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. 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 23

[Note: This is the twenty-third sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.]

 Super Grass

I previously mentioned the notion that humans are creatures of the grass.  Recently, I stumbled on information that added a deeper dimension to this theme.  It all began when I read that the area of global forest cover has been sharply reduced since the early Miocene Epoch.  This stimulated my curiosity, and led to an exciting wild factoid chase.  The Miocene spanned from 23 to 5.3 million years ago.  It seems that the early Miocene was wet and warm, and many ecosystems were forests.  I was surprised to learn that as late as 20 million years ago, much of Antarctica was covered with temperate forests.

Anyway, later in the Miocene, maybe 6 to 8 million years ago, it got cooler and dryer, and a new type of major ecosystem emerged — grasslands.  They can thrive where it’s too dry for trees.  Over time, expanding grassland displaced large areas of forest.  This shift was an important turning point in the human saga.  As forests shrank, there was less habitat for tree-dwelling primates, causing a number of species to tumble off the stage.  Some primates moved out onto the savannah, and figured out how to survive in open country as ground-dwelling primates.  They included the ancestors of baboons and humans. 

So, it was a gradual but substantial shift in climate patterns and ecosystems that made it possible for our ancestors to invent a new career path as hunters of large herbivores.  As the climate got cooler and dryer, grass species more tolerant of arid conditions rose in importance.  At this point, we need to take a brief side trip into some technical stuff.  I’ll keep it as short and simple as possible.

The entire 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 in order to survive.  Some animals acquire it directly by eating plant material, and others get it indirectly by dining on plant-eating animals.  Thus, photosynthesis is the foundation of life on Earth.

The process begins by splitting water molecules (H₂O) into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.  Then, in a fancy magic act, hydrogen is stirred together with CO₂ to make sugar (C₆H₁₂O₆).  The process results in some leftover oxygen atoms, which are released to the atmosphere.  Notice that animals exhale the CO₂ that plants must have, and plants exhale the oxygen needed by animals, a sacred circle dance.  Plants can use the sugar to fuel their growth, 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 we’re now just beginning to experience.

I should also mention that petroleum and coal are substances made of sequestered carbon that accumulated over the course of 500 million years.  Big Mama Nature wisely stored it away in a safe place deep underground, where it could cause no mischief.  Unfortunately, it has become very trendy for ignorance-powered societies to retrieve enormous quantities of this ancient carbon and foolishly burn it up, in order to indulge in a decadent joyride of self-destructive childish whimsy.  Big brains can make big mistakes.  It’s so embarrassing!

And now, (gasp!) the plot thickens.  There are two categories of plant species, based on the mode of photosynthesis they use: C₃ or C₄.  C₃ produces a compound that has three carbon atoms, and C₄ produces a compound that has four carbon atoms.  Both types are very old, but the shift to a cooler and dryer climate greatly boosted the expansion of C₄ species.  Maybe 85 percent of the plant species on Earth are C₃.  Their method of carbon fixation is simpler and less efficient than C₄. 

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 (i.e., 30 percent more than C₃).  While only 3 percent of flowering plant species are C₄, they account for 23 percent of all carbon fixation in the world.  In other words, they produce much more of the precious chemical energy (sugar) that the family of life depends on.  Kellogg calls the C₄ process a turbocharger.

There are four conditions under which C₄ plants have a big advantage — high temperature, high light, low moisture, and low nutrients.  Because they use much less water, C₄ plants better conserve soil moisture.  They also produce more root biomass, which increases their tolerance for drought and fire.  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.)

When critters consume C₄ grasses, this diet leaves behind physical tracks.  Spencer Wells wrote that the bones of Native Americans revealed whether they were corn farmers or hunter-gatherers.  Because corn is a C₄ grass, the bones of corn eaters contained molecular C₄ markers.  Baz Edmeades talked about the ferocious dirk-tooth cats (Dinofelis), a species that went extinct about 1.4 million years ago.  We know they were creatures of the savannah, not the forest, because analysis of their tooth enamel indicated that they dined on herbivores that ate C₄ grasses.

And now, dear reader, at long last, we are ready to proceed to the exciting conclusion of this tedious jabber.  It’s time to turn the spotlight on the heroes of this story, the C₄ grass species.  Kellogg noted that in the last 8 million years, as climate change drove the retreat of tropical forests, the domain of C₄ grasses has greatly expanded.  They are now significant components of major grasslands around the world.

C₃ grasses were better adapted to moist forest floors and limited sunlight.  They were less able to thrive on arid grasslands.  Out on the savannah, conditions were ideal for C₄ grasses, because they needed less water to enjoy a happy life.  Here they moved from the sidelines to the center stage.  Receiving many hours of direct sunlight every day, they were able to manufacture generous amounts of chemical energy (sugar), and this gave them the ability to grow rapidly. 

