Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Winter Solstice 2021
Almost every day I spend 60 to 90 minutes biking on pathways along the river. On my route is a 50 acre (20 ha) grove of forest that hasn’t been cut in maybe a hundred years. It’s lush, green, and alive. Songbirds fill the air with their music of love and celebration. This is my church, a sacred place.
In the last 12 years, I’ve only seen a starry night once or twice. There must be thousands of children in this city who have never once experienced a sky full of twinkling stars. Moonlight is still able to penetrate the light pollution. The moon silently watches our frantic craziness. In years past, it watched the campfires of hunter-gatherers. It watched the wooly mammoths come and go. It watched the dinosaurs come and go. It watched the dawn of life. It will continue shining down when the lights of civilization finally blink out, and the family of life struggles to begin a long and difficult healing process.
Last year, I hoped that my book would be finished by now, but it isn’t. I completed the rough draft in early September, minus an unwritten summary chapter, the final item on my to-do list. Early sections of the draft date back to March 2016. I’ve learned a lot since then. I’m now rereading the entire manuscript, making revisions, and adding new info. I strongly suspect that the newer sections will need less attention. Maybe the revisions are half done. We’ll see. Quality is more important than speed.
Day after day, I slog through endless tedious details, resolving questions, zapping booboos, and fine-tuning the clarity. In the end comes the joy of finishing another passage. It’s satisfying to see that this torn and battered old brain can still produce work that warms my soul, and makes me smile with satisfaction.
Since the 2020 solstice, my blog has had 100,000+ more views. This summer, for reasons I don’t understand, I got a surge of friend requests on Facebook, rapidly tripling my friend collection. They came from Australia, Bali, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo, Cote D’Ivorie, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Gaza, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Zambia.
I wish I had time to chat with them, but the library gives me just one hour a day of internet access. Right now, my primary goal in life is to finish this book. Publishing a book can take years of effort, with no guarantees, and I’m getting old. These days, publishers prefer books with generous servings of magical thinking, sustainable solutions, and maximum strength hopium. That’s where the money is. I’m interested in where the reality is, which has become an entirely different matter.
In my ten years as an author and blogger, I’ve learned that when interesting writing costs nothing, it reaches far more eyeballs than when the same material costs money. My current plan is to skip publishing and give this book away, in digital formats, an Earth Day gift. It’s cheap and easy to send free PDFs to folks in distant lands, rather than paperbacks. After so many years of hard work, it would be fun to finally reach an audience.
All the best!
Saturday, December 4, 2021
Megafauna Review
Megafauna is an important, fascinating, unforgettable,
one-of-a-kind book. It primarily focuses
on prehistoric megafauna extinctions around the world, and how they
happened. Baz Edmeades (“ed-meedz”) has
been working on this book for 20+ years, and it is impressively thorough. His grandfather was a professor who found a
unique human-like skull that was about 259,000 years old.
Megafauna are mammals weighing more than 100 pounds (46
kg). Hominins are primates that walk on
two legs, like you and I. Hominins have been
around for several million years. Humans
have been around for 250,000 to 400,000 years, depending on who you ask.
During the last two or three million years, lots of megafauna
species, all around the world, have moved off the stage forever. Why? A
heated debate has been buzzing for 50+ years.
Was it an asteroid strike? No
evidence. Were they zapped by
diseases? No evidence. Was it climate change? It probably strained some regional
situations. Was it human activities? The evidence strongly supports this. In 1966, Paul Martin presented his megafauna
overkill theory (humans did it), which ignited big controversy in
academia. Edmeades became friends with
Paul Martin, and learned a lot from him.
Hominins originated in Mother Africa, where there used to be
at least nine species of big cats (three today), nine types of elephants (one
today), and four hippos (one today).
There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, and
giant baboons — all gone. Extinction
spasms especially surged as humans wandered out of Africa, and gradually
colonized the planet. They migrated
across Southern Asia, to Australia, then Eurasia, and finally the Americas.
Paul Martin coined the misleading term “blitzkrieg overkill,”
which angered quite a few folks. As
humans colonized new regions, the megafauna declined in number, in a process
that could take a thousand years or more, multiple generations. It was not a high-speed massacre. These hunters were Stone Age people, using
simple tools. Many of the large game
they hunted had low reproductive rates, which made them extremely vulnerable to
extinction.
There is a clear pattern that when hunters migrated into
continental land masses, stuff went extinct — except on uninhabited
(human-free) offshore islands of the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and
elsewhere. On these islands, extinctions
didn’t begin until humans eventually stepped ashore, sometimes thousands of
years later. Understand that offshore
islands have a climate quite similar to the nearby mainland. Climate was not a factor here. Many of the megafauna species that blinked
out had survived multiple ice ages over the passage of several million years.
In 2015, I stumbled across early sections of the Edmeades
book online, and they blindsided me. I
never understood how incredibly alive this planet once was, and how tragically
damaged it now is. None of my teachers
ever explained this, because they never learned it. Our cultural myths celebrate the upward
spiral of humankind’s brilliant achievements.
We live in a technological wonderland, not an ecological graveyard. Life has never been better, and the best is
yet to come.
The ancestors of hominins were originally tree dwellers. Our closest living relatives are chimps, with
whom we share 98.8 percent of our DNA.
Long ago, when the climate changed, and forests shrank, our ancestors
were forced to survive as ground dwellers, a lifestyle for which evolution had
not prepared them.
Over the course of several billion years, evolution has been
a remarkable force that guided the journey of the family of life. When frigid eras arrived, critters evolved
fur coats. When foxes became faster,
evolution selected for faster bunnies.
It was a balancing act. Foxes
needed bunnies, and bunnies needed foxes.
The family of life was continuously fine-tuned at the speed of
evolution, an extremely slow process.
Alterations could take many thousands of years.
Over millions of years, evolution provided giant tortoises
with large bodies, invincible lion-proof shells, and long lifespans. In the blink of an eye, these advantages were
rubbished when hominins moved into the neighborhood, and began killing 200-year-old tortoises with big rocks. This
hunting method was not fine-tuned by evolution.
It was a sudden innovation that popped into the mind of a hungry hominin
— and it worked! Invincible tortoises
were immediately transformed into helpless sitting ducks that didn’t have a
bright future. Evolution was yanked out
of the driver’s seat. Ancient rules no
longer mattered.
Hominin cleverness changed the world. It made it far easier to grab essential
resources, grow in numbers, and avoid becoming cat food. Cleverness had the long term impact of an
asteroid strike. Cleverness enabled hominins
to domesticate fire, plants, and animals.
We colonized the planet, developed industrial civilization, zapped the
forests, polluted everything, and destabilized the climate.
