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!

 

Sources

Araujo, Bernardo, et al., “Bigger kill than chill… (megafauna extinctions),” Quaternary International, November 2015. [Link]

Blondel, Jacques, “On humans and wildlife in Mediterranean islands,” Journal of Biogeography, 2008, 35, 509-518. [Link]

Burney, David and Tim Flannery, “Fifty millennia of catastrophic extinctions after human contact,” TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution, Vol.20 No.7 July 2005. [Link]

Childs, Craig, Apocalyptic Planet, Pantheon Books, New York, 2012. [Review]

Cooke, Siobhán, et al., “Anthropogenic Extinction Dominates Holocene Declines of West Indian Mammals,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Vol. 48:301-327, November 2017. [Link] ($$$)

Dávalos, Liliana M., “Caribbean islands reveal a ‘lost world’ of ancient mammals,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, November 6, 2017. [Link]

Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna: First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction, Houndstooth Press, 2021. [Review]

Fernandez, Fernando, “Human Dispersal and Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinctions…,” ResearchGate, July 2016. [Link]  (Readable & detailed)

Flannery, Tim, Europe: A Natural History, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2019.

Graham, Russell, et al., “Timing and causes of mid-Holocene mammoth extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska,” PNAS, August 16, 2016, vol. 113, no. 33. [Link]

Kelekna, Pita, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009. [Review]

Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014. [Review]

Lister, Adrian, and Paul Bahn, Mammoths, Macmillan, New York, 1994.

MacKinnon, J. B., The Once and Future World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2013. [Review]

MacPhee, Ross, End of the Megafauna, W. W. Norton Company, New York, 2019. [Review]

Martin, Paul, “Africa and Pleistocene Overkill,” Nature, October 22, 1966. [Link]

Martin, Paul, Twilight of the Mammoths, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.

Masseti, Marco, “Mammals of the Mediterranean islands: homogenization and the loss of biodiversity,” Hystrix (Italian Journal of Mammalogy), 2009. [Link]

Singh, J. A. L., and Robert M. Zingg, Wolf-Children and Feral Man, 1939, Reprint, Archon Books, 1966. [Review]

Turvey, Samuel, et al., “Where the Wild Things Were,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, March 2021. [Link]

Van der Geer, Alexandra, “The Late Survival of Madagascar’s Megafauna,” Paleobiology, December 13, 2017. (Cool illustrations) [Link]

Van der Geer, Alexandra, “The Lost World of Island Dwarfs and Giants,” Paleobiology, September 22, 2017. [Link]

Ward, Peter D., The Call of Distant Mammoths, Copernicus, New York, 1997. [Review]

Weisberger, Mindy, “Humans Doomed Caribbean's 'Lost World' of Ancient Mammals,” Live Science, November 7, 2017. [Link]

 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

 [Note: This is a new section in my rough draft of a far from finished book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be inserted before sample 26.  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.

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

In his lecture, Four Domestications, James Scott described four turning points that radically changed the course of the human saga — the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and ourselves.  We domesticated ourselves by radically changing the way we lived, in order to protect and nurture the survival and growth of crops and herds.  We controlled their lives, and they controlled ours.  Many tasks had to be performed at specific times for optimal results — tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.  Herders also fine-tuned their ongoing schedules and activities for the benefit of their livestock. 

We’ve already looked at the domestication of fire, and how this superpower radically altered the human saga.  It enabled tropical humans to survive in chilly non-tropical regions (snow country), colonize the planet, and eventually become participants in monstrous fire-breathing industrial civilizations.  This chapter will focus on plant and animal domestication, which mostly began within the last 13,000 years, and fired up the turbochargers for our high-speed one-way rocket ride into the unknown.

Supply and Demand

Mother Africa was the homeland where hominins first evolved maybe six million years ago.  Experts do not agree on when humans first emerged.  Estimates range from maybe 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were nomadic foragers — hunters and gatherers.  Around 60,000 years ago, some pioneers decided to see the world, and began exploring the tropics of southern Asia, on a path toward Australia. 

Around 42,000 years ago, humans were present up north in Europe, a region with a temperate climate.  It was a major shift, moving outside of the tropical climate for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  The curiosity of these explorers helped to accelerate our journey to a stormy future.  Long term survival in a non-tropical region required loads of radical innovations.