And so, these highly nutritious grasses became a highly desirable food source for the animals that were able to digest them, which required some adaptations.  Baz Edmeades noted that the blades of these grasses were tough, highly fibrous, and coated with abrasive silica.  Evolution responded by providing some animals with new and improved teeth that were more tolerant of abrasion, and better able to pulverize the plant fibers.  Other critters were issued new and improved digestive tracts, populated with bacteria that were fine-tuned for chemically breaking down fibrous glop.  The critters that succeeded in adapting to the new banquet made big gains in size and diversity.

Of course, too much of a good thing will have consequences.  If herds got way too large, the vitality of the grassland would be degraded, leading to starvation.  So, evolution came to the rescue by promoting a variety of big strong bloodthirsty carnivores, who delighted in inviting large herbivores to join them at lunchtime.  To make this sacred dance more sporting, evolution also encouraged the development of herbivores who could boogie across the grassland at high speeds.

Edmeades concluded that the rise of highly productive C₄ grasses radically changed the world.  It spurred the evolution and spread of an astonishing variety of grassland herbivores and their predators.  It led to the emergence of spectacular Serengeti-like ecosystems in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas — fantastic wonderlands of abundant life.

Graham Harvey noted that the herds of grass-eating critters benefitted the grasses.  Grazing actually stimulated plant growth.  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.  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.

Grazing also benefitted grasses by regularly nipping off the rising shoots of woody vegetation.  If trees and brush were allowed to grow and spread, they would compete with the grass plants.  Then, the herds of hungry herbivores would have less to eat, and so would the carnivores that adored red meat.  Herds religiously offered their deep gratitude to the grass people by lovingly depositing nutrient rich manure and urine all over the place.

The big picture here is that the shift to a cooler dryer climate encouraged the substantial expansion of grassland, which boosted the expansion of C₄ grass species, which propelled the evolution and expansion of large grazers and carnivores, which boosted the global tonnage of living meat.  These megafauna migrated and settled on five continents (not Australasia).  Around the world we find species of horses, bison, elephants, antelope, deer, hyenas, wolves, bears, and so on.  The moral of this story is that climate change can radically alter the face of the planet, and the family of life.

Later in this amazing transformation, another powerful agent of radical change joined the cast of the grassland soap opera.  These critters walked on two legs, and resembled what you see in the mirror.  They eventually assumed the role of apex predators, something that no other primate had ever attempted.  Our ancestors did not wait patiently for evolution to provide them with the speed, strength, fangs, and claws that are customary for natural born carnivores.  Instead, they invented hunting weapons, learned how to make fire, and began experimenting with a way of life that no other animal in the history of the planet had ever attempted.  It’s notable that every other animal species continues to live like they did a million years ago — ultra-conservative, and perfectly sustainable.

The advance of the new critters marked the emergence of an extremely spooky, highly contagious, multi-drug resistant virus known as cleverness fever.  For a few million years, its mind-altering effects gradually intensified.  Ten thousand years ago, they surged.  Today they are skyrocketing.  Humankind is now engaged in full scale warfare against the entire family of life, including itself.  A lively and entertaining soap opera has shape shifted into the mother of all horror shows.  Will the current swing to a much warmer climate provide the miraculous silver bullet cure for the mass hysteria of cleverness fever?  Stay tuned.

Ten Billion

Stephen Emmott is a chief techno-wizard at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.  His brilliant young scientists are doing research in complex natural systems.  Their objective is to invent miracles.  They want to program ordinary cells to perform photosynthesis, so we can produce food from sunlight, without plows and seeds.  Agriculture can’t feed ten billion.  The goal is to delay the onrushing planetary emergency, and push aside annoying obstacles to perpetual growth.

Much of the public seems to be paying little attention to the emergency, if they are aware of it at all.  Biking around the university town where I live, I don’t sense a crisis of overpopulation.  I don’t sense that global carbon emissions have increased 400 percent in my lifetime.  The squirrels, opossums, ducks, and blue jays have not gone extinct.  Life seems normal.  Everything is OK.  Right?

A wealth of information can be found online, but many internet factoids are generated by slippery gangsters who accumulate riches by accelerating the planetary emergency.  You see their work hundreds of times every day.  Among their favorite tools are magical rubber stamps that imprint [SUSTAINABLE] with subliminal green ink — [SUSTAINABLE] soil mining, [SUSTAINABLE] forest mining, [SUSTAINABLE] fish mining, [SUSTAINABLE] growth, [SUSTAINABLE] development, and on and on.

Emmott’s clan of brilliant scientists is an oddity.  They do not have the rubber stamp.  They are not wearing choke chains that will be jerked if they express ideas that offend the mighty.  They will not lose their jobs if they conclude that we are in the midst of a planetary emergency.  When thinkers are free to learn without blinders and hobbles, they come to perceive reality as an intense whirlwind of out-of-control juju.  This can be a head-snapping experience.

