Wild Free and Happy Sample 63

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting closer to the home stretch.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Scientists enjoy categorizing, ranking, and naming.  In the realm of Earth history, they have broken the process down into a series of epochs — like the Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, etc.  In the mid-1970s, some folks began feeling a need to create a new epoch, the Anthropocene, an era when human activities generated substantial eco-impacts. 

Science has not yet agreed on an official definition.  Some say it started with the explosive impacts of the Great Acceleration, which began in 1945.  Others say the Industrial Revolution (~1780).  Others say the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture and civilization, which began about 12,000 years ago. 

Dan Flores believes that it began much earlier, during the late Pleistocene, as humans migrated out of Africa.  When they arrived in new regions for the first time, megafauna species were hit hard, resulting in a series of extinctions.  He wrote, “The Pleistocene extinctions, in other words, look very much like the first act of the Anthropocene, the beginnings of what we now call the Sixth Extinction.”

These early ancestors were successful predators because they benefitted from technological advantages including spears, slings, blades, warm clothing, and fire.  High-tech teams were able to kill powerful prey.  Their high-tech advantages enabled humans to successfully colonize much of snow country — despite the fact that their lean and nearly hairless bodies were finetuned by evolution for tropical climates. 

Close your eyes and imagine what northern Eurasia and the Americas would look like today if they had never been colonized by hominins — a vast, astonishing, Serengeti-like wild paradise of abundant life!  Wow!  Wild, free, happy… and perfectly healthy and sustainable!  Imagine that!

When our ancestors first wandered in, snow country was home to a variety of huge animals that had enjoyed living there for a very, very long time — grazers, browsers, predators, and so on.  A number of these species were originally from tropical regions of Africa and Asia, like the elephant, rhino, and sabertooth families.  Over time, these tropical megafauna species gradually evolved traits that improved their ability to survive in the cooler climate, like warm coats of thick fur.

Snow monkeys (Japanese macaques) are interesting primates.  Like our hominin ancestors, they originated in tropical Africa several million years ago.  Over time, their ancestors wandered off into the outer world, and eventually migrated from Korea to Japan more than 300,000 years ago.  Some now live in Japan’s chilly regions, where snow might cover the ground for four months, in depths up to 10 feet (3 m), and temperatures can plunge to -4°F (-20°C).

Snow monkeys adapted to snow country via a long slow process of evolution.  So now, when winter approaches, their thin summer fur automatically grows and thickens into luxurious warm coats.  During the summer, they build up body fat by feasting at the warm season buffet.  In winter months, they survive on stored body fat, and rough foods like leaves and bark.  They huddle together to keep warm.  They don’t use fire.  They’ve lived 300,000 years in Japan, and they’re still alive today because humans have allowed them to continue existing. 

Also around 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged in Africa.  From there, we migrated out of the tropics, and eventually colonized most of the world, including regions having temperate or arctic climates.  Instead of gradually evolving beneficial adaptations like the snow monkeys did, our clever technology boosted our ability to keep warm and survive in chilly places.

In modern cultures, a belief in human supremacy is the norm.  Our limitless brilliance is the mother of infinite miracles.  We’ll easily fix climate change, save the world, colonize Mars, and enjoy endless love, peace, and happiness!  The notion of Anthropocene has an aroma of human vanity.  We are the most powerful and important critters on Earth!

Welcome to the Pyrocene

The four primordial elements are earth, water, air, and fire.  Fire has existed on the planet for more than 400 million years, long before the dinosaurs.  It will continue burning long after the human circus moves off the stage, as long as there is fuel, oxygen, and spark. 

One mind-altering day, my brain crashed into the work of Stephen Pyne, the author of more than 30 books about fire, and one of the world’s foremost experts on fire history.  He described an extremely crucial turning point in Big History: the domestication of fire.  The earliest evidence of this has been found in South Africa, inside Swartkrans Cave.  It dates to about two million years ago, long before the emergence of Homo sapiens.  The two primary suspects are Homo erectus, or an earlier australopithecine hominin.  Did we drive these predecessors off the stage?

Much later, Homo sapiens inherited the knowledge of fire making, and this ability eventually enabled us to become the dominant species on Earth, and the planet thrashing demolition team of today. 

Greek mythology includes the story of Prometheus, a sassy man who stole fire from the god Zeus and gave it to humans.  Stories say that he was the inventor of the fire drill, the tool for kindling flame.  He boldly violated forbidden limits, and the gods severely punished him.  His theft initiated the dawn of human misery.

As discussed earlier (see Mother Africa), the domestication of fire began in the same general timeframe as a wave of megafauna extinctions in Africa.  Was this a coincidence?  Peter Ungar noted, “…the sudden appearance of large concentrations of artifacts and animal remains around two million years ago surely signals a change in the role of hominins in their world. 

Our ancestors had grabbed a place at the dinner table with the large carnivores.  Hominins were eating antelopes, hippos, horses, giraffes, and elephants.  Stone tools gave hominins better access to meat and marrow. 

Pyne thinks that the Anthropocene idea is too limited.  It is rooted in the emergence of agriculture and civilization.  But the primary event that made these changes possible was the domestication of fire.  So, instead of the narrower time window of the Anthropocene, he recommends the creation of a broader epoch called the Pyrocene (pyro means fire).  It would include the events of the Anthropocene.  The Pyrocene would close the curtains on the ancient Ice Age, and usher in the new and turbulent Fire Age. 

Pyne described three categories of fire. 

·       First fire is natural, sparked into flame by lightning, volcanoes, etc.  Its fuel is wood and vegetation.  This fire has existed for 400 million years.

·       Second fire is anthropogenic, ignited by hominins.  It enabled agriculture, civilization, early industry, soil destruction, deforestation, and the massive expansion of human inhabited regions.  Its fuel is wood and vegetation.

·       Third fire ripped open the trap door to hell.  Growth of the industrial era eventually required far more fuel than firewood could provide.  The heartbreaking mistake was to introduce the fire breathing monster to fossil hydrocarbons (coal, oil, gas).  Suddenly, humankind had access to a million times more energy dense combustible fuels.  Shit!  Trouble ahead! 