As mentioned earlier, William Rees proposed two fundament ecological concepts.  (1) Every species will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.  (2) When they expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them. 

Humans regularly bumped into limits as they colonized the world, and cleverness often provided ways to bypass the obstacles.  As long as wild foods were abundant, there was no need to pursue farming or herding, which required far more time, difficulty, and risk.  Large game was our ancestors’ preferred food but, over time, hunting a bit too much could gradually deplete the delicious herds.  Efforts then had to shift to class B and class C foods — small game, forest animals, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, insects, and so on. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that as the last ice age weakened, the climate warmed, and the more comfortable Holocene era began.  The forests of Europe were able to migrate northward from the Mediterranean, displacing some tundra regions, and their megafauna residents.  These forests were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Reduced access to easy meat motivated lifestyle changes.  Folks learned that it was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of foods might be gathered.  This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while. 

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward.  When the tundra megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens. 

Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game got scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps were oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells got smaller and smaller. 

Eventually, the seeds of domesticated corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that pursued the new experiment could produce more food, and feed more people.  When fields were first cleared, and the virgin soil was still highly fertile, agricultural land might sometimes produce a hundred times more food than an equal area of wild land used by foragers.  Of course, population pressure is a predictable cause of social friction and bloody conflict.  Because they had no livestock, they had no manure to help conserve soil fertility, which declines over time, shrinking the harvests.

The big picture here is an endless struggle for survival, in which limits periodically stomped on the brakes, and cleverness often found new ways to temporarily sneak around them.  Cleverness is not an all-powerful miracle-making magic wand.  It also has limits, as the folks on Easter Island discovered, when the last tree fell (whoops!).  It’s not easy to cleverly sneak around food scarcity.  Options often boiled down to starvation, mindful family planning, or a blind leap into the mysterious realm of food production.

Cradle of Civilization

Jared Diamond seriously wondered why some cultures could remain rich and powerful for centuries, while many others rarely, if ever, had an opportunity to sniff prosperity’s butt.  He invested a massive number of brain cycles in a quest to find answers.  In 1987, he published his boat-rocking essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” [Link or Link]. 

He wrote, “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.  In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.  With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.”

Ten years later, in 1997, Diamond published his classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he presented a book length discussion of what he had learned.  Domestication emerged independently in maybe nine locations around the world, but one region in Eurasia played a starring role in influencing the chain of events that eventually led to the bruised, beaten, and bleeding world outside your window.

It began one day, thousands of years ago, when some intrepid pioneers happened to stumble into an amazing jackpot known as the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization.  Gasp!  It was as if their wildest dreams had come true!  The place was home to a great abundance of wild game and plant foods — a heavenly paradise. 

Life was grand for a while, but as the mobs grew in number, they naturally smacked into more and more annoying limits.  Cleverness inspired behaviors and illusions that put folks on the treacherous path to farming and herding.  This generated a surge of temporary prosperity, while it permanently degraded the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed, the forests, soils, and wildlife got rubbished.  Paradise deteriorated into depleted cropland, deserts, ancient ruins, and persistent bloody conflicts.  The Fertile Crescent (like every other region), was not an ecosystem that could tolerate endless agriculture.  Diamond noted that farming is a slow motion act of ecological suicide.

In 2002, five years after Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond published a paper, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” [Link]  It presented some additional thoughts.  The emergence of domestication, maybe 10,500 years ago, inspired tremendous changes.  It commenced in Eurasia, primarily in the Fertile Crescent and parts of China, where the whims of “biogeographic luck” provided perfect conditions for seriously dangerous mischief. 

Not only were wild foods abundant, but an unusual number of the plant and animal species possessed characteristics that made them suitable for domestication.  Despite centuries of trial and error, clever humans have discovered that it’s impossible to domesticate the vast majority of plants and animals.  To be suitable for domestication, species must have specific collection of vulnerabilities.

For example, Diamond listed six obstacles that made it impossible to domesticate most large animal species.  Any one of these could prevent enslavement: (1) a diet not easily supplied by humans, (2) slow growth rate and long birth spacing, (3) nasty disposition, (4) reluctance to breed in captivity, (5) lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and (6) a tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators.  

