rosemary flowers that could once be scented 150 kilometres off the coast of Spain, inspiring the essayist John Evelyn to suggest the plants be grown in London to freshen the air against the smog—and this in 1661. Soon wheeling seabirds can be seen streaking back and forth from the land, and sea turtles—why not?—are making their steady way to their nesting beaches, their shells numerous enough in places that a child could play hopscotch over the waves and never get her socks wet. By the time the dark smudge of landfall finally appears on the horizon, the lines of birds have gathered into clouds, and at times you need to shout to be heard over their cries or take cover below deck from the steady rain of guano.

  In places, the ocean seems to hiss and boil as shoals of small fish are pressed to the surface by hungry predators, which fill the deeper water with shadows. “Life water,” as fishermen once said. There’s no need to bait a hook here: fish will bite at almost any object that appears before their eyes. Navigation, on the other hand, is complicated. The reefs are explosions of colour, as if a crowd had opened a thousand bright umbrellas beneath the sea. Reefs are common around islands, of course, but here they rear up in unfamiliar forms where timeless layers of shellfish have piled one upon the other, rising into ragged ridges. Around and among them bob seals and sea lions; whales blow their rotten-fish breath into the air.

  On shore, it’s hard to decide whether the island is a thing of rock and dirt or a living being itself. By morning or evening, the birdsong builds into a cacophony, as though a gale was blowing through the wires and bells of a harbour full of wooden ships. Moving inland is surprisingly easy: wildlife trails bore through the forests and traverse the grasslands. The overall impression is not so much of wilderness as otherworldly design. In the same way that modern archaeologists sometimes struggle to differentiate between ancient earthworks made by men versus those built by beavers, our Lost Island has been intimately shaped by its plants and animals in all their abundance. Birds prune the trees as they gather sticks for their nests; moles and boars turn the earth; big, swimming beasts clear routes through weedy swamps.

  There are mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, giant camels, giant lizards, giant parrots, giant tortoises. Let us note that on Lost Island you wouldn’t feel the freedom that people often do in wild spaces today. You wouldn’t swim among the reefs for fear of sharks, and neither would you happily walk alone across the land. You’d quickly learn to listen for a sound in the reeds like fingers gently pulled along a blackboard—a snake—or, worst of all, the sudden hush that falls in the forest when something with fangs and claws is on the move. The ground underfoot would be a busy city of insects, while the air would hum with trilling wings. The mosquitoes—my god, the mosquitoes. If early explorers’ accounts from other remote regions of the world are any indication, then Lost Island’s biting flies could be bad enough that dogs would bury themselves in the ground and horses run themselves to death, while human visitors would build fires and live in the smoke to escape the swarms.

  But the mosquitoes are also food for dragonflies, for tadpoles and frogs, for fish fry, for bats, swifts and swallows. There is, as George Perkins Marsh wrote more than a century ago, “nothing small in nature.”

  From the moment we set foot on Lost Island, it will never be the same again. There’s no way to freeze the nature of a place in time, just as there is never a way to turn back the clock to some exact and perfect condition from the past. We can only ask ourselves new questions.

  How do we live in a wilder world? And what is the wildest world we can live in?

  The first thing we would want to do is establish a baseline. What lives on Lost Island? In what numbers and relationships? What is the total weight of living things? What impression does this wild place leave on our senses, our psyches, our souls? Against the backdrop of deep time, this baseline would be nothing more than a snapshot in a long history of transformation. On human time scales, though, it would be a pole star against which to measure change, recognize losses and make restorations when damage is done. Above all, a baseline is a record of what is possible—a memory, in case one is ever needed in the future, of the abundance and diversity of which nature is capable.

  We would want to protect some of that heritage, forever. This is something that we, as a species, have always felt a need to do, whether we’ve explained it to ourselves through religion, aesthetics, stewardship or a moral responsibility toward other living things. We do this not to divide people from nature but to anchor ourselves in it, to provide sanctuaries where we can witness the natural world without us, as it was during the vast majority of time since the dawn of life on earth. It takes a living planet to sustain us; to ignore the desire to preserve it would be the true beginning of our end.

  It also seems to be human nature, however, to kick against the pricks—we don’t easily give in to restraints. The Convention on Biological Diversity, the most ambitious international conservation accord to date, sets targets that would see 17 percent of the earth’s land and 10 percent of the oceans protected from degradation, for a combined total of about 12 percent of the planet. But the agreement goes further, calling on nations to preserve each type of ecosystem, from different kinds of forest and grassland to tundra, deserts, mangroves, wetlands, coastlines, even stretches of open ocean. It remains a distant goal.

  On Lost Island, we could surely agree to meet these targets: no less than 12 percent of the land and sea, safeguarded for all time. In the past, we would have saved a fragment here and a fragment there, a patchwork, but with today’s understanding of the “island effect” we would create the largest, most contiguous protected areas possible, linking them with corridors of wilderness to allow species to move freely across the land and sea.

  Then would come the hard part: figuring out how we should live on the other 88 percent.

  Does it strain your credulity that we would open Lost Island to exploitation? Do you imagine that today’s enlightened society would see such an unspoiled place as sacred? Some islands in the Arctic are, in a sense, “lost islands”: parts of the Queen Elizabeth
archipelago, Canada’s northernmost island group, are home to extraordinarily hardy species and remarkable abundance in some seasons, have changed little over the past centuries, and may go decades without witnessing a single human footfall. Today, though, global warming is making the Arctic more accessible, and there’s little indication we’ll forgo the opportunity. A resource rush is underway, especially for oil and gas. It will be one of history’s bitter ironies: catastrophic climate change in one of the world’s most changeless places, making it possible to extract more of the fossil fuels that caused the disaster in the first place.

  Our Lost Island is irresistibly rich with resources, among them stands of ancient forest and teeming fisheries beyond anything known to most of the world today. But there is also the opportunity to move forward with more conscious awareness than we have in the past. Consider the fact that most modern human beings eat next to nothing that is hunted or gathered from the terrestrial surface of the earth. This is an outcome that would strike our ancestors as bizarre if not apocalyptic,* and yet it can’t be said to be the product of choice. We drifted to this point, generation by generation.