Carbon Cycle

NOAA calls carbon “the chemical backbone of life on Earth.  Carbon compounds influence the Earth’s temperature, make up the food that sustains us, and provide energy that fuels the global economy.”

Carbon is an element that exists in the atmosphere, oceans, living organisms, rocks, soils, sediments, fossil fuel reservoirs, etc.  This is called the carbon pool.  The pool is a magic act that allows the flow of carbon throughout the ecosystem, which is vital to the survival of the family of life.  The pool includes both carbon sources and carbon sinks. 

A carbon source emits more carbon than it absorbs.  Major sources include the burning of coal, oil, and gas, and the emissions from making concrete. 

A carbon sink absorbs more carbon than it releases.  For example, a forest is a carbon sink, and it absorbs and stores carbon as it lives and grows.  The two primary sinks in the global carbon cycle are the land and the water.

The atmosphere is neither a source nor sink.  It constantly absorbs carbon emissions, and it’s constantly a source of carbon for plant life to absorb.  In the atmosphere, carbon is allowed to pass back and forth between sources and sinks — something like a train station, an ongoing flow of in and out.

Prior to the industrial era, the carbon load in the atmosphere was a relatively stable closed loop — the volume of incoming carbon from sources was similar to the volume of outgoing carbon absorbed by sinks.

Today, that stable closed loop is long gone.  When fossil energy is burned, CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.  From there, the water sink absorbs some of it, and so does the land sink.  Unfortunately, these two sinks cannot absorb CO₂ as quickly as it’s now being emitted, so the growing surplus accumulates in the atmosphere.  Here is a chart that displays the explosive growth of global CO₂ emissions from 1900 to 2020.  Note that what the land and ocean sinks can’t absorb builds up in the atmosphere. 

With the fantastically tragic mistake of industrialization, humankind unleashed a planet roasting monster that is raging against the vitality of life on Earth — a furious roaring bonfire of fossil carbon.  This monster had been safely and harmlessly sleeping underground for millions of years.  Unfortunately, some goofy smarty pants could not leave it alone, and all hell broke loose.  Big Mama Nature screamed!

The normal and natural balancing act of atmospheric carbon got slammed.  In 1850, the atmosphere contained 280 ppm of CO₂ (parts per million).  In 2024 it’s up to 426 ppm and growing.  Consequently, the CO₂ content of the atmosphere is now higher than at any time in the last 3.6 million years, and its volume is skyrocketing now.  The planet’s climate is going batshit crazy, and the worst is yet to come.  Ooops!

Global CO2 Emissions is a chart showing carbon emissions from 1800 to 2006.  The four nations that emit the most carbon are highlighted.  Note the enormous surge of carbon emissions since 1930!

As we burn fossil energy day after day, year after year, faster and faster, enormous amounts of ancient carbon are released into the atmosphere, where it constantly accumulates, clobbers climate stability, and generates heat waves, droughts, catastrophic floods, monstrous storms, and huge wildfires.  Earth is getting hotter and hotter.  Thawing permafrost is releasing huge amounts of methane.  Glaciers are shrinking, sea levels are rising, the family of life is getting brutally bludgeoned.  Circle what is wrong in this picture.

If humankind suddenly went extinct next week, the permafrost would continue thawing, releasing additional methane, trapping more heat, and further boosting the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans.  And every day we keep burning like crazy.  The pyromania genie cannot be put back into the bottle.  Sorry kids!

Wild New World

 

Dan Flores is a historian who has been studying the stormy relationship between humans and the family of life for many years.  He calls this subject Big History.  Wild New World is a fascinating and disturbing masterpiece.  It’s a thick book loaded with ideas gathered over a long career.  The core focus is on North America, which was once an Eden-like paradise of abundant wildlife.  What happened?

Our species emerged in beautiful Mother Africa maybe 300,000 years ago.  Maybe 60,000 years ago, adventurous folks began wandering off into the outer world.  Our exploration of the planet was underway.  Folks went east to Asia, and north to Europe.  By maybe 45,000 years ago, folks were in Siberia and northern Asia.  So far, the earliest evidence of humans in America dates to maybe 25,000 years ago.

Flores described two important discoveries in New Mexico.  At Folsom (1908), the bones of 32 extinct giant bison, 12,450 years old.  At Clovis (1914) the bones of extinct mammoths, 13,000 years old.  At both sites, flaked flint points were found with the bones, smoking gun evidence of human hunting.  A huge surprise!

Humans were team hunters skilled at killing delicious wild animals, preferably jumbo sized megafauna.  As bands of pioneers migrated into new frontiers, a number of megafauna species gradually went extinct, in one region after another, a sequence corresponding to the timeline of human arrival. 

Today, our culture celebrates human brilliance.  We’re simply too smart to disrupt the planet’s climate — global warming is a hoax!  We deny responsibility — not our fault.  Similarly, we’re too smart to cause mass extinctions — not our fault. 

It’s much more comfortable to blame prehistoric climate change.  But the wiped-out species in America had survived for millions of years, including numerous eras of unusual heat and cold.  They weren’t dainty weaklings.  Why did this killer climate shift only exterminate large animals, not small?  Why did it just affect America, but not other continents at the same time?  Hmmm…

In the 1960s, Paul Martin began using a new technology, radiocarbon dating, a better tool for dating prehistoric artifacts.  This enabled him to compare the dates of human presence in North America with the dates of extinctions.  He learned that human arrival came first, and extinctions came later — during a process that took maybe a thousand years. 

Stunned, he referred to this process as “blitzkrieg overkill,” because of its unusual speed.  To Native Americans, this implied that their venerable ancestors foolishly hunted too hard.  They’ve never been fond of the paleface settlers who foolishly obliterated their ancient homeland, and they especially disliked Martin.

We’ve now learned that as the human diaspora advanced around the world, the same pattern followed: arrival first, then extinction.  By 2006, Martin had learned more.  He wrote, “I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years were anthropogenic.”  Yikes!  The indigenous white folks of Europe had done it too!

Evolution had fine-tuned us for living in tropical climates.  Many of the new lands we wandered into had uncomfortably chilly non-tropical climates.  We were forced to develop innovative solutions, like needles, awls, sewn clothing, and protective shelters. 