Emmott realized that it would be good to share his disturbing discoveries with the world, to help others see.  Being present in reality, with eyes wide open, breaks the spell.  It provides vision, coherence, and empowerment unavailable to those who stumble in a fog of illusions.  So, in a burst of creative energy, he sat down and wrote Ten Billion, a most unusual book.

It’s 216 pages long, but it can be read in less than an hour.  There is more white space than text.  Some pages are home to five words.  In a normal book, the text might fill 25 pages.  Ten Billion resembles a PowerPoint presentation — an orderly stream of brief statements, decorated with attention-grabbing photos and charts.  He smelted down a mountain of raw data, reducing it to vital conclusions, the pure essence of his vision, and nothing else.

According to one review, readers have a love/hate relationship with the book.  Techies and scientists tend to be annoyed by bold statements unsupported by exhaustive explanations and scholarly citations.  Commoners are more likely to appreciate the simplicity.  It’s encouraging that the book is keeping the cash registers busy at Amazon — it’s attracting hungry minds.  For oddballs like myself, who have read several hundred books on the planetary emergency, Ten Billion is just basic information that every well-educated high school student should know by now.

For example, “We currently have no known means of being able to feed ten billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system.”  Indeed, experts expect food productivity to decline in the coming decades, “possibly very sharply.”  Why?  Reserves of phosphate, a mineral nutrient essential for agriculture, are no longer plentiful.  Desertification and urban sprawl are reducing cropland area.  Soils are being depleted, or eroding away.  Weeds, diseases, and insects continue to develop resistance to our latest chemicals.  Farmers are draining rivers and emptying underground aquifers.

To feed ten billion people, many of whom want more meat, food production must double.  Keeping a growing mob on life support will require far more water, energy, and cropland.  Kiss the tropical forests goodbye.  Kiss countless wild species goodbye.  Adding more people will also increase carbon emissions and accelerate climate change.

Don’t worry about Peak Energy.  Instead, worry that we’ll continue extracting and burning what we’ve already discovered.  Worry that we’ll discover even more, and burn that, too.  Worry about climate change.  A 2°C rise in the global climate would be catastrophic.  New research suggests that a rise of 4 degrees is likely, and 6 degrees is possible.  As the Arctic heats up, large amounts of methane are being released in thousands of plumes.  “This could be very big trouble on a very big scale.”

Even if miracles provided us with abundant clean energy, eliminated climate change, and inspired us to consume far, far less, we’re still doomed if population growth continues.  It is helpful to educate more women, and provide family planning services, but it is still very common for women have more than two children, often many more.  “The worst thing we can continue to do — globally — is have children at the current rate.”

Anyway, after a quick tour of our primary challenges, Emmott finally reveals two options for addressing them, (1) technological innovation, and (2) radical behavior change.  He warns that expecting techno-miracles requires “a staggering leap into fantasy.”  Science is unlikely to rescue us.  But radical behavior change requires a radical reduction in consumption, radically different governments, and a radically different economy.  The bottom line is on the last page.  “We urgently need to do — and I mean actually do — something radical to avert global catastrophe.  But I don’t think we will.  I think we’re fucked.”

For years, publishers have required eco-books to offer some light at the end of the tunnel.  “We only have 30 years to prevent disaster.”  Then, it was 20 years.  Then, it was 10 years.  Write letters to your legislators!  Change your light bulbs!  Let’s mobilize the nation, as we did during World War II, to sharply reduce consumption!  Those books failed to make enough people care.  The house was not on fire, yet.

If you spent months studying 500 channels of TV, you would not be blown off your couch by a fire hose of messages describing the planetary emergency.  “We’re not getting the information we need.  The scale and nature of the problem is simply not being communicated to us.”  A healthy dose of truth might encourage us to reflect upon how we live, and what we value, but that would slow economic growth.

A primary objective of our education system is to prepare the next generation for careers in [SUSTAINABLE] development, so they can live like there’s no tomorrow.  To expose innocent youth to full strength reality would plunge them into deep despair, reducing them to walking dead zombies, we claim.  Actually, despair is a normal, healthy, and rational response to today’s reality.  It’s not a terminal illness, it’s an opening of the heart that revives us as we recover from soul loss.  How can we interact intelligently with reality if we don’t comprehend reality?

There is no silver bullet cure for the planetary emergency.  There is no undo button.  But living mindfully, present in reality, is healing and empowering.  Our species did not evolve to be recreational shoppers.  We weren’t meant to spend our lives mindlessly hoarding frivolous status trinkets.  There’s no future in that.  It’s not even fun.  There are other paths.

Emmott, Stephen, Ten Billion, Vintage Books, New York, 2013.