Diamond wrote that there are maybe 200,000 wild plant species in the world, of which about 100 have been domesticated.  The Fertile Crescent was home several wild grasses that produced large cereal seeds (barley, einkorn, emmer, and spelt), a rich source of carbohydrates.  There were also several varieties of pulses (peas, beans, and lentils) that provided protein.  In the whole world, purely by random chance, the Fertile Crescent was the biggest treasure chest of future super foods, both plant and animal.  It was essentially ground zero for the birth of civilization.

Globally, there are 148 species of large land-dwelling mammalian herbivores and omnivores that weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 51 of these species, but none of them have been domesticated, because they luckily failed to meet all of the six criteria for enslavement.

Of the 148 species, just 14 have been domesticated.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species eventually became multinational superstars.  The Fertile Crescent was home to four of the five: the goat, sheep, pig, and cow (horses are the fifth) — an amazing coincidence. 

Of the 14 domesticated species, 13 of them originated in Eurasia.  Consequently, it’s no coincidence that Eurasia played a primary role in the growth and spread of acute, highly infectious, epidemic crowd diseases.  Farming and herding created communities of humans that lived in unhealthy proximity to unnatural concentrations of livestock, poultry, rats, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. 

This encouraged a number of animal pathogens to adapt to human hosts, including influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera.  Diamond noted, “Such diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture, because they can sustain themselves only in large dense populations that did not exist before agriculture, hence they are often termed crowd diseases.”

Nomadic foragers lived in small groups, enslaved no livestock or poultry, and periodically moved their camps — a brilliant strategy for avoiding diseases.  On the other hand, humans who lived in crowded villages and cities made tremendous advances in unsanitary living.  Crap and garbage was all over the place, all the time.  Rivers were the source of drinking water, and the dumping place for sewage and filth.  A later chapter will take a closer look at disease.

Diamond noted four developments that dimmed the future for hunter-gatherers, and encouraged the expansion of farming and herding.  (1) Over time, hunting gradually made large game less abundant.  (2) We learned new skills for collecting, processing, and storing foods.  (3) Societies competed, spurring innovations that improved our ability to survive.  (4) Growing populations required large-scale food production.

Folks who inhabited a paradise of plant and animal super foods, learned lots of tricks for maximizing food production.  Population surged, spurring the emergence of cities and civilizations.  Civilization encouraged the development of stuff like metallurgy, industry, deforestation, soil destruction, warfare, overcrowding, patriarchy, and slavery.

So, let’s rephrase what William Rees said about species.  (1) “Every civilization will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.”  As they expand, they will take along their livestock, crop seeds, weaponry, culture, technology, religions, and diseases.  (2) “When they colonize new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them.”

Eurasia spans from Europe to China.  The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.  State of the art food production provided both centers with powerful advantages over their more humble neighbors.  The two centers became hubs for territorial expansion, and their languages, genes, tools, and cultural influences have spread around the world. 

This is a spooky story.  From the two hubs, the realm of farming and herding spread in many directions.  In the sixteenth century, European travelers began noticing striking similarities in Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.  They appeared to have a common ancestor.  As the years flowed by, scholars noticed that lots of other languages also had similarities.  A category was created to name this large assortment.

Visit Wikipedia’s discussion of Indo-European Languages.  See the maps that show how this language family spread across the Old World over time.  Around 500 years ago, the age of global colonization exported them to the Americas, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.  Today, the native language of about 46 percent of humankind, is an Indo-European tongue.

Drop a pebble in a calm pool of water, and rings of ripples spread in every direction.  Diamond wrote that humankind’s long and stormy story of food production, population growth, civilization, and global domination, began in the Fertile Crescent.  The pebble is called domestication.

Diamond lamented, “If they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition, and heavier disease burdens.”

Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can readily see the many unnecessary wrong turns that our ancestors made.  At the same time, we can observe the world around us today, and readily see the catastrophes that those wrong turns triggered.  It’s heartbreaking.  Cleverness without foresight is a deadly duo.  It sure is an interesting time to be alive!

