The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  Not far from where I live today, a seasonal lake—always large but expanding every spring to cover 120 square kilometres—once supplied the local indigenous people with industrial-scale harvests of wapato (WAH-pah-toe), an aquatic tuber that tastes like a cross between a chestnut and a potato. Wapato were also a favourite food of swans and canvasback ducks, once familiar birds on North American dinner tables. They joined rafts of other wildfowl on the lake, tens of thousands of birds through the seasons, while beneath their dabbling feet throbbed runs of salmon; of oolichan, a smelt so rich in oil that a dried fish can be stood on end and lit like a candle; and of round whitefish, which poured up the feeder streams so thickly they could be caught by hand. The dead from all of these spawning rounds fed sturgeon that could weigh as much as horses.

  Despite this wild abundance, the local tribes called the first European settlers Xweilitum, “the starving.” These were nineteenth-century colonists, often coming from places already deeply disconnected from nature and eager to replace the unfamiliar landscape with fields and farms, with general stores selling flour, salt, sugar and coffee. By the 1920s, some had come to treasure the lake as a larder, but in the end it was drained to make way for agriculture. For years afterward, living sturgeon turned up under the farmers’ ploughs in marshy areas of the new fields, spawning fish gathered at the pumphouse that had emptied the lake into a nearby river and flocks of waterfowl landed on the ground as though it still was open water. The indigenous people who relied on the lake continue to feature it on their maps, as though its imprint has survived its material destruction, but the former waters are otherwise forgotten, buried ever more deeply beneath suburbs that act as a capstone against remembrance. Today’s residents drive to supermarkets for their food. What was lost with the draining of the lake was not wilderness in the name of civilization, but one more way to feed ourselves.

  Would we make the same decisions today? Or, faced with the knowledge of what nature can be, would we strike a different balance between whole ecosystems that feed every living thing and simplified landscapes that feed nothing but ourselves? Today, the only wild-caught foods that most people eat are fish and shellfish. How many of them would we take from Lost Island? “To have a reasonable chance to feed people with seafood over the next fifty years, we need to understand these things,” says Tony Pitcher of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. No one yet has developed a model of the historical abundance of all the world’s oceans, so it’s impossible to say how many fish we could have caught from those pristine seas without overfishing. But Pitcher, whose research has taken him around the globe, says his back-of-the-napkin estimate is that, if we miraculously rebuilt the planet’s fish stocks to their original bounty, we could catch 10 percent of the fish every year without any overall decline in abundance. That amount of fish, he guesses, would equal between 40 and 60 percent of the annual catch worldwide today. It would surely be a shock to lose half of today’s fishery. It would take innovation and adaptation to close the gap in the food supply—but nowhere near as much effort as it will take to face the future as our current fishing practices deplete the last of the world’s major fish stocks. The upside, meanwhile, would be a supply of seafood that never decreased, while our coasts and oceans exploded with life.

  As we try to build ourselves into the nature of Lost Island, raising cities, towns, farms, mines, ports—all the trappings of our lives—these are the kinds of questions we must grapple with. And the solutions will not be familiar ones. Maybe on Lost Island there are still herds of wild bison, and we eat as much or more of their meat than beef. Maybe we harvest both wheat and wildflower bulbs. Maybe we acquire our former taste for porpoise, seal and whale. Maybe we get to know the flavours of songbirds, and in exchange spare more forests and grasslands from our bulldozers and ploughs.