Many folks in the human herd suffer from a blind faith that
the miraculous power of cleverness can easily overcome all challenges. Their vision is to keep our maximum impact
way of life on life support, as long as possible, and hope for the best. Edmeades presents no solutions, but this is a
story that was important to tell. He
laments that cleverness “has given our species the power to transform the
biosphere so profoundly that no other organism on this planet may get the
opportunity of evolving it again.”
His book does an excellent job of discussing the megafauna
extinctions in an understandable way, with up-to-date information. Its bitter medicine, and good medicine. Many misperceive evolution to be a divine
competition, in which species fight relentlessly to reach the top of the
hierarchy, seeking to wear the Dominant Animal crown. This pyramid-climbing quest for domination is
the engine of civilization. By the end
of the book, you understand that evolution is more about adapting to changing conditions
in a way that is as smooth and balanced as possible.
Evolution has been the great friend of the family of
life. The Dominant Animal game has been
its grim reaper. While the wild
megafauna are now sharply diminished, human-caused extinctions of many other
species continue at an accelerating rate.
Cleverness never sleeps. I’ve
spent 69 years in a roaring hurricane of devastating cleverness. Edmeades book reminded me that this planet
was once a healthy and amazing living paradise.
Some of my genes have their roots in those good old days of abundant
life. That’s a comforting notion.
Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna: First Victims of the
Human-Caused Extinction, Houndstooth Press, 2021.
Friday, November 12, 2021
Forest Rewrite
Greetings! The following is a rewrite of samples 25 and 41. They will be combined into one section and moved much later in the manuscript, before Sacred Energy. One more step closer to the end!
As mentioned earlier, after the last Ice Age wound down,
glaciers and ice sheets melted and retreated, eventually allowing the expansion
of tundra, grassland, and forest.
Grassland spurred the momentum of the human experiment by boosting herds
of game. In wooded regions, hunting was
more challenging, and forests interfered with the growth of trendy new fads
like herding and farming.
This is why civilization emerged in the grassland regions of
the Fertile Crescent, where wild wheat and barley grew in great abundance, as
did herds of wild game. Bountiful lands
made living easier. They also had a
prickly habit of stimulating population increase. The uncomfortable pressure of crowding and
friction inspired some folks to envision escape. Maybe they could create a more pleasant life
in the forest frontier of Europe’s wild west.
Some of them packed up and left.
In Europe, Barry
Cunliffe noted that as the climate warmed, wild folks migrated northward
from the Mediterranean. By 7000 B.C.,
they were present in a number of locations.
In lean regions they were nomadic, and in places of abundance they
settled down. At the same time, forests
were also migrating northward, encouraged by the changing climate.
By around 4000 B.C., forest expansion stopped, when it
finally reached regions that were too chilly for happy trees. By this time, folks were raising crops and
herding livestock in a number of permanent settlements. These communities were expanding their fields
and pastures, which required murdering happy trees.
Over time, this increasingly abusive relationship between the
two legs and the tree people led to tremendous destruction. In the good old days, forests originally
covered 95 percent of west and central Europe.
Jed
Kaplan and team wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of
Europe. It included stunning maps that
illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850. [Look] Deforestation went into warp drive between
1500 and 1850, driven by the rise of colonization, industrialization, and other
dark juju. The voracious human swarm was
swerving deeper and deeper into mass hysteria.
Humankind’s war on forests has been intensifying for several
thousand years. It’s a huge and complex
subject. Forests have suffered from many
impacts, including firestick farming, agriculture, herding, industry, warfare,
construction, consumerism, climate change, and population growth.
In this chapter, I’ll share a few snapshots from the ripped
and torn photo album of the relationship between two legs and the tree
people.
Humbaba’s Roar
The Fertile Crescent was where plant and animal domestication
shifted into high gear. It was in this
region that the first civilizations began popping up all over, like a painful
burning rash of deforestation, soil destruction, slavery, patriarchy,
exploitation, aggression, self-destruction, etc.
It’s interesting that the oldest known written story is the Epic
of Gilgamesh, the saga of Gilgamesh, a lunatic king who ruled over the city
of Uruk, located along the Euphrates River in Sumer (now Iraq). By around 3100 B.C., Uruk was the biggest
metropolis in the world. Today, Uruk is a crude
pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape. [Look] It has an important message for folks today:
“Don’t live like we did.” But humankind
is a herd of sleep walkers, wandering lost in a foggy dream world.
The story was originally scratched into clay tablets in
cuneiform script. Over the course of
2,000 years, components of the story unified into a single narrative by around
1800 B.C. In the story, King Gilgamesh
was a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand low-tech, muscle powered,
organic agriculture along the Euphrates River (a process now known as
Sustainable Development™).
Gilgamesh was probably a real king who lived somewhere
between 2900 and 2350 B.C. The growth of
Uruk led to massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense
erosion and flooding. In the story,
Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.
Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there
was no tomorrow. Rains then washed the
soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.
And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of
catastrophic destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.” It’s the first sound I hear every morning.
Beyond Hunting and
Gathering
Earlier, I jabbered about how some hunter-gatherer cultures
used firestick farming to boost the availability of wild game and special
plants. This involved limiting forest,
and encouraging the expansion of customized grasslands. The tree people were never fond of this. Over time, this expansion encouraged the
intensification of farming, herding, civilization, industry, and aggressive
deforestation.
Other cultures used a different survival strategy, mindful
self-control. They understood the need
to pay close attention to reality, to recognize the signs of approaching
limits, and to avoid scarcity by adjusting current patterns. Sometimes reproduction taboos were used to
reduce the birth rate. Mindfulness could
avoid having an abusive relationship with the tree people, but modern society
displays little interest in it. It’s not
good for jobs or the economy.
Let’s take a quick peek at the relationships that several
cultures had with the tree people.
(Prehistoric dates are not certain, different sources cite different
dates.)
Britain
When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea
levels were much lower than today.
England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and
continental Europe. Barry Cunliffe noted
that most of Western Europe essentially became a vast forest. This expansion of forests displaced natural
grazing land, which affected the abundance of large herbivores.
By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers had apparently made some small
clearings in the forest to attract game.
By 6500 B.C., rising sea levels had made Britain an island, like it is
today. It was no longer connected by dry
land to neighboring regions. By 4500
B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, Britain was largely a
forest, except for the highlands. Hunters
dined on red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and so on. By 3000 B.C., substantial clearances for
cropland and pasture were increasing. By
A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest. By 1919, it was five percent. Britannia was essentially stripped naked, a
ghastly painful open wound.
J.
B. MacKinnon mentioned a story about Mark Fisher, a British scientist who
visited the U.S. From an overlook in the
White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres (323,748
ha) of woodland, an overwhelming experience.