Winter Solstice 2021

What a memorable year this has been.  Terrorists failed in their first attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.  The COVID family of viruses was so popular that it will return for another year of thrills, chills, ventilators, and conspiracy theories.  This has been a good year for being a writer, spending week after week in a wordsmith cave, largely isolated from viruses circulating in flesh and blood society.

Almost every day I spend 60 to 90 minutes biking on pathways along the river.  On my route is a 50 acre (20 ha) grove of forest that hasn’t been cut in maybe a hundred years.  It’s lush, green, and alive.  Songbirds fill the air with their music of love and celebration.  This is my church, a sacred place.

In the last 12 years, I’ve only seen a starry night once or twice.  There must be thousands of children in this city who have never once experienced a sky full of twinkling stars.  Moonlight is still able to penetrate the light pollution.  The moon silently watches our frantic craziness.  In years past, it watched the campfires of hunter-gatherers.  It watched the wooly mammoths come and go.  It watched the dinosaurs come and go.  It watched the dawn of life.  It will continue shining down when the lights of civilization finally blink out, and the family of life struggles to begin a long and difficult healing process.

Last year, I hoped that my book would be finished by now, but it isn’t.  I completed the rough draft in early September, minus an unwritten summary chapter, the final item on my to-do list.  Early sections of the draft date back to March 2016.  I’ve learned a lot since then.  I’m now rereading the entire manuscript, making revisions, and adding new info.  I strongly suspect that the newer sections will need less attention.  Maybe the revisions are half done.  We’ll see.  Quality is more important than speed.

Day after day, I slog through endless tedious details, resolving questions, zapping booboos, and fine-tuning the clarity.  In the end comes the joy of finishing another passage.  It’s satisfying to see that this torn and battered old brain can still produce work that warms my soul, and makes me smile with satisfaction.

Since the 2020 solstice, my blog has had 100,000+ more views.  This summer, for reasons I don’t understand, I got a surge of friend requests on Facebook, rapidly tripling my friend collection.  They came from Australia, Bali, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo, Cote D’Ivorie, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Gaza, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Zambia.

I wish I had time to chat with them, but the library gives me just one hour a day of internet access.  Right now, my primary goal in life is to finish this book.  Publishing a book can take years of effort, with no guarantees, and I’m getting old.  These days, publishers prefer books with generous servings of magical thinking, sustainable solutions, and maximum strength hopium.  That’s where the money is.  I’m interested in where the reality is, which has become an entirely different matter.

In my ten years as an author and blogger, I’ve learned that when interesting writing costs nothing, it reaches far more eyeballs than when the same material costs money.  My current plan is to skip publishing and give this book away, in digital formats, an Earth Day gift.  It’s cheap and easy to send free PDFs to folks in distant lands, rather than paperbacks.  After so many years of hard work, it would be fun to finally reach an audience.

All the best! 

Megafauna Review

Megafauna is an important, fascinating, unforgettable, one-of-a-kind book.  It primarily focuses on prehistoric megafauna extinctions around the world, and how they happened.  Baz Edmeades (“ed-meedz”) has been working on this book for 20+ years, and it is impressively thorough.  His grandfather was a professor who found a unique human-like skull that was about 259,000 years old.

Megafauna are mammals weighing more than 100 pounds (46 kg).  Hominins are primates that walk on two legs, like you and I.  Hominins have been around for several million years.  Humans have been around for 250,000 to 400,000 years, depending on who you ask. 

During the last two or three million years, lots of megafauna species, all around the world, have moved off the stage forever.  Why?  A heated debate has been buzzing for 50+ years.  Was it an asteroid strike?  No evidence.  Were they zapped by diseases?  No evidence.  Was it climate change?  It probably strained some regional situations.  Was it human activities?  The evidence strongly supports this.  In 1966, Paul Martin presented his megafauna overkill theory (humans did it), which ignited big controversy in academia.  Edmeades became friends with Paul Martin, and learned a lot from him. 

Hominins originated in Mother Africa, where there used to be at least nine species of big cats (three today), nine types of elephants (one today), and four hippos (one today).  There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, and giant baboons — all gone.  Extinction spasms especially surged as humans wandered out of Africa, and gradually colonized the planet.  They migrated across Southern Asia, to Australia, then Eurasia, and finally the Americas. 