When we arrived in new regions, the wildlife was clueless.  Mysterious bipedal primates did not trigger danger alarms, because we didn’t fit the standard predator template.  “We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs, and fire.”  For a while, hunters enjoyed the pursuit of fearless prey, many of whom became victims of fatal tameness, like dodos.  During the Lewis & Clark expedition, Clark once bayoneted a wolf that calmly walked past.

Hunting focused on jumbo sized animals that didn’t breed like bunnies, or zoom like gazelles.  Small groups of humans roamed across vast roadless wilderness on foot, armed with Stone Age weapons.  Game was depleted over the course of centuries, and the process of decline could have been imperceptible to living generations.  As game got scarce, the diaspora advanced into new regions.

Everywhere we migrated, the megafauna had evolved large strong bodies, a traditional defense against fierce predators, like sabertooth cats.  Unfortunately, when the predators were bloodthirsty primates from outer space, jumbo size was a vulnerability, and high speed escape was not an option.  The big guys could be killed with primitive spears.

America was the last major stop of the human diaspora, which had begun maybe 35,000 years earlier.  During this long process, pioneers had become highly skilled survivalists.  When the Beringia land bridge emerged from the sea, they advanced from Siberia into the “American Serengeti.”

I was shocked to realize the very long time spans of evolutionary history prior to human arrival.  The camel family in North America blinked out 10,000 years ago, ending a 40 million year residence.  Horses went extinct 9,000 years ago, after enjoying four million years here.  Mammoths wandered in from the Old World 1.5 million years ago.  It’s heartbreaking to comprehend the impact of the blitzkrieg.

IMPORTANT!  So, a number of species blinked out.  When the American megafauna extinction surge wound down, what came next was 10,000 years (100 centuries) of relative stability, according to Flores.  The human pioneers remained, and eventually coevolved with the species that survived.  This preserved the continent’s downsized wildlife community.  Humans learned ecosystem limits, established wise taboos to avoid overhunting, and nurtured a culture of profound respect and reverence for the entire family of life. 

Species that survived extinction now had less competition.  With the giant bison gone forever, the much smaller bison we know today exploded in number.  They reached reproductive age faster, and successfully coevolved with the remaining survivors.  

Sadly, the 100 centuries of stability zoomed off a cliff 500 years ago, when visitors from the Old World began washing up on the Atlantic coast — something like a bloody asteroid strike.  The aliens brought with them an assortment of deadly infectious diseases for which natives had zero immunity.  There were maybe four million natives in 1492.  Epidemics rapidly spread westward, killing about 90 percent of them within 100 years. 

This die-off sharply reduced hunting pressure on the wildlife, which was free to grow explosively.  In 1585, Thomas Hariot was astonished by the fantastic abundance of animals he saw in Virginia.  It was an Eden created by disease.  Settlers were free to hunt like crazy in a wilderness where there were no rules or regulations. 

In addition to diseases, colonists also imported their infectious worldview.  Their religion had roots in a herding society that treasured enslaved livestock, and detested predators.  Their Old World culture was built on a foundation of human supremacy, domestication, civilization, manufacturing, fanaticism, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and pathological self-interest. 

From time to time, Flores stopped to take a long hard piss on the notion of self-interest, a demonic quirk in the settler’s worldview.  I suspect it emerged with the rise of farming, herding, personal property, and individual salvation.  Its one all-consuming question has been “how can I get what I want?”  We suffer from an insatiable lifelong pursuit of social status, to the fullest extent possible, by any means necessary.  Nothing else matters.  Sorry kids!  Sorry wolves!

The traditional worldview of most tribal cultures majored in cooperation instead.  It nurtured mindfulness, and profound reverence for the family of life, the mother of their existence.  They were something like the folks who made the passionate cave paintings at Chauvet.  With few exceptions, the named gods of Native Americans were animals — coyote, raven, rabbit, etc. 

In the Old World religion, humans were very special critters, the other animals were not.  By and by, settlers from the Old World flooded into America.  They had domesticated animals and religions and economic ideas wherein “animals were not kin but resources.”  Their lives had no sacred significance.  So, the more hides, pelts, and furs you could take to market, the more cool stuff you could get.  Yippee!

Native folks thoroughly detested the monstrous colonists, but were fascinated by the unusual stuff they had.  Fifty deerskins could be traded for a metal pot.  Hatchets, axes, and knives were more expensive.  Whiskey was intoxicating.  The desire for this stuff was powerful, but it wasn’t free.

It was in the self-interest of the market, and the colonies, to leave nothing of monetary value unmolested.  Wild animals were pests that stood in the path of progress, and their extermination would continue until it was no longer profitable.  For natives, all options sucked.  They struggled to do their best.

In 1972, I was a roller coaster operator.  Riders slowly went up the steep hill, and then rapidly zoomed downhill screaming their brains out.  Flores provides readers a similar experience.  Most of his book describes the terrifying mass insanity that ravaged America in the last 500 years.  Readers will scream their brains out as they plunge deep into the cesspool of Big History, our horrifying monster closet.

Flores wrote that the invaders forced “a transformation of a hundred centuries of Native America into a re-creation of Old World civilization on a new continent.”  Five centuries ago, Old World folks and animals arrived, “and then, like some new contagion spreading inland from the coasts, proceeded to effect a widespread demolition of almost all that was here.”

In one year, 1743, the port at La Rochelle, France “took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 12,400 river otter furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears.”

“In 1874 Bozeman market hunters were hip-deep in the big bonanza.  That year they shipped out 48 tons of elk skins, 42 tons of deerskins, 17 tons of pronghorn skins, and 760 pounds of bighorn skins.”

“Governments at all levels paid money for the heads or ears or scalps of a suite of animals — wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, bobcats, lynx — for the single purpose of promoting agricultural economies.”  Dead animals (or meat chunks) injected with strychnine were put everywhere to poison scavengers — wolves, coyotes, eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, foxes, skunks.  It was sold in bulk in every store.

To delight ranchers, Montana put out 3,567,000 poison baits to kill predators.  Between 1883 and 1928 Montana shelled out payments on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes.  In one year, a wolf killer earned enough to buy a ranch and livestock.