He burst into tears and had a long, hard cry. At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for
the first time, and he dropped to his knees.
Fisher dreams of rewilding the U.K. — introducing long lost critters
like beavers, lynx, wolves, and so on.
Ireland
The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but
Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508
cm) of precipitation. The wet climate
encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests. Frederick Aalen noted that early
hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with
a dense unbroken forest. Folks lived
along coastlines, lakes, and streams. In
the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were
apparently small in scale.
Then came a paradise-killing event of dark juju. Farmers and herders began arriving around
3500 B.C., and the war on trees commenced.
By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly
complete. When Aalen wrote in 1978, only
three percent of the island was occupied by natural forest or tree farms.
Deforestation had many unintended consequences. William MacLeish noted that in the good old
days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and then
released it into the passing breezes, which carried it away. When the trees were gone, this dispersal
process wheezed. Meanwhile, the Gulf
Stream faithfully continued delivering warm rainy weather from the
Caribbean. So, the heavy rain continued,
and the water remained where it landed.
Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and the ground turned
acid.
Deforestation blindsided the rainforest ecosystem. The new manmade grassland ecosystem seemed to
be a perfect place for raising enslaved livestock. Winters were mild, the grass was green all
year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed. Barns were not needed to protect livestock
from the cold. Milk and meat were
available all year round. Herding worked
well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite
the rich soils.
In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus
Cambrensis to visit Ireland and produce a report. He mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some
of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before. Common freshwater fish included salmon,
trout, eels, and oily shad. Along the
coast, saltwater fish were abundant. The
woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.” There were numerous boars and wild pigs. Wolves had not yet been fully
exterminated. He said it was common to
see the remains of extinct Irish elks.
Their remains were usually found in bogs, often in groups.
The herding life allowed the Irish people to survive, sing,
and dance. They did not have the
slightest interest in the dreary backbreaking work of agriculture, a stupid
fad. Cambrensis felt great pity for the
uncivilized natives. “Their greatest
delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the
enjoyment of liberty.”
Maximum Security
Forests
Rhineland
Julius
Caesar roamed around Western Europe and wrote a report in 51 B.C. He was the emperor of Rome, and his mission
was to expand the Empire, collect tribute payments, acquire military
conscripts, and vigorously spank uncooperative subjects. During this campaign, he focused his
attention on provinces of Celtic people in what is now France, Belgium, and
England.
He had also hoped to conquer the wild Germanic tribes that
lived on the east side of the Rhine, but this fantasy promptly came to an
end. The Rhine was a large, treacherous,
swift moving river. No bridges. It took a lot of effort and luck to get from
one side to the other, and once you set foot on the German side, a super
violent welcoming party was eager to immediately cut you to bloody bits.
Each tribe preferred to keep their homelands surrounded with
a barrier of uninhabited wilderness. The
Germans were primarily wandering herders who built no permanent
settlements. They had no granaries
loaded with valuable food for raiders to swipe, and no roads to make invasions
quick and easy. When danger threatened,
the people and their herds vanished into the deep forest mists.
For the German herders, nothing would have been dumber than
to eliminate the vast ancient forests that provided this security system. The Roman legions were fine-tuned for open
battlefield combat, where heavily armored lads attacked in rigid
formations. Wild Germanic tribes
excelled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.
On the west side of the Rhine were the Celts of Gaul
(France), who were subjects of the Empire.
Their forests were mostly gone, roads crisscrossed the land, and folks
were forced to engage in the backbreaking misery of muscle powered organic
agriculture. Their granaries stored the
result of months of hard work.
Stored grain was treasure that villainous raiders found to be
irresistibly tempting. It was impossible
for farmers to hide or quickly move their treasure. Raiding was popular, because it was much
easier than honest work. Consequently,
highly vulnerable farm communities required constant military protection, for
which they had to pay dearly. In several
Western European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a
common root.
So, the Celts that Caesar described did not reside in the
primordial forest that their wild ancestors once enjoyed. They were the opposite of wild and free. Peasants were essentially wealth generating
livestock controlled by local strong-arm elites. On the east side of the Rhine, the Germanic
tribes had not destroyed their forests.
They were alive and well, wild and free.
Tacitus was
a Roman historian who wrote Germania in A.D. 98 (150 years after
Caesar). It described several fiercely
independent tribes of that era. They
preferred the thrills and excitement of raiding to the drudgery of
farming. “They even think it base and
spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.” Perhaps they learned this effective and
profitable strategy from the Romans.
Tacitus wrote a fascinating description of the vast Hercynian
forest. From the Rhine, it spanned east,
across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia
(Romania). A quick traveler could cross
the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to
west. Caesar noted, “There is no man in
the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest,
though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what
place it begins.”
Pliny also mentioned it:
“The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old
as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.” In those days, there were still a number of
primeval forests in the world.
Scandinavia
In Sweden, forests also provided freedom and security for the
common folks. Vilhelm
Moberg celebrated the fact that peasant society in Sweden had largely
remained stable and functional for 5,000 years.
In most of the regions of Europe, peasants endured many centuries of
misery under the heavy fist of feudalism.
Many Norse and Swede settlements were lucky to be protected by their
vast, dense, rugged, roadless forests.
It’s simply impossible to kill or rob invisible folks who live in
unknown wilderness settlements. Moberg
glowed with gratitude for his nation’s forests, which allowed the rustic
peasants to preserve their freedom until the industrial era metastasized.
Aggressive invaders from elsewhere found no roads, and soon
became perfectly lost. Behind every bush
might be a man with a crossbow. The
local folks knew every hill and rock in the woods. They could pick the ideal time and place to
strike. When trouble was advancing, they
gathered as many belongings as possible, and vanished into the greenery.
My Norse ancestors told the story of Ragnarök, the twilight
of the gods. Some creepy gods had
temporarily subdued nature, but in this great battle, the forces of nature
rubbished the gods, and cleansed the Earth with a great flood. Peter Andreas Munch described the dawn of a
new era: “Out of the sea there rises a new earth, green and fair, whose fields
bear their increase without the sowing of seed.”
A man and woman survived.
From them sprang a new race of people.
A few minor deities also survived.
One was Vidar, a son of Odin (Viðr means forest). Vidar was known for being strong. His home was in a vast and impenetrable
forest. Rasmus Björn Anderson wrote that
Vidar was the god of wild primordial forests, where neither the sound of the
ax, nor the voice of man, was ever heard.
He is silent, dwells far away from, and exercises no influence upon, the
works of man, except as he inspires a profound awe and reverence. This was a culture filled with a deep respect
and reverence for creation, in its wild and unspoiled form. Forests were holy places.
Forest Mining
In the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and
herding, forests had served as a limit to growth — grain, grass, and herds
don’t thrive in shady places.