Paul Martin coined the misleading term “blitzkrieg overkill,” which angered quite a few folks.  As humans colonized new regions, the megafauna declined in number, in a process that could take a thousand years or more, multiple generations.  It was not a high-speed massacre.  These hunters were Stone Age people, using simple tools.  Many of the large game they hunted had low reproductive rates, which made them extremely vulnerable to extinction.

There is a clear pattern that when hunters migrated into continental land masses, stuff went extinct — except on uninhabited (human-free) offshore islands of the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and elsewhere.  On these islands, extinctions didn’t begin until humans eventually stepped ashore, sometimes thousands of years later.  Understand that offshore islands have a climate quite similar to the nearby mainland.  Climate was not a factor here.  Many of the megafauna species that blinked out had survived multiple ice ages over the passage of several million years.

In 2015, I stumbled across early sections of the Edmeades book online, and they blindsided me.  I never understood how incredibly alive this planet once was, and how tragically damaged it now is.  None of my teachers ever explained this, because they never learned it.  Our cultural myths celebrate the upward spiral of humankind’s brilliant achievements.  We live in a technological wonderland, not an ecological graveyard.  Life has never been better, and the best is yet to come.

The ancestors of hominins were originally tree dwellers.  Our closest living relatives are chimps, with whom we share 98.8 percent of our DNA.  Long ago, when the climate changed, and forests shrank, our ancestors were forced to survive as ground dwellers, a lifestyle for which evolution had not prepared them.

Over the course of several billion years, evolution has been a remarkable force that guided the journey of the family of life.  When frigid eras arrived, critters evolved fur coats.  When foxes became faster, evolution selected for faster bunnies.  It was a balancing act.  Foxes needed bunnies, and bunnies needed foxes.  The family of life was continuously fine-tuned at the speed of evolution, an extremely slow process.  Alterations could take many thousands of years.

Over millions of years, evolution provided giant tortoises with large bodies, invincible lion-proof shells, and long lifespans.  In the blink of an eye, these advantages were rubbished when hominins moved into the neighborhood, and began killing 200-year-old tortoises with big rocks.  This hunting method was not fine-tuned by evolution.  It was a sudden innovation that popped into the mind of a hungry hominin — and it worked!  Invincible tortoises were immediately transformed into helpless sitting ducks that didn’t have a bright future.  Evolution was yanked out of the driver’s seat.  Ancient rules no longer mattered. 

Hominin cleverness changed the world.  It made it far easier to grab essential resources, grow in numbers, and avoid becoming cat food.  Cleverness had the long term impact of an asteroid strike.  Cleverness enabled hominins to domesticate fire, plants, and animals.  We colonized the planet, developed industrial civilization, zapped the forests, polluted everything, and destabilized the climate.

Many folks in the human herd suffer from a blind faith that the miraculous power of cleverness can easily overcome all challenges.  Their vision is to keep our maximum impact way of life on life support, as long as possible, and hope for the best.  Edmeades presents no solutions, but this is a story that was important to tell.  He laments that cleverness “has given our species the power to transform the biosphere so profoundly that no other organism on this planet may get the opportunity of evolving it again.” 

His book does an excellent job of discussing the megafauna extinctions in an understandable way, with up-to-date information.  Its bitter medicine, and good medicine.  Many misperceive evolution to be a divine competition, in which species fight relentlessly to reach the top of the hierarchy, seeking to wear the Dominant Animal crown.  This pyramid-climbing quest for domination is the engine of civilization.  By the end of the book, you understand that evolution is more about adapting to changing conditions in a way that is as smooth and balanced as possible. 

Evolution has been the great friend of the family of life.  The Dominant Animal game has been its grim reaper.  While the wild megafauna are now sharply diminished, human-caused extinctions of many other species continue at an accelerating rate.  Cleverness never sleeps.  I’ve spent 69 years in a roaring hurricane of devastating cleverness.  Edmeades book reminded me that this planet was once a healthy and amazing living paradise.  Some of my genes have their roots in those good old days of abundant life.  That’s a comforting notion.

Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna: First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction, Houndstooth Press, 2021.