Passenger pigeons, had been in America for 15 million years.  My father was in diapers when the last one died in 1914.  “The largest nesting site ever reported, near Sparta, Wisconsin, in 1871, spread across 850 square miles (2,200 km²).”  One flock was estimated to have 3.7 billion birds. 

Life on Earth is powered by energy.  Sunbeams feed the plants, and plants feed the critters.  Agriculture and herding amplified the energy flow for humans.  More recently, the flow has been explosively accelerated by burning fossil hydrocarbons, which are not limitless or harmless.  We can now temporarily feed more than eight billion.  We’re heating the planet into a toasty concentration camp crematory.  The machine’s guiding force is insanely clever childish self-interest, which is dumber than dog shit, but far more powerful than foresight, wisdom, cooperation, and mindful self-control.  SCREAM!!!

Flores, Dan, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America, W. W. Norton, New York, 2022.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 59

 

[Note: This is the fifty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

ISLANDS

The saga of the family of life is several billion years old.  It’s a story of evolution, from single celled organisms to a fantastically complex and diverse collection of living beings.  It’s a story of climate change which, for better or worse, never tires of pulling the rug out from under eras of stability.  Craig Childs noted that drill cores of lake sediments in northern New Mexico showed droughts that lasted up to ten centuries.  Six thousand years ago, the Sahara Desert was a lush grassland.

The saga is also a story of migration and colonization.  All plant and animal species are sometimes nomadic, remaining in comfortable habitats until conditions become challenging.  When their home becomes harsh, the lucky ones are able to migrate to better locations.  The horse family originated in North America about 4.5 million years ago.  It was a wonderful place to live — until hungry humans from Eurasia arrived.  Pita Kelekna noted that the last wild American horse perished in Patagonia 9,000 years ago.  

The horse family remains alive and well today because, long ago, some adventurous herds happened to wander across the land bridge to Asia.  They migrated into new regions, and found lots of delicious places to live.  Like the horses, many other groups of megafauna species have colonized large portions of the world — the elephant-like family, and the bears, cats, canines, camels, hominins….  They migrated from one continent to the next by walking across dry land.  Of these globetrotting megafauna, only one species has a reputation for causing numerous extinctions, and severely damaging ecosystems.

Paul Martin was a pioneer in the study of megafauna extinctions.  Offshore islands were the last places to be colonized by species that did not fly or swim.  He noted that ground sloths were eventually driven to extinction from Alaska to Patagonia — except on islands.  For example, on the islands of Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, ground sloths survived 6,000 years longer than on the continental mainland.  Why?  The mainland and islands had the same climate.  The critical variable was human presence.  When watercraft technology enabled hunters to visit islands, the sloths were finally doomed.

After reading a pile of books and papers, I was convinced that climate change was not the primary cause for many of the extinctions that have happened since humans migrated out of Africa.  Martin wrote that the megafauna species that went extinct had been around for a very long time, and had survived a number of surging and fading glacial cycles.  Ongoing research largely supports the human impact hypothesis.

In his book Europe, Tim Flannery discussed the vast mammoth steppe of northern Europe.  Oddly, with the rise and fall of temperature trends, warmth loving species were not more likely to vanish during periods of frigidity.  Cold loving species were not more likely to vanish when the steppe got hotter.  Uncomfortable animals were inspired to migrate to more pleasant locations.  Unlike today, ice age climate swings happened gradually.  Living generations would not have been aware of the changes.

Earlier, I mentioned that megafauna extinctions could sometimes take a thousand years or more.  Living generations were unlikely to actually notice the slow decline of large game species in a wild frontier.  As humans colonized new regions, and unintentionally encouraged extinction spasms, the largest mammals were usually the first to blink out.  They were easy to find, provided lots of meat, and had low reproduction rates.  Thus, human impact.  A climate whammy would have hammered critters of all shapes and sizes indiscriminately.  David Burney and Tim Flannery described a 50,000 year pattern of extinctions corresponding with the arrival of humans. 

Fernando Fernandez wrote an unusually readable paper that described six significant problems with the climate change theory.  Bernardo Araujo and team agreed.  They concluded that if we disregarded all evidence of human impacts, nobody would be talking about megafauna extinctions today.

Over the years, Paul Martin rejected flimsy arguments that blamed climate shifts, but by 2005, he acknowledged that the climate could have led to a few extinctions.  Big Mama Nature may have sometimes played a direct role, and that’s OK.  We can’t complain.  She will always do whatever she wishes, because this is her circus, and we are her clowns.

Most of the world’s woolly mammoths were extinct by 10,500 years ago.  A few lasted longer.  Saint Paul Island is off the coast of Alaska.  Graham Russell and team noted that woolly mammoths survived there until about 5,600 years ago.  A warming climate had elevated sea levels, which shrank the land area of the island.  The climate got dryer, and sources of fresh water became scarce.  The thirsty mammoths vanished.  The first evidence of human presence on the island dates to just 230 years ago.  Here, climate is clearly a primary suspect.

The last mammoths on Earth perished about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia.  DNA analysis suggests that the mammoths were wrecked by a small population and inbreeding.  Lately, new research has found evidence of human presence about 3,700 years ago.  The island is huge, and has not been thoroughly studied.  When more is learned, this story may add a hunting chapter.  Stay tuned.

I’ve been a technical writer for 35 years.  Accuracy is essential.  But in the realm of prehistory, experts express theories and factoids that are consistently inconsistent.  Truth can be a fairy mist.  This gives me endless headaches.  I still can’t understand why more than a few folks continue to believe that the primary cause of the megafauna extinctions was climate change, not human impacts.

Today, the world is buzzing with countless conspiracy theories that throw truth under the bus.  Derrick Jensen wrote the book on human supremacy, and the super-spooky mind-altering power of unquestioned beliefs.  Humans are the only things that matter, a living planet does not.  Earth is a disposable stage prop for the heroic stars of the show, the comically clever primates.

From this mindset, the human colonization of Earth (a process that has left behind a long and bloody trail of extinctions, spurred explosive population growth, rubbished countless ecosystems, and triggered an onrushing climate catastrophe) is seen as a wondrous achievement that should fill us with glowing pride.  We have blind faith that technology will always sweep aside every challenge on our path.  Indeed, the best is yet to come! 