Deforestation cleared away the towering giants and let the sunbeams
shine in. When metal axes came into common
use, lumberjacks could reduce vast tracts of primeval forest into rotting
stumps and erosion gullies. Early
villages and cities were built with the mutilated carcasses of countless tree
people. The rise of civilizations would
not have been possible without innovative advances in unsustainable forest
mining and soil mining.
George
Perkins Marsh was a brilliant American hero that few modern folks have
heard of. He published Man and Nature
in 1864. This gentleman from Vermont
served as the U.S. Minister to Italy.
While overseas, he visited the sites of many once thriving civilizations
in the Fertile Crescent. What he
observed was terrifying and overwhelming.
Each of them had seriously damaged their ecosystems and self-destructed
in similar ways.
Massive levels of soil erosion created surreal
catastrophes. He saw ancient seaports
that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.
He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet
(9 m) of eroded soil. He stood in
mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which were formerly located on
offshore islands. He saw the sites of ancient
forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of precious living
soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained.
Far worse, Marsh was acutely aware that every day, back home
in America, millions were currently working like crazy to repeat the same
mistakes, glowing with patriotic pride at the temporary prosperity they were
creating on their one-way joyride to oblivion.
In a noble effort to cure blissful ignorance, he fetched pen, ink, and
paper and wrote a book to enlighten his growing young nation.
Sales were respectable for a few decades, but America did not
see the light and rapidly reverse course.
Folks thought that the cure was worse than the disease (like today’s
climate emergency). A radical shift to
intelligent behavior would not have been good for the highly unintelligent
lifestyle. Tom Brown’s mentor, Stalking
Wolf, lamented that our culture was “killing its grandchildren to feed its
children.”
Marsh’s book has stood the test of time fairly well. It presented a wealth of vital information,
none of which I learned about during 16 years of education. Forests keep the soil warmer in winter, and
cooler in the summer. Springtime arrives
later in deforested regions, because the land takes longer to warm up. Forests absorb far more moisture than cleared
lands, so after a good rain, runoff is limited, and flash floods are less
likely.
Deforestation dries out the land. Lake levels drop, springs dry up, stream
flows decline, and wetlands are baked.
Back in the fourth century, when there were more forests, the water volume
flowing in the Seine River was about the same all year long. When Marsh visited 14 centuries later, water
levels could vary up to 30 feet (9 m) between dry spells and cloudbursts. In 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen in
three years on the island of Malta, after the forest had been replaced with
cotton fields. And on and on. The book is a feast of essential
knowledge.
Walter
Lowdermilk was deeply inspired by Marsh’s work. In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited China,
Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. His mission was to study soil erosion, and
write a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They created a short booklet that was very
readable and filled with stunning photographs.
Over a million copies of it were printed. Conquest of the Land Through Seven
Thousand Years is available as a free download. [Link]
Industrial Wood
Marsh generally discussed the environmental impacts of
deforestation that he had observed at the sites of extinct or wheezing
civilizations. These catastrophes were
usually the unintended consequences of clearing forest to expand cropland or
grazing land. Over the passage of
centuries, clever people discovered many new ways that dead trees could be used
to generate wealth and power.
John
Perlin wrote an outstanding history of deforestation. It’s a modern book (1989), and much easier to
read than Marsh. It devotes more
attention to the political, military, industrial, and commercial motivations
for forest mining. It visits locations
including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil,
and America.
Dead trees were used to build houses, bridges, temples, and
palaces. Wood was made into fences,
docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.
It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass,
bricks, cement, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.
Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry. Very importantly, wood was used to build
cargo, fishing, and war ships. Navies
sped the spread of colonies, empires, trade networks, and epidemics.
Cultures that mindfully limited their numbers, and continued
living in a low impact manner, had no future.
Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of golden
treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot
tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts. In other words, if you didn’t destroy your
forest, someone else would.
Perlin described the copper industry on Cyprus in around 1300
B.C. Copper was used to make bronze,
which was in high demand during the Bronze Age.
For each 60 pound (27 kg) copper ingot produced, four acres of pine (120
trees) had to be reduced to six tons of charcoal. Each year, the copper industry on Cyprus
consumed four to five square miles (10-13 km2) of forest. At the same time, the general society
consumed an equal amount of forest for heating, cooking, pottery, lime kilns,
and so on. Can you guess what inevitably
happened to the forests, soils, industry, and affluence of Cyprus?
Shortages also affected the use of firewood. In chilly regions, a city of one square mile
might depend on 50 square miles of forest to provide the firewood it consumed
year after year. In the good old days,
this was often possible. Later, as
forest area decreased, and population grew, limits spoiled the party.
If Perlin’s work sounds interesting, but you can’t get his
book, a similar book is available as a free download. In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter
published Topsoil
and Civilization. Readers are taken
on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient
civilizations destroyed themselves. The
free PDF is HERE. It is not available in some countries, for
copyright reasons, but I once saw a pirate copy on Google.
New World Forest
Richard Lillard described how early European visitors
experienced the ancient forests of North America. When standing on mountaintops, they were
overwhelmed by the fact that as far as they could see in any direction there
was nothing but a wonderland of trees.
The intense experience of perfect super-healthy wildness was surreal,
overwhelming, almost terrifying.
Walking beneath the canopy at midday, the forest floor was as
dark as a cellar, few sunbeams penetrated through the dense foliage. At certain times, some sections of the forest
were absolutely silent, a spooky experience that bewildered the white folks. They saw vast numbers of chestnut trees that
were nearly as big as redwoods.
British visitors to early settlements were stunned to see
amazing luxury — wooden houses, sidewalks, fences, and covered bridges! Commoners were free to hunt large game
because the forest was not the exclusive private property of anyone. In the old country, their diet majored in
porridge. Now it could major in wild
grass-fed meat. Commoners were free to
cut as much firewood as they wished, and keep their cottages warmer than the
castles of royalty. Michael
Williams mentioned one winter night when the king of France sat in his
great hall. He was shivering as he ate
dinner, the wine in his glass was frozen.
William
Cronon noted that settlers with sharp axes went crazy on the forests,
cutting them down as if they were limitless.
Lots of excellent wood was simply burned, to clear the way for
progress. They built large houses, and
heated them with highly inefficient open fireplaces. By 1638, Boston was having firewood
shortages.
As clearing proceeded, summers got hotter, and winters
colder. As stream flows dropped in
summer, water-powered mills had to shut down, sometimes permanently. In winter, upper levels of the soil froze
solid on cleared land, and snow piled up on top of it. When springtime came, the frozen land could
not absorb the melt, so the runoff water zoomed away, and severe flooding was
common.