  If the goal on Lost Island is to live with all the wild diversity and abundance we can, then some acts that are common today would not have any place there. Large-scale clear-cut logging of ancient forests, which reduces woodlands thousands of years in the making to barren fields of stumps, would not be practised on Lost Island, and neither would its marine equivalent of dragging weighted trawl nets across the sea floor. Other practices would be carried out far more carefully than in the past: fully a third of the world’s largest river systems, for example, have been strongly affected by dams, cutting off major fish migrations between the fresh water and sea. We wouldn’t use waterways as dumping grounds for toxic waste or raw sewage, build cities at river mouths, which are some of the richest ecosystems on earth, or drain swamps because we consider them a nuisance. Mountaintop removal and other forms of mining that tear away huge areas of the earth’s surface rather than tunnelling underground would be practised in only the most extraordinary circumstances, if at all. In areas of especially high biodiversity, we might even decide to leave billions of dollars of fossil fuels in the ground, as the nation of Ecuador is planning to do—at significant economic sacrifice—in part of the Amazon Basin. Replacing whole horizons of grassland or forest with the unbroken fields of industrial farming would be unthinkable. The idea of displacing seabird colonies, sea turtle nesting sites, fish spawning beaches and seal haulouts simply to provide vacation homes for the rich would beggar belief.

  These are the low-hanging fruit: the human activities where the highest environmental impacts have been embraced unnecessarily. In every case, alternatives already exist to meet similar needs while causing far less damage, typically by employing more people, using materials more efficiently, or applying more sophisticated technologies. We are talking, however, about acts of self-restraint already resisted by the world’s most powerful corporations and their many stakeholders, and the questions only become more difficult, if not overwhelming. How do we handle plastic on Lost Island, knowing it has been found in the digestive tracts of nearly three hundred different marine species and that toxic chemicals from degrading plastic turn up in samples of ocean water all over the world? Do we build wildlife overpasses and underpasses on every stretch of highway, and do we build fewer roads overall? Do we live in darker cities, knowing that our bright lights threaten migratory birds, cause some flowers not to bloom and some animals to mate out of season, lead bats to starvation and leave fireflies unable to signal potential mates out of the night? Can we accept that a recreational hike in the Lost Island wilderness may demand a minimum of five people, possibly armed? Are we able to think beyond our own senses, recognizing that most birds, for example, can see light in the ultraviolet spectrum, that pigeons can hear the infrasound rumble that precedes an earthquake, that bears can pick up odours the way we can hear a pin drop in an empty room? Will we eliminate all those mosquitoes?

  Life on Lost Island would quickly convince us that we truly cannot live in the past; we always and only exist in the present. Perhaps, in our largest, most pristine reserves, megafauna still would march behind perimeter fencing, but most of the landscape would be more nuanced and imperfect—more human—than that. For most of our history as a species we have been running a largely unmonitored, planet-wide experiment in reinventing nature; still, the way forward is not to bring an end to experimentation, but to proceed more carefully and consciously. We cannot choose not to choose.

  There are ordinary living things among us—cockroaches, crocodiles, the simple plant known as horsetail—that have endured, nearly unchanged, since the age of the dinosaurs; horseshoe crabs, which look like leather luggage from another planet, have been around several thousand times as long as human beings and have survived five mass extinctions. More important than any one species, however, is the system that created us, nature, with its roots that reach back more than three billion years. Even in the heart of a city of millions, even where we dig a mine or position a deep-ocean drilling rig, we can do more to accommodate the living earth. It is inspiring—perhaps even liberating—to acknowledge that we have the power and the necessity to shape the future. But we have been attempting to make an imposs
ible world, in which humans are separable from the rest of life. Our greatest experiment is still pending: the making of a world in which humanity can express all of its genius, and so, too, can nature. Our Lost Island is not life as it was before the Industrial Revolution, or before Columbus, or before humans walked the earth, but a way of being that has yet to be invented: a world true to the past and unlike anything seen before.

  A few words about hubris:

  In around 1820, European sailors introduced cats to Macquarie Island, which hangs like a frozen tear on the face of the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica. Treeless, cool and wet, the island nonetheless was home to unique birds, one of them a brightly coloured and seemingly misplaced parrot called the Macquarie Island parakeet. Already you can guess how this is going to end: the cats drove the flightless parakeet extinct. But there is more to the story than that.