Was I missing something important?  My muse was nervous and perspiring heavily.  She persistently insisted that I take a deeper look at island extinctions, and butt heads with my doubts.  So I did.  Wow!  It has been a mind-blowing experience.  I now have no doubt that islands have especially important stories to tell us.  So, let’s do some island hopping.  Enjoy!

Pangaea the Supercontinent

I sometimes look out my window and see an opossum.  One day, I was fascinated to discover the saga of the opossum people.  They are marsupial mammals, and humans are placental mammals (see Google).  Opossums originated in the vicinity of Australia.  Around 335 million years ago, most of Earth’s dry land was clumped together into an enormous supercontinent called Pangaea.  It began to break apart around 200 million years ago.  Over time, chunks of it drifted all over the place, and arranged themselves into the seven continents we know today.

The plants and animals that had evolved on Pangaea continued living on the drifting chunks, in varying assortments of species.  The chunks migrated in different directions, sometimes into different climate zones.  Their plant and animal communities continued adapting and evolving, creating unique ecosystems.  Opossums had lived on chunks that used to be connected, now called Australia, Antarctica, and South America.  For a long time, South America was far away from North America, but they eventually wandered close together, and opossums boogied north across the border, and into my future back yard.

Until this morning, I believed that humans were the only species associated with mass extinctions, but I was wrong.  A wise woman has now informed me that, three million years ago, when North and South America finally kissed at Panama, North American carnivores charged southward, and exterminated numerous marsupial species.

Anyway, the gradual breakup of Pangaea was rough and messy.  Offshore from the large land masses were smaller chunks that had broken away from the edges — islands.  Many islands were created.  For example, Madagascar broke away from India maybe 100 million years ago.  East of Madagascar is Mauritius, a different type of island, created by volcanic activity (like Hawaii was).

Channel Islands

Offshore from Santa Barbara, California are the five Channel Islands.  Around 20,000 years ago, when sea levels were 300 feet (91 m) lower than today, the five islands were united in one larger island that was just 6 miles (10 km) from the coast.  Over time, rising seas altered the coastlines.  Today, the islands are 22 miles from the coast.  About 80 percent of their former dry land area is now submerged.

Among the former residents were pygmy mammoths.  Their ancestors were the huge Columbian mammoths that lived on the mainland, some of whom decided to swim several miles to the islands.  Swim?  Yes!  Even when sea levels were low, there was no land bridge from the mainland to the islands.  Asian elephants have been known to swim to islands 23 miles (37 km) away.  Their large bodies are buoyant, and their trunks can be used like snorkels.  Did you know that hippos in the Old World have also been excellent long distance swimmers?  No joke!

Anyway, over the passage of thousands of years on the Channel Islands, the mammoths evolved into dwarfs, a unique new species.  Maybe this was an adaptation to limited resources.  Or, maybe it was a lack of predators.  Jumbo size improves the odds for survival when bloodthirsty carnivores live nearby.  But when predators are not good swimmers, and live far away, there is less need to be huge and powerful.

Radiocarbon dating is accurate up to 50,000 years ago, and mammoths were on the islands for at least that long.  Humans arrived on the islands around 13,000 years ago.  The mammoths went extinct between 13,000 and 12,900 years ago.  Coincidence?  Wikipedia reports that mammoths still lived on the islands when humans arrived.  Two mammoth skulls with the brains removed were found near a fire pit.  Of the 100 fire pits examined, at least a third contained mammoth bones.  Climate pleads innocent.

Mediterranean

Jacques Blondel was interested in habitat destruction on the Mediterranean islands during the last 10,000 years.  Population pressure on the mainland encouraged folks to colonize the larger islands.  Forests were pushed back to create cropland and pasture.  Humans deliberately introduced livestock, and unintentionally released pests, like rats and mice. 

Long, long ago, isolation from the mainland led several species of large animals to become dwarfs on multiple Mediterranean islands. There were pygmy hippos and deer, and at least 12 species of pygmy elephants.  The smallest elephants were 39 inches (1 m) tall.  The scarcity of predators also led to the evolution of giant rodents and flightless owls. 

Blondel wasn’t sure if the pygmies were primarily eliminated by hunting, or by feral pigs introduced from the mainland.  Either way, this was not a climate bummer, it was a human impact bummer.  Bottom line: probably all of the wild mammal species that originally inhabited the Mediterranean islands were eventually driven extinct following human colonization. 

Marco Masseti was fascinated by the mammals of the Mediterranean islands, and his report is long, exceedingly thorough, and includes cool maps and illustrations.  In the Mediterranean basin, several thousand years of civilization have been fantastically successful at rubbishing the ecosystem, taking a heavy toll on biodiversity.  Many islands were once vast jungles of oak trees, now reduced to “little more than mineral skeletons.”  It may be the most heavily destroyed region on Earth. 

The old theory was that when sea levels were low, large mammals simply walked across dry land to what are now islands.  When sea levels rose, and islands became cut off, the isolated large mammals became dwarfs.  Experts now say that the land bridges never existed.  Islands were only accessible by swimming, rafting, or flying.  Rising sea levels increased the difficulty.  Deer are capable swimmers, and hippos and elephants are champions.  Birds and bats can go where they wish.  Masseti concluded that human impacts were the primary cause of Mediterranean island extinctions.  Again, climate pleads innocent.

Caribbean

There have been two recent studies of extinctions on islands of the West Indies, in the Caribbean Sea.  The 2017 paper was written by Siobhán B. Cooke and team.  On multiple islands, it compared the dates of human arrival with the extinction dates.  It found that humans arrived on the islands in four waves.  The first three were Amerindian hunter-gatherers, and the fourth was Europeans.  Each wave generated increased eco-impacts.  Access to the full paper is not free. 

Luckily, Mindy Weisberger wrote a news release that summarized the study, and is free to one and all.  Prior to human colonization, there were 150 species of mammals on the islands, including sloths, giant monkeys, bats, and jumbo rats.  Humans colonized the Caribbean basin mainland by 12,000 years ago, but they didn’t begin colonizing the islands until 6,000 years ago.  By this time the climate was stable, well into the Holocene warm era.  Most of the extinctions on all of the islands happened after human arrival, not before. 