Stewart
Holbrook wrote about the fantastically destructive obliteration of ancient
forests in the U.S. upper Midwest. On
the same day as the great Chicago fire, October 8, 1871, a firestorm
obliterated the backwoods community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing five times
as many people as in Chicago. On this
day, the new word “firestorm” was added to the English vocabulary.
Holbrook interviewed John Cameron, an eyewitness to the
Peshtigo fire. Cameron noted that there
had been little snow the previous winter, and just one rain between May and
September. Streams were shallow, and
swamps were drying up. Logging
operations left large amounts of slash in the woods (piles of discarded limbs
and branches). Slash piles were
eliminated by burning, even when it was very hot, dry, windy, and
extraordinarily stupid.
The morning of October 8 was hotter than anyone could
remember, and the air was deadly still.
At noon, the sun disappeared. By
nightfall the horizon was red, and smoke was in the air, making their eyes
run. At 9 P.M., Cameron heard an unusual
roaring sound. The night sky was getting
lighter by the minute. A hurricane force
wind howled through. Suddenly, swirling
slabs of flames were hurtling out of nowhere and hitting the bone dry sawdust
streets. In a flash, Peshtigo was
blazing — maybe five minutes.
Cameron saw horses, cattle, men, and women, stagger in the
sawdust streets, then go down to burn brightly like so many flares of
pitch-pine. He winced when he spoke of
watching pretty young Helga Rockstad running down a blazing sidewalk, when her
long blond hair burst into flame. The
next day, he looked for her remains. All
he found was two nickel garter buckles and a little mound of white-gray ash.
The river was the safest place that night. People kept their heads underwater as much as
possible, so the great sheets of flame wouldn’t set their heads on fire. Within an hour, the town was vaporized. Big lumberjacks were reduced to streaks of
ash, enough to fill a thimble. In this
village of 2,000, at least 1,150 died, and 1,280,000 acres (518,000 ha) went up
in smoke.
Also on October 8, 1871, numerous big fires raged across the
state of Michigan, where it had not rained in two months. These fires destroyed 2.5 million acres (1
million ha) — three times more timberland than the Peshtigo blaze. This was an era of countless huge fires. For example, in just the state of Wisconsin,
tremendous fires destroyed huge areas in 1871, 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908,
1910, 1923, 1931, 1936.
Paul Shepard
wrote, “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.” In 1990, I chatted on an internet bulletin
board with a Shawnee man named Nick Trim.
He talked about a project 300+ years ago, along the Mississippi. In a kindly gesture, some French soldiers
were teaching the Shawnee how to build log cabins. This required cutting trees. The natives were very nervous about chopping
down living trees, because they were often home to spirit beings, the little
people.
To avoid spiritual retaliation, a respectful process was
essential. They knocked on each tree,
described the situation, and explained why they wanted to take lives. This was followed by a ceremony, prayers, and
apologies to the trees. Then they waited
a day or so, to give any spirit residents adequate time to find a comfortable
new home. This took so long that the
French lost their patience, and the project ended.
Peter
Wohlleben, a German wood ranger, developed an extremely intimate
relationship with the forest he cared for, and wrote a precious celebration of
his love for it. Modern folks who spend
most of their lives in civilized space stations almost never get to know the
tree people. Some do not eat meat
because they sense that animals have souls.
In an interview, Wohlleben conveyed a deeper understanding. Killing an animal is the same as killing a
tree. He once oversaw a plantation of
trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced.
It was a concentration camp for tree people.
Friday, October 29, 2021
Grassland Rewrite
Greetings! The following is a rewrite of samples
23, 24, and 25, which were originally posted way back in 2019, when I was young
and innocent. The revised version is
shorter, clearer, and adds new factoids.
I hope that as my editing process moves into newer sections, fewer
tweaks will be needed, and the blessed finish line will arrive before the sun
burns out.
MOTHER
GRASSLAND
The family of life is solar powered. Incoming solar energy is received by green plants,
who use it to produce sugar. This
process is photosynthesis. It converts solar
energy into a form of chemical energy that plants and animals must
have to survive. Animals acquire this
energy by eating plant material, or by dining on plant-eating animals.
Photosynthesis splits water molecules (H2O) into
hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Then, in a
fancy magic act, hydrogen is stirred together with CO2 to make a sugar
called glucose (C6H12O6). The process results in some leftover oxygen
atoms, which are released to the atmosphere.
Notice that animals exhale the CO2 needed by plants, and
plants exhale the oxygen needed by animals, a sacred circle dance. Plants use the sugar to fuel their daily life,
or they can convert it to starch, and save it for later. Plants can also make fat, protein, and
vitamins. They’re much smarter than they
look.
The act of snatching carbon from the air, and incorporating
it into living plant tissues, is called carbon fixation, or carbon
sequestration. As more carbon gets sequestered
into the plants and surrounding topsoil, then less of it remains in the
atmosphere. This is great, because too
much carbon in the atmosphere can lead to catastrophic climate juju, like the
freaky changes that are beginning to bludgeon the family of life right now.
There are four primary terrestrial biomes: grassland, forest,
desert, and tundra. Grasslands are
communities of different plants — primarily grasses, mixed with a wide variety
of sedges and leafy forbs (wild flowers and herbs). These mixed communities maximize the capture
of solar energy, make better use of soil resources, and create rich humus. Humus boosts soil fertility, and helps retain
moisture. Some plants also convert
atmospheric nitrogen into a form that is essential for all living things. Others are good at retrieving essential
mineral nutrients.
There are maybe 12,000 species of grass, and they grow in
many tropical and temperate regions. Some
are able to survive extended droughts, or long winters. Grasslands have two modes, productive and
dormant. In warm climates, they are
dormant during the dry season, and recover when the rains return. In temperate climates, they are dormant
during the frosty months, and green when the soil thaws.
Following an intense disturbance, grasslands can recover in 5
to 10 years — far faster than a wrecked forest.
Evolution has done a remarkable job of fine-tuning grasslands for rugged
durability. They can recover more easily
after wildfires because only a third of grassland biomass is above ground, and most
vulnerable to flames. Plants send roots
far underground, to acquire moisture and nutrients. Some roots grow as deep as 32 feet (10 m). The seeds of many grassland species can
remain dormant for an extended period, postponing germination until appropriate
conditions return. Some seeds can
survive a hot and slippery ride through an herbivore’s gut and remain fertile,
enabling the colonization of new locations.
Grass
and Herbivores
Grassland communities run on carb energy that moves from
species to species, up and down the food chain, and enables the existence of
the family of life. Large grass eating
herbivores were a favorite source of nutrients for our prehistoric
ancestors. For the effort invested in
hunting, they provided the biggest jackpots of meat. Our strong desire for these animals, and our
ongoing dependence on them, eventually resulted in some hominins evolving into Homo sapiens, the
last surviving hominin species.