  As the number of cats slowly grew, the parakeets lived on, nesting under tuffets of greenery and feeding in running flocks along the shoreline. In 1872, men who camped on the island to kill penguins and seals introduced a game bird from New Zealand called the weka. Wekas will eat almost anything, including parakeets, but the little birds continued to endure. They were clever survivors, and had the seasons on their side. Every winter Macquarie’s millions of seabirds and penguins would migrate away, leaving the cats and wekas hungry. There was never a steady enough food supply for the predator population to endlessly grow.

  Then, in 1878, sealing crews brought rabbits to the island. As the rabbits multiplied, there was suddenly plenty of food for the cats and wekas all year long. Their numbers surged, and the parakeets went extinct within a decade.

  Flash forward one hundred years, and Macquarie Island was wearing a living, breathing rabbit-fur coat, with a thousand rabbits per square kilometre. Their intensive grazing threatened to wipe out every trace of the island’s original vegetation, so wildlife managers introduced yet another new species: fleas that spread a virus lethal to rabbits. As the rabbit population decreased, the native plants began to recover. Then biologists noticed that Macquarie’s seabirds were dying off. The culprit was the hungry cats and wekas, which had become reliant on the rabbits as food. A program was launched to eradicate the predators, with the last weka killed by 1989 and the last cat shot in the year 2000. But as the cats and wekas disappeared, the rabbits boomed again: it turned out that the disease-carrying fleas were not enough to control the population once the predators had vanished. Soon there were so many rabbits that not only were they once again destroying the plant life, they were also invading the nesting sites of the seabirds that had been rebounding after the elimination of the cats.

  Macquarie Island is only thirty-five kilometres long, just a rock in the sea, and yet we failed again and again to foresee the consequences of our actions there. R. H. Taylor, the ecologist who first solved the riddle of why the parakeets had endured the predatory cats and wekas only to vanish with the introduction of vegetarian rabbits, came up with a lone recommendation that remains, really, the guiding sutra for the new wilderness of the future: “We should watch for new factors.”

  Who will be on watch? The people who would live on Lost Island are not figures from the past—they are us. In some cases, the losses we have suffered from the decline of the natural world are still fresh. The nation of Malawi in southern Africa, for example, frequently appears on top 10 lists of the world’s poorest nations; malnourishment is widespread, and people have been imprisoned for such crimes as stealing leftovers from their employers’ dinner tables. As recently as the 1980s, however, the fishery for a wild whitefish called chambo in Lake Malawi, one of the largest water bodies in Africa, supplied twice as much protein per capita as Malawians eat from all animal sources today. After decades of overfishing, the chambo stock collapsed in 1991 and has not recovered. Malawi is a nation that is literally hungry for nature as it was.

  Yet for many of the most privileged people on earth, and I count myself among them, whatever ecological wounds we may have suffered have faded into scars. To fly with ease between the world’s great cities; to hurtle through rushing streets among people from every corner of the globe, music in our ears, emotions modulated by pharmaceutical drugs; to communicate across the planet with the touch of a finger on a screen, can feel as mystic, as wild, even as sacred as all but the most extraordinary encounters with the natural world today. The global majority who live in cities, whose families may have been urban for generations now, are often transient, strangers to their landscapes, temporary visitors with no place that is truly home and no traditions in the places they find themselves.

  The history of nature tells us we have been a part of a great forgetting, and can now be a part of the reminding. What is the twenty-first century equivalent of the child who can swim with sharks, or the gatherer whose understanding of plant biology is the equivalent of a lifelong scientist’s, or the artist who can capture uncertainty in the face of a bison with a few deft lines of fingerpaint, or even the working sailor who knows the unmistakable joy that can be expressed by a tortoise? These questions await our reply. To live in a wilder world, we’ll have to find a way to weave nature into our identities, until guarding against harms to the natural world is as innate as watching out for ourselves, our families or our communities. Only this kind of person—we might call him or her the ecological human—can inhabit nature deeply enough to change our troubled relationship to non-human life, to observe carefully enough the changes we will continue to make, and to truly love the return of the wild as a formidable presence in our lives.