Early in the game, hunting was probably the cause of extinctions.  Then came forest clearance and agriculture, which eliminated wildlife habitat.  Destruction accelerated 500 years ago, when Europeans arrived, bringing invasive exotics like cats, rats, goats, and mongooses.  Indigenous rodent species got hammered.  This is not a climate story, it’s another human impact tragedy.

In 2021, a second paper was published, written by Samuel Turvey and team.  It’s online and free.  This paper tracked the data on 89 species on 118 Caribbean islands, and explored the pattern of extinctions.  All of these species were still alive at the start of the Holocene warm era, which began 11,700 years ago, and has not cooled off yet.  Conclusion: “Hunting, landscape transformation, and invasive mammal introduction by successive waves of colonists following human arrival approximately 6000 years ago are considered the primary drivers of Caribbean mammal loss.” 

Larger animals had low reproduction rates, and small populations.  They were at the highest risk of being driven to extinction by the growing human population.  The smallest animals were hard hit by the introduction of invasive predators, like black rats and mongooses.  Their extinction dates correspond to the arrival of these predators.  Again, climate pleads innocent.

New Zealand

The islands of New Zealand were the last large landmass colonized by humans.  Polynesian settlers began arriving somewhere between A.D. 1280 and 1350.  Over time, almost half of New Zealand’s original vertebrate species went extinct, including 51 species of birds.  Alexandra van der Geer wrote that nine species of huge flightless moas vanished in less than a century, zapped by hunting and habitat destruction. 

Moas shared the trait of gigantism with other flightless birds, like the ostriches of Australia, and the elephant birds of Madagascar.  In the extremely distant past, the moas lived elsewhere, and still had wings that enabled flight.  When they landed in New Zealand, maybe 60 million years ago, they were delighted to discover that there were no large ground dwelling predators eager to eat them.  The only mammals on the islands were bats and seals, and they weren’t interested in moas. 

Until this morning, I believed that the gigantism of flightless island birds was solely due to little or no predator risk.  Today I learned that there was another factor.  Isolated islands had no large herbivores that feasted on the greenery.  So, birds that could digest the greenery lived in a heavenly all-you-can-eat buffet.  They were free to grow to jumbo proportions, in a normal and healthy way.

Flying is an energy-guzzling way for an animal to explore the world.  If you live in a place where there is plenty to eat, and little or no risk of getting killed by ground-dwelling predators, then you might have little or no need for wings.  Over time, evolution completely eliminated the tiny useless wing bones of the moas. 

The largest moas stood 12 feet (3.6 m) tall, and weighed 510 pounds (230 kg).  Many collections of moa bones have been found, some containing the remains of up to 90,000 birds.  Evidence suggests that a third of the meat was tossed away to rot.  Obviously, the birds were super-abundant and super-easy to kill.  Obviously, the hunters (like modern folks) did not comprehend the vital importance of mindfully respecting limits.

Moas were the primary food source for the Haast’s eagle, the largest eagle that ever lived.  They weighed up to 33 pounds (15 kg), and their wingspan was over 8 feet (2.6 m).  Not long after the moas were hunted to extinction, the eagles lost their meal ticket and vanished forever. 

Polynesian settlers also brought with them domesticated food plants, which required cleared land.  Originally, 80 percent of New Zealand was forest.  Today, forest covers only 23 percent of the land.  Along with the trees, many forest dwelling birds also got wiped out.  Europeans stumbled upon the islands in 1642, and substantially accelerated the eco-destruction.

Folks who colonized islands sometimes brought with them rats, mice, dogs, ferrets, pigs, and so on.  Baz Edmeades noted that exotic rodents exploded in number, and drove many island birds to extinction.  Their chicks and eggs were no longer safe.  Rodents wiped out frogs, flightless songbirds, ground-dwelling bats, and large insects.  Again, climate pleads innocent.

Madagascar

Alexandra van der Geer described the ecological history of Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island.  It’s located in the Indian Ocean, 250 miles (400 km) east of the African mainland.  Isolated from the outer world for maybe 100 million years, it was home to a unique collection of tropical fauna (see the illustrations in her report). 

Several types of exotic mammals mysteriously began arriving on the island around 60 million years ago, maybe rafting in via ocean currents — lemurs, tenrecs, fossas, and Malagasy mice.  More recently, just one or two million years ago, hippos arrived, and eventually shrank to one fourth the size of mainland hippos.

Lemurs evolved into 17 varieties, including giant sloth lemurs that could grow to the size of male gorillas.  The island was also home to the elephant bird, the heaviest bird in the world.  It was flightless, weighed up to a half ton, and stood 10 feet (3 m) tall.  Their eggs could weigh 22 pounds (10 kg).  When the European colonizers arrived in the 1600s, elephant bird eggshells still littered the beaches of the island’s southern coasts.  Conclusion: “The combined evidence suggests that all mammalian species heavier than 10 kg (22 lbs) gradually disappeared forever from Madagascar’s fauna list.”

Baz Edmeades wrote that Indonesian seafarers first visited Madagascar sometime between A.D. 670 and 920.  By the end of the fourteenth century, many mammals, birds, and reptiles were gone.  Elizabeth Kolbert wrote that the lemurs, elephant birds, and pygmy hippos survived into the Middle Ages.  All of them blinked out.  She noted that the extinction spasms in North America, South America, Madagascar, New Zealand, and elsewhere occurred in a series of pulses, each of which corresponded to the arrival of human colonists.  None of the pulses seem to correspond with unusual climate events.  Again, climate pleads innocent.

Mauritius

Mauritius is a tropical island, east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) from the African coast.  It is one of the four Mascarene Islands.  They were created by volcanic activity about eight million years ago.  Because of its long isolation, Mauritius was inhabited by an amazing assortment of unique species, including many flightless birds and large reptiles. 

It was home to the famous flightless dodos.  The dodo lineage was more than 23 million years old.  So, they were originally from somewhere else, and arrived in Mauritius by flying there, back when they still had functional wings.  Having no natural enemies, dodos enjoyed a wonderful life.  For this reason, evolution long ago reduced the dodo’s wings to tiny useless stubs.  Dodos were unable to fly or swim, but they did enjoy being alive.  They could grow up to 39 inches (1 m) tall, and weigh up to 37 pounds (17 kg).