It’s important to understand that herds of large herbivores
do not usually reside in forests or jungles.
Large body size can be an important advantage on grasslands, but a
disadvantage in dense woodlands. In
terms of vegetation, forests contain much more plant biomass than grasslands,
but most of it is elevated out of the reach of hungry herbivores. On the other hand, grasslands annually produce
much more new biomass per acre than forests, and it’s conveniently located
close to the ground.
To herd critters, grassland looks like a candy store where
all the goodies are free and delicious.
Grasslands are the best place to dine on high quality greenery, hang out
with friends and relatives, produce cute offspring, and enjoy a wonderful life
of fresh air, travel, and adventure.
Consequently, grasslands are home to far more large animals. I would expect that most land-dwelling
megafauna species originated in grasslands.
Grass
and Hominins
The Miocene Epoch spanned from 23 to 5.3 million years
ago. It seems that the early Miocene was
wet and warm, and many ecosystems were forests.
Much of Antarctica was covered with temperate forest 20 million years
ago. Later, maybe six to eight million
years ago, it got cooler and dryer, and a different type of ecosystem evolved
and expanded — grasslands. Compared to
forests, grasslands generally need less precipitation to survive. Today, the Earth’s forest area is 80 percent
smaller than it was in the Miocene’s golden age of trees.
This transition had a significant impact on the human
saga. As forests shrank, there was less
habitat for our tree-dwelling ancestors.
A number of forest species tumbled off the stage forever. Some primates moved onto the savannah, and
figured out how to survive as ground-dwelling primates, in open country. They included the ancestors of baboons and
humans. Humans are hominins, primates
that walk on two legs. About four
million years ago, hominins originated on the savannah grasslands of tropical
Mother Africa.
Our tree-dwelling ancestors were primarily frugivores, fruit
eaters. They ate stuff that grew or lived
in trees. When they became
ground-dwelling critters, they needed a new diet. Large herbivores became a popular choice. Hunting was the path to success, and grassland
was the place to be. Consequently, as
humans migrated out of Africa, and colonized the world, they preferred to
select routes that majored in grasslands.
Their journey took them to grasslands in the Middle East, and then
Europe.
Barry Cunliffe noted that a vast steppe grassland began in Hungary
and ended in Manchuria, providing a grassy highway that was 5,600 miles (9,000
km) long. As an added bonus, the steppe
was largely carpeted with vegetation that was drought-resistant and
frost-tolerant. Once established in northern
Asia, intrepid pioneers were eventually able to wander from Siberia, over the
Beringia land bridge, and then explore the incredible Serengetis of the
Americas.
In 1872, Kansas senator John James Ingalls
celebrated the power of grass. He wrote:
“Grass is the forgiveness of nature — her constant benediction. …Streets abandoned by traffic become
grass-grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers
vanish, but grass is immortal. …The
primary form of food is grass. Grass
feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so
the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves
endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”
Super
Grass
And now, the plot thickens.
There are several ways that photosynthesis fixes carbon in plants. The conventional process is called C3. It produces a compound that has three carbon
atoms. The turbocharged process is C4,
and it produces a compound that has four carbon atoms. Maybe 85 percent of the plant species on
Earth are C3. Their method of
carbon fixation is simpler and less efficient than C4. Both types are very old, but when climate
change favored the expansion of grassland, C4 species got an
important boost.
Elizabeth
Kellogg studied C4 plants.
In one experiment she found that, under ideal conditions, C3
plants could theoretically capture and store up to 4.6 percent of the solar
energy they received, while C4 plants could get up to 6 percent (30
percent more). In other words, provided
with the same inputs of sunlight and water, C4 produces more
calories than C3 — carbs that fuel the family of life. They also produce more root biomass, which
increases their tolerance for drought and fire.
Kellogg calls the C4 process a turbocharger. While only 3 percent of flowering plant
species are C4, they account for 23 percent of all carbon fixation
in the world. Of the 12,000 grass
species, 46 percent of them are C4, and they include corn (maize),
sugar cane, millet, and sorghum. (Mad
scientists are now trying to alter DNA to make rice C4 too.)
There are four conditions under which C4 plants
have a big advantage — high temperature, high light, low moisture, and low nutrients. Because they need less water, C4
plants better conserve soil moisture, so their growing season is longer in arid
regions. Kellogg wrote, “In the last 8
million years, C4 grasses have come to dominate much of the earth’s
land surface.”
C3 grasses are better adapted to moist forest
floors and limited sunlight. They are
less able to thrive in arid grasslands.
Out on the savannah, C4 grasses enjoy some important advantages. When conditions are right, they are able to
manufacture generous amounts of chemical energy (sugar), and this increases
their odds for survival.
[Important!] The big
picture here is that climate change radically altered the family of life. It encouraged the substantial expansion of
grassland, which boosted the expansion of C4 grasses, which
propelled the evolution and expansion of large grazers and carnivores, which
boosted the global tonnage of living meat, which set the stage for the arrival
of our hominin ancestors. Today’s
climate crisis seems likely to unleash far bigger changes in something more like
the blink of an eye.
Grasslands can support more large animals than forests. Grassland megafauna migrated and settled on
five continents (not Australasia). Around
the world we find varieties of horses, bison, elephants, antelope, deer, hyenas,
wolves, bears, and so on. Grasslands
support far less biodiversity than rainforests, which are home to fantastic
numbers of different species.
Graham
Harvey, a grass worshipping wordsmith, noted that growth is actually
stimulated by grazing and fire. In a
brilliant design, new blades of grass emerge from growing points located close
to the ground, where they are less likely to be damaged by hungry teeth or
passing flames. The faster that grasses
can send up new blades, the more sunlight they can capture, the more sugar they
can make, and the happier the whole ecosystem becomes. Joy!
Another benefit of grazing is that herbivores often nip off the
rising shoots of woody vegetation. If
trees and brush were allowed to grow and spread, they would compete for sunlight
with the grasses. Then, the herds of
hungry herbivores would have less to eat, and so would the carnivores that
adore red meat. Herds religiously
offered their deep gratitude to the grass people by lovingly depositing
nutrient rich manure and urine all over the place.
Grass eaters are called grazers. Browsers are critters that eat leaves, woody
shoots, bark, and saplings. Some species
are both. The elephant family loves to
dine on young green leaves, and they sometimes knock trees down to get
them. Each day, elephants eat 550 pounds
(250 kg) of grass and leaves, and then turn it into magnificent
fertilizer. Giraffes are top feeders
that specialize in leafy vegetation that elephants and rhinos are too short to
snatch.