  For some, such a transformation is probably impossible; they have been away from nature too long and in too many ways to make their way back. But the world has never needed every soul to act as its guardian; it has only ever needed enough. Most of us—a great majority, I hope—can still take some delight in the awkward movements of a newborn owl or the intricate architecture of a flower. It is this capacity that now matters most to our future as a species: the part of us that feels awe in the knowledge that a simple clam, Arctica islandica, can live for as long as four hundred years, that the gingko tree has remained essentially unchanged through 280 million years of evolution, but also that some insects have adult lives so brief they are born without mouths to eat with. There is a person within us who would like to hear birdsong spill out of the forest like a wave, watch spawning fish turn a blackwater river to silver, or walk a road beaten into the savannah by herd animals. It’s that same person who would take some unexplainable satisfaction from the sound of a whale’s deep breathing as it sleeps at the surface of the sea, and who is able to grasp that a lichen that clings to the slopes of a single mountain is a metaphor for our own dependence on this lone earth in outer space.

  What we do not know—what we have not even begun to ask—is how many people can live on a rewilded planet. Here, though, is an interesting coincidence. The highest credible estimate for the population density of Hawaii during the era in which the islands’ people survived in isolation from the rest of the world is forty-eight people per square kilometre. Compare that to the planet’s current population of seven billion people, or about forty-seven people per square kilometre of land. At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the two figures are almost exactly the same.

  Most of the earth is nothing like warm, perpetually fertile Hawaii. Then again, the Native Hawaiians of that earlier time had no metals, no fossil-fuel energy, no trade with other nations, no way to bring home fish from faraway seas—they had lived not one of the lessons or insights of the past two hundred years. They lacked the collective intelligence and technologies of the globe’s seven thousand cultures, not to mention supercomputers capable of performing nearly twenty quadrillion calculations per second, and they had no one who could build on their successes or support them through their failures. In other words, it just might be possible for seven billion people—maybe even more—to survive on this planet, and not only to stop the endless decline of the natura
l world but watch it return to astounding, perpetual life. All it will take is a wilder way of being human.

  * The extinct palms appear to live on in a tree-shaped rune used in the Easter Islanders’ Rongorongo script, which was carved into the wood of a shrub imported by early Polynesian settlers. Rongorongo is no longer understood by any living person.

  * During early colonial times, some indigenous people reportedly expressed concern about eating pigs or cattle as alternatives to deer, suspecting that people take on the characteristics of the animals they eat. Given modern rates of obesity, their fear may have contained a kind of truth.

  So move your feet

  from hot pavement and into

  the grass.

  ARCADE FIRE

  Epilogue

  In the history of the grasslands I grew up on, one creature stands out in my mind above all others: the grizzly bear. There lurks the great beast in pioneers’ memoirs, in one case sending a prospector’s pick “skyrocketing upward” with the swat of a paw, in another killing a man in the pine forest and “eating half his horse.” Shamans of the local Secwepemc tribe wore grizzly claws around their necks, and during fifteen years in the mid-1800s, the trading fort that became my hometown received 104 of the bears’ pelts. The grizzly is a memorable animal, equally able to bite through a six-inch pine tree or nimbly open a screw-top jar, to run a marathon distance in a single hour or lift and carry 150 kilograms of weight in its mouth, but as a child I never once heard the prairie remembered as grizzly country.

  Eliminated from 98 percent of its territory in the Lower Forty-eight and at least a quarter of its former Canadian range, the grizzly is now known mainly from cold mountain meadows and distant northern rivers. I have seen the bears in the wild myself—in cold mountain meadows and along distant northern rivers. I failed to picture them picking cactus stickers out of their paws.