When the Portuguese visited in 1507, there were zero ground dwelling mammal species on the island.  The only mammals were fruit bats and marine animals.  In 1598, Dutch sailors were the first to describe the existence of dodos.  The Dutch East India Company used Mauritius as a service station for trade vessels.  The last mention of dodos was in 1662. 

There used to be at least ten species of flightless birds on the island, all are now extinct.  Humans imported dogs, pigs, macaques, cats, and rats.  Some think the imports may have killed more dodos than humans did, by raiding their nests.  There is also the matter of habitat destruction.  When humans arrived, the island was entirely forested.  Dodos were forest birds.  Today, just two percent of the forest remains.  Again, climate pleads innocent.

There is an old saying that rude folks use to insult others, calling them “dumb as a dodo.”  Humans could simply walk up to a happy dodo and club it to death.  Dodos weren’t dumb, they were fearless.  They had no concept of predators or danger.  To them, humans were mysterious funny-looking weird-smelling space aliens.

Eight Billion Fearless Dodos

Paul Martin focused much attention on the megafauna extinctions.  They were an ongoing process that began in Africa more than two million years ago, then Australia, then Eurasia, and then the Americas.  Human pioneers migrated from continent to continent by walking (except for the soggy trip to Australia).  Fifteen thousand years ago, before the ice age softened, critters could theoretically walk north from South Africa, through Eurasia, cross the land bridge to America, and go south to Chile.

In these large interconnected continental landmasses, there were many species of carnivorous animals, of every size and shape.  They regularly enjoyed having lunch dates with delicious prey.  The endless bloody dance of predator and prey could lead to evolution and/or extinction. 

As discussed earlier, genetic evolution was something like a nonstop escalating arms race, encouraging animals to become smarter, larger, stronger, faster, and/or harder to find.  In this process, prey gradually got better (but not too good) at escape, and predators gradually got better (but not too good) at capture.  In continental ecosystems, the existence of these predators would have made it impossible for flightless moas, elephant birds, or dodos to survive.  Islands provided a far safer refuge, allowing lucky critters to enjoy a wonderful life to the fullest. 

Genetic evolution was an exceedingly slow balancing act.  For savannah elephants to evolve into tundra-adapted woolly mammoths took many thousands of years.  But for furless tropical primates to adapt to a frosty life in snow country required a different, turbulent, and high speed process called cultural evolution, which bypassed the limits set by genes.  It was driven by cleverness and technological innovation — campfires, shelters, sewn clothing, food storage, deadly weaponry, and so on. 

Cultural evolution, in countless ways, enabled folks to quickly pound the crap out of an ecosystem.  Using a short spear, a single Mbuti pygmy could kill a full grown elephant 20 times larger than the hunter.  With this clever new killing technology, the elephant’s great size and thick hide suddenly lost all of its defensive benefits, and became a serious handicap.  The improvements provided by millions of years of genetic evolution were tossed out the window.  No more safety nets.

A number of isolated islands were remarkably different from continental mainland ecosystems.  Some of them existed for millions and millions of years without humans, spears, manmade fire, religion, industry, money, cell phones, plastic garbage, and eco-catastrophes.  Imagine that! 

Island critters did not have to live in a state of high alert, in constant fear of life-threatening surprise visits from lions and tigers and bears.  Island birds could grow huge, and eventually lose their wings, because flying had no useful purpose.  On islands, there were no two ton elephants with thick hides and huge tusks, because elephants were perfectly safe — no sabertooths.  They were free to slim down to pygmy size, so they could dance with ecstatic enthusiasm.

It is very IMPORTANT to understand that the long term journey of existence for ALL species is guided by genetic evolution, but just ONE genus (Homo) has seriously fooled around with cultural evolution, which has become the curse of our existence.

Humans share 98.8 percent of our DNA with chimps, charming beings that have not been bedeviled by the juju of cleverness.  They have lived in the same place, in the same way, for maybe a million years or more.  They haven’t trashed it.  It has never occurred to them to cleverly obliterate their home and future.  Can you imagine living in a manner that could glide along for a million years? 

Like all wild nonhumans, chimps have a way of life that remains within the limits defined by genetic evolution.  In other words, they continue to live in their ancient, time-proven traditional manner.  Chimps have not forgotten how to be chimps.  The difference between humans and wild nonhumans is that cultural evolution has enabled us to bypass the limits set by genetic evolution, and become control freaks and loose cannons.  Singh and Zingg wrote a fascinating book about feral children — kids who had no language, no tools, no fire, no self-awareness, no directed thinking, no sin, no guilt, no greed.  The only thing they wanted was freedom.

Cultural evolution was born long ago, maybe ignited by the fire-making Erectus, or another early ancestor.  If they had never domesticated fire, and discovered many clever ways of exploiting its power, our ancestors may have remained something like ordinary animals — brown skinned, wild, free, and happy tropical primates.

Snow country might still be home to mammoths, sabertooths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and so on.  Neanderthals were also addicted to cultural evolution.  So is humankind.  We can start fires, use projectile weapons, drive species extinct, travel at high speeds, live underwater, fly around the world, survive in polar bear country, and spend our lives entranced by glowing screens. 

Discovering new tricks can be thrilling — using rocks to crack nuts.  Wow!  The discovery of fire making was mind blowing!  It blasted our ancestors outside the community of ordinary animals, into a dangerously unstable realm of existence.  Cleverness snowballs over time, at an accelerating pace.  It never sleeps.  Every day, countless new gizmos and ideas pour into the world, like a devastating flash flood.  None are clean, green, and renewable.

With the emergence of plant and animal domestication, our ability to control, exploit, and rubbish ecosystems soared to astonishing new heights.  More and more people got better and better at living too hard and busting up everything.  Forests were cleared to make space for fields, pastures, cities, civilizations, freeways, landfills, and barren wastelands.  This large scale destruction was turbocharged by explosive surges in cultural evolution.

To varying degrees, every human society is addicted to clever tricks inspired by cultural evolution.  Indigenous cultures were rooted in a specific region, which set firm limits on them.  Smart groups paid close attention to reality.  If they did not live mindfully, they were on a slippery path.  Nomadic cultures were free to pack up and move.  While passing through a region, they might unintentionally damage an ecosystem without knowing it.  Consumer cultures, like the one I live in, have no foresight.  We live like there’s no tomorrow.