Browsers can limit the expansion of trees and woody brush,
but they aren’t fanatical mass murdering exterminators. Savannah ecosystems are grasslands dotted
here and there with trees and shrubs.
Grass provides food for the grazing herds, and woody vegetation
nourishes the browsers — and it provides shade and hiding places. Home sweet home!
Harvey concluded that, in many ways, humans are creatures of
grass country, like the bison, hyenas, and vultures. We still are.
We take immense pride in the brilliant triumph of humankind, but if we
turn off the spotlights and loudspeakers, and pull back the curtains, we see
that the Green Mother of this grand and goofy misadventure is our intimate and
enduring dependence on grassland ecosystems.
Grass is Superman’s momma.
Manmade
Grassland
All flesh is grass, but grass is not limitless. In the old days, there were no hunting
licenses, rules, bag limits, or game wardens.
The hunting fad was able to grow until it eventually smashed into rock
solid limits. Flesh is not
limitless. Folks began missing dinners,
and going to bed with growling tummies. Overshoot
is never sustainable. Too many hominins
spoil the party. The 100% guaranteed,
always effective, least popular cure for overshoot is die-off.
Another cure is migration, pack up and move. This medicine worked for thousands of years, as
folks colonized the regions uninhabited by humans. Eventually, the happy hunters learned a
painful new lesson: Earth is not limitless.
Shit! What now? Cultural taboos that limited reproduction
could provide some pressure relief. So
could perpetual inter-tribal warfare, bloody the competition whenever possible. Cleverness is the persistent gift and curse
of humankind. It conjured another idea,
a magic wand call the firestick.
Shortgrass prairie grassland needs between 10 and 30 inches
(25 to 76 cm) of annual precipitation.
Most of its plants are less than one foot (30 cm) tall. Tallgrass prairie needs more than 30 inches
(76 cm) of annual precipitation. In
tallgrass, prairie plants can sometimes grow up to 13 feet (4 m) high — tall
enough to hide a horse. Tallgrass can
produce far more food for grazing animals, which enables larger herds. However, the precipitation needed by
tallgrass is also adequate for the survival of forest. While browsing and grazing helps to maintain
open grassland, it’s not enough to fully prevent the existence and spread of
forest.
When Big Mama Nature gets in a stormy mood, she sometimes
ignites wildfires with lightning bolts. Fire
can be a good tonic for the health of grass.
It burns up accumulated dead foliage and debris, allowing more solar
energy to empower the grass people. Also,
with the dead junk burned away, the exposed ground warms up faster when the
snows melt, enabling the growing season to begin earlier. Soon after fires end, tender green shoots
emerge from the ashes. Fresh greenery
looks heavenly to the grazing critters, and hunters love grazing critters.
Jill
Haukos noted that fire happily stimulates the growth of fresh new grass, but
it has zero concern for the health and safety of trees and shrubs. Grass productivity is 20 to 40 percent higher
on burned land, compared to unburned. When
tallgrass prairie is deliberately burned every few years, it will not
transition to forest, because the seeds, sprouts, and saplings can’t survive the
cruel abuse. Natural wildfire doesn’t
faithfully follow regular burn schedules, but regular manmade fire is able to
trump the tree people.
Wild folks clearly understood that maintaining extensive
grasslands improved their hunting. By
deliberately controlling nature, they could eat better, and feed more
bambinos. So they did. For hunters, fire was a powerful beneficial servant. For the rodents, birds, and insects of the
grassland, fire could be a viciously powerful master. Shepard Krech mentioned that when the first
humans settled Hawaii and New Zealand, they cleared the land with fire, driving
many bird species extinct. Is it OK to
rubbish a thriving ecosystem for selfish reasons? Only human desires matter?
Haukos wrote about bison grazing in tallgrass prairie. Hungry herds have little interest in seeking
un-grazed locations that are covered with lots of old and skanky low calorie
grass. They much prefer fresh new grass,
and they pay close attention to recently burned landscapes. “Bison maintain large grazing lawns. They return again and again to the same
‘lawns’ to eat the new growth of grass, which is highly nutritious. These areas may look overgrazed but actually have
new growth continually, providing the nutritious grass bison need, even if only
one inch high (2.5 cm).”
The practice of using periodic burns to maintain and expand
superb grazing land is often called firestick farming, because it uses burning
to increase the harvest of life-giving meat.
It is a powerful, easy, low tech way to benefit large game. Alfred
Crosby noted that firestick farming had transformed much of six continents
long before the first field was planted.
Let’s look at a few examples.
North America
The chilly Pleistocene ended about 11,700 years ago, with the
arrival of the warmer and gentler Holocene era that we currently enjoy. Ice sheets melted and retreated, creating
space for tundra. As the climate further
warmed, expanding prairies displaced regions of tundra. Prairie ecosystems can support more complex biodiversity,
as different communities of species adapt to different mixes of soil types,
moisture, and climate. Where changing
conditions favored the existence of trees, forest expanded. Forests tend to trump grassland, because they
allow less sunlight to reach the ground.
Once established, a forest can thrive for thousands of years, if not
molested by murderous terrorists.
One way or another, Native Americans learned the benefits of
grass burning. They understood that
regular burning could inhibit forest regeneration. As centuries passed, tallgrass regions
expanded, much to the delight of large herbivores, and hungry hunters.
Stephen
Pyne wrote that when white colonists were settling in the eastern U.S., the
western portion of the Great Plains was shortgrass prairie, too dry to support
forest. But much of the eastern portion
was tallgrass prairie. It had rainfall
and soils suitable for forest, but over the centuries, Native Americans had
gradually pushed back forest territory to greatly expand the prairie. They maintained this highly productive prairie
by burning it every few years, to kill young saplings. It provided excellent habitat for bison and
other delicacies.
Burning was a common practice in many regions of North
America. By A.D. 1000, the expansion of
manmade tallgrass prairie had enabled bison to migrate east of the Mississippi
River watershed for the first time. By
the 1600s, several million bison lived in a region spanning from Massachusetts
to Florida.
Shepard Krech wrote that along the east coast, there were oak
openings (meadows with scattered trees) as large as 1,000 acres (404 ha). Manmade grasslands in the Shenandoah Valley
covered a thousand square miles (2,590 km2). He noted that Indian fires sometimes had
unintended consequences, when they exploded into raging infernos that burned
for days, sometimes killing entire bison herds, up to a thousand
animals.
Lamar
Marshall described the relationship between the Cherokee people and the
bison. The tribe resided east of the
Mississippi River, and lived by farming and hunting. Legends suggested that bison did not live
there until sometime around A.D. 1400.