Low impact does not mean no impact.  The humans that colonized the mainland regions of the Caribbean basin 12,000 years ago, were what we would consider to be extremely low-tech hunter-gatherers.  So, what happened to the giant ground sloths, huge rodents, and jumbo monkeys?  They disappeared.  Then, 6,000 years later, humans colonized the offshore islands, and another extinction spasm commenced.

Sadly, low impact does not always mean safe and secure.  Back country wild folks with bows and arrows are not going to have a pleasant future when the folks with guns and diseases discover them.  In the painful words of an old proverb, cultures have no right to what they cannot defend.  The ancient Story of Ahikar says it more elegantly, “Oh my son!  Withstand not a man in the days of his power, nor a river in the days of its flood.”

Unfortunately, the serpent in the Garden of Eden encouraged the first couple to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.  By doing so, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  The disobedient duo was immediately hurled out of paradise, and condemned to spend the rest of their days tilling the soil.  Bye-bye!

Unfortunately, our blind leap into hardcore cleverness also inspired the development of mining, smelting, axes, plows, swords, spears, automobiles, aircraft, toxic pollution, nuclear fission, and on and on.  We have become techno-kamikazes, skilled at using turbocharged cultural evolution to blindly zoom down a dead-end road. 

I am an American consumer, and it’s extremely painful to contemplate the enormous amount of stuff I’ve discarded during my life.  I was simply living as Americans are expected to live (like spoiled two year olds).  Other cultures are far less clever, and far less destructive.  No culture is cleverness free.  None live with the sustainable simplicity of chimps and bonobos.

In earlier chapters, I’ve mentioned many low impact cultures.  It would be great if the vast human herd could sharply downsize and return to far lighter lifestyles — deliberately, wisely, and this afternoon (or sooner).  That would blindside life as we know it.  The herd is still growing explosively, and we’re zooming toward energy limits, water limits, and soil limits, while the rapidly warming climate is preparing to serve us exactly what our blindfolded cleverness has ordered.

Wild humans had no wings, and could not fly.  So, most islands remained healthy and safe.  Unfortunately, clever innovation eventually inspired the development of technology for travelling by water.  Dodos were doomed!  Fearless flightless birds also vanished on Tonga, New Caledonia, Fiji, Hawaii, Easter Island, the Marquesas, and on and on.  Island by island, the good old days disappeared in the rearview mirror. 

Like dodos, mainstream humankind is also fearless.  Some of us are a bit aware of a few uncomfortable changes in the world.  In the preceding chapters, I mentioned the existence of swarms of growing abnormalities.  Nobody comprehends them all, including me.  The future is sure to be full of exciting surprises.

The notion that our ancestors unintentionally encouraged extinction surges is uncomfortable.  But the planet’s sixth mass extinction catastrophe is not slowing down.  I suspect that blaming climate change might be an effort to defend our reputation, and conceal embarrassing secrets.  We can act like children who don’t understand how the cookie jar mysteriously became empty.  Hey, we didn’t eat the pygmy hippos.  Honest!

Luckily, doubt fairies can be chased away with magical thinking.  We’re OK!  Miraculous technology will protect us.  We just need to make a bunch of clean green energy, buy a bunch of electric cars, and continue enjoying unlimited prosperity.  If we just maintain a positive attitude, and hope really hard, the clouds will pass.  Really?

Bon Voyage!

Congratulations, you’ve finally made it to the rear end of my long and tedious rant storm!  You now know a bit about what I’ve been contemplating for the last 25+ years.  What I’ve learned has little in common with the worldview I absorbed during 16 years in classrooms, the standard love story that celebrates our amazing genius, and perpetual progress.

This book’s core question was: “How did things get to be this way?”  Obviously, a mob of eight billion critters fearlessly rubbishing a delightful planet is not exactly a heartwarming portrait of sparkling intelligence.  Limited knowledge, clever technology, and self-centered thinking helped to conjure the monster into existence. 

In this book, my goal was to explore the human saga from a perspective that presents humans as simply one of the gang in the family of life, rather than the glorious crown of creation.  From this viewpoint, we are the family’s crazy uncle.  The dodo family enjoyed this planet for 23 million years, but the human family just stepped off the bus recently.  Humankind’s initial colonization of the planet’s ecosystems established a pattern that has never stopped.  Empire builders continue ruthlessly bulldozing their way over all obstacles in their never-ending quest for maximum domination — the Romans, Mongols, Spaniards, English, Americans, Nazis, Russians, and thousands more.

On the day you squirted out of the womb, you were a wild animal, ready to enjoy a wild life in a healthy paradise.  You were not a fatally flawed animal genetically, but the culture that taught you everything you know is a train wreck.  The good news, in theory, is that dodgy cultures can be revised and improved, or hurled off a cliff.  They are nothing but vivid ideas, fantasies, and nightmares that live between your ears, and can be highly contagious. 

As promised, I have presented no sure-fire snake oil cures for all that ails us.  I’ll let you know if I ever find any.  In this book, my objective was exploring history, not foretelling the future.  All of us accept the notion that we’ll die someday.  So will our way of life.  The sun rises every morning, the stars come out at night, and all civilizations have expiration dates.  They grow like crazy, deplete their resource base, and become ancient ruins. 

Several weeks ago, it occurred to me that Wild, Free, and Happy was a ridiculously inappropriate title for this book.  It had little to do with the flow of ideas between the covers, but it sounded nifty a few years back.  I’m going to keep it.  Discovering the islands of flightless birds radically altered my perception of reality.  These ecosystems evolved in isolation for millions of years.  They were 100% cleverness free, virgins unmolested by cultural evolution, and they actually existed on this planet.  Imagine that!

We’ve learned that it’s possible for bird species to live for millions of years without wings.  Can humans live without cleverness?  Can we forget everything we know, return to Mother Africa, throw out our clothes, and humbly start over?  Can humans survive the powerful pandemonium we have conjured into existence?  Time will tell.  Whatever happens, genetic evolution will continue, and guide the survivors down the long and winding path to healing.

Bon voyage!

 

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