By then, the natives had significantly expanded grassland for hunting,
and cleared forest for farming. Game was
especially attracted to rivercane pastures (canebrakes) that were burned every
7 to 10 years. Marshall provided a map
showing how huge North America’s bison range was in 1500. [Look]
Michael
Williams noted that as the diseases of civilization spread westward,
Indians died in great numbers. They had
zero immunity to deadly and highly contagious Old World pathogens. Diseases spread westward far faster than the
expansion of settlers. Consequently, the
traditional burning was sharply reduced, and forests were returning. In 1750, they may have been bigger and denser
than they had been in the previous thousand years. When whites eventually arrived to create
permanent agricultural communities, the happy regrown forests had to be
savagely euthanized.
Arlie
Schorger wrote about the vast manmade tallgrass prairies of southern and
western Wisconsin, and the last bison killed there in 1832. Some prairies spanned 50 miles. Prairie was almost continuous from Lake
Winnebago to the Illinois border.
Natives had been expanding and maintaining grassland for a very long
time. In 1767, white visitors observed
“large droves of buffalos” on the fine meadows along the Buffalo River.
By and by, devastating epidemics hammered the indigenous
people who had maintained the grassland and hunted the bison. Regular burning sputtered out. The last bison seen crossing the Mississippi River,
and entering Wisconsin, was in 1820. By
1854, dense groves of 25 year old trees were joyfully reclaiming their
ancestral homeland. Unfortunately, these
recovering forests had a bleak future, because they stood directly in the path
of a rapidly approaching mob of merciless pale-faced axe murderers. Shit!
Over the passage of centuries, the tallgrass prairies created
topsoil that was deep and remarkably fertile.
Then came the settlers, with their plows and ambitions. Plows are magnificent tools for destroying
soil, and creating permanent irreparable damage. Walter
Youngquist wrote, “In the United States, half the topsoil of Iowa is now in
the Mississippi River delta.” Today,
tallgrass prairie ecosystems are in danger of extinction, maybe one percent of
them still survive. Exotic freak show grasses
like corn and wheat are far more popular and profitable than the indigenous
tallgrass.
In his book Collapse,
Jared Diamond mentioned his visit to a wee remnant of the ancient prairie that
had somehow survived the plowman invasion, an old churchyard in Iowa. It was surrounded by land that had been
farmed for more than 100 years. He
wrote, “As a result of soil being eroded much more rapidly from fields than
from the churchyard, the yard now stands like a little island raised 10 feet (3
m) above the surrounding sea of farmland.”
Australia
Bill
Gammage described the Australia that British colonists observed in 1788,
when they first washed up on shore. That
landscape was radically different from what it is today. Early white eyewitnesses frequently commented
that large regions looked like parks. In
those days, all English parks were the private estates of the super-rich. Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the
beautiful park-like Australian countryside were penniless illiterate bare-naked
Stone Age antifascist anarchist heathens.
Their wealth was their time-proven knowledge.
In 1788, large areas of Australia had been actively managed
by firestick farming, which greatly promoted habitat for the delicious critters
that the natives loved to have lunch with.
The Aborigines used both hot fires and cool fires to encourage
vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire dependent, or fire
promoting. Different fires were used to
promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses. When starting a fire, the time and location
was carefully calculated to encourage the desired result. According to Gammage, most of Australia was
burnt about every one to five years. On
any day of the year, a fire was likely burning somewhere.
The natives generally enjoyed an affluent lifestyle. They had learned how to live through hundred-year
droughts and giant floods. No region was
too harsh for people to inhabit. Their
culture had taboos that set limits on reproduction and hunting. During the breeding seasons of important
animals, hunting was prohibited near their gathering places. Lots of food resources were left untouched
most of the time, a vital safety net.
The Dreaming had two rules: obey the Law, and leave the world as you
found it.
The white colonists were clueless space aliens. Their glorious vision was to transfer a British
way of life to a continent that was highly unsuited for it. Australia’s soils were ancient and minimally
fertile, and the climate was bipolar — extreme multi-year droughts could be
washed away by sudden deluges. But, they
brought their livestock and plows and gave it a whirl. They believed that hard work was a
virtue. The Aborigines were astonished
to observe how much time and effort the silly newcomers invested in producing
the weird stuff they ate.
The new settlers wanted to live like proper rural Brits —
permanent homes, built on fenced private property. They freaked out when the natives set fires
to maintain the grassland. Before long,
districts began banning these burns.
This led to the return of saplings and brush. So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy
dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.
Without burning, insect numbers exploded. Without burning, fuels built up, leading to
new catastrophes, called bushfires. The
Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851.
It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep,
thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.
Mark Brazil shared a story that was full of crap. In Britain, cow manure was promptly and
properly composted by patriotic dung beetles, which returned essential
nutrients to the soil. In Australia,
none of the native dung beetles could get the least bit interested in cow
shit. It was too wet, and too out in the
open. Cow pies could patiently sit on
the grass unmolested for four years, because nobody loved them. This deeply hurt their feelings. Adding insult to injury, Brook Jarvis noted
that fussy cattle refused to graze in the vicinity of neglected pies, so the
herd needed access to far more grazing land than normal.
Australian flies, on the other hand, discovered that cow pies
made fabulous nurseries for their children.
Each pat could feed 3,000 maggots, which turned into flies — dense
clouds of billions and billions of flies — which the hard working Christians
did not in any way fancy. Being outdoors
was hellish. In the 1960s, folks
imported British dung beetles, which loved the taste and aroma of cow
pies. Oddly, this is one example where
an introduced exotic species apparently didn’t create unintended
consequences. When they ran out of pies
to eat, the beetles simply died.
Anyway, a continent inhabited by Stone Age people was
substantially altered by firestick farming and hunting. The Australia of 1788 was radically different
from when the first humans arrived.
We’ll never know if continued firestick farming would have eventually
led to severely degraded ecosystems.
Some serious imbalances can take a long time to fully develop. Many attempts to deliberately control and
exploit ecosystems have spawned huge unintended consequences over time. The ultra-conservative indigenous kangaroos
and wallabies were not control freaks, they simply adapted.
Gammage was fond of the Aborigines, because they were highly
successful at surviving for a long time in a challenging ecosystem. He was much less fond of the British
colonists who, with good intentions, combined with no wisdom, were highly
successful at rubbishing it.
Baz Edmeades
viewed the entire Australian experience through ecological glasses. Fire reshaped the continent. When humans first arrived, the north coast
was home to dry forests that majored in araucaria trees. Before long, they were displaced by
fire-promoting forests that majored in eucalypts. The original dry forests went up in
smoke. Extremely low-tech Stone Age
people substantially altered the ecosystem.
We may never have a clear understanding of the early extinctions of the vertebrate
megafauna and giant reptiles.