Forest Rewrite

Greetings!  The following is a rewrite of samples 25 and 41.  They will be combined into one section and moved much later in the manuscript, before Sacred Energy.  One more step closer to the end!

 SACRED FOREST

As mentioned earlier, after the last Ice Age wound down, glaciers and ice sheets melted and retreated, eventually allowing the expansion of tundra, grassland, and forest.  Grassland spurred the momentum of the human experiment by boosting herds of game.  In wooded regions, hunting was more challenging, and forests interfered with the growth of trendy new fads like herding and farming.

This is why civilization emerged in the grassland regions of the Fertile Crescent, where wild wheat and barley grew in great abundance, as did herds of wild game.  Bountiful lands made living easier.  They also had a prickly habit of stimulating population increase.  The uncomfortable pressure of crowding and friction inspired some folks to envision escape.  Maybe they could create a more pleasant life in the forest frontier of Europe’s wild west.  Some of them packed up and left.

In Europe, Barry Cunliffe noted that as the climate warmed, wild folks migrated northward from the Mediterranean.  By 7000 B.C., they were present in a number of locations.  In lean regions they were nomadic, and in places of abundance they settled down.  At the same time, forests were also migrating northward, encouraged by the changing climate. 

By around 4000 B.C., forest expansion stopped, when it finally reached regions that were too chilly for happy trees.  By this time, folks were raising crops and herding livestock in a number of permanent settlements.  These communities were expanding their fields and pastures, which required murdering happy trees.

Over time, this increasingly abusive relationship between the two legs and the tree people led to tremendous destruction.  In the good old days, forests originally covered 95 percent of west and central Europe.  Jed Kaplan and team wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  It included stunning maps that illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850. [Look]  Deforestation went into warp drive between 1500 and 1850, driven by the rise of colonization, industrialization, and other dark juju.  The voracious human swarm was swerving deeper and deeper into mass hysteria. 

Humankind’s war on forests has been intensifying for several thousand years.  It’s a huge and complex subject.  Forests have suffered from many impacts, including firestick farming, agriculture, herding, industry, warfare, construction, consumerism, climate change, and population growth.

In this chapter, I’ll share a few snapshots from the ripped and torn photo album of the relationship between two legs and the tree people. 

Humbaba’s Roar

The Fertile Crescent was where plant and animal domestication shifted into high gear.  It was in this region that the first civilizations began popping up all over, like a painful burning rash of deforestation, soil destruction, slavery, patriarchy, exploitation, aggression, self-destruction, etc. 

It’s interesting that the oldest known written story is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the saga of Gilgamesh, a lunatic king who ruled over the city of Uruk, located along the Euphrates River in Sumer (now Iraq).  By around 3100 B.C., Uruk was the biggest metropolis in the world.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape. [Look]  It has an important message for folks today: “Don’t live like we did.”  But humankind is a herd of sleep walkers, wandering lost in a foggy dream world.

The story was originally scratched into clay tablets in cuneiform script.  Over the course of 2,000 years, components of the story unified into a single narrative by around 1800 B.C.  In the story, King Gilgamesh was a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand low-tech, muscle powered, organic agriculture along the Euphrates River (a process now known as Sustainable Development™). 

Gilgamesh was probably a real king who lived somewhere between 2900 and 2350 B.C.  The growth of Uruk led to massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding.  In the story, Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.  Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there was no tomorrow.  Rains then washed the soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.  And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of catastrophic destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.”  It’s the first sound I hear every morning.

Beyond Hunting and Gathering

Earlier, I jabbered about how some hunter-gatherer cultures used firestick farming to boost the availability of wild game and special plants.  This involved limiting forest, and encouraging the expansion of customized grasslands.  The tree people were never fond of this.  Over time, this expansion encouraged the intensification of farming, herding, civilization, industry, and aggressive deforestation. 

Other cultures used a different survival strategy, mindful self-control.  They understood the need to pay close attention to reality, to recognize the signs of approaching limits, and to avoid scarcity by adjusting current patterns.  Sometimes reproduction taboos were used to reduce the birth rate.  Mindfulness could avoid having an abusive relationship with the tree people, but modern society displays little interest in it.  It’s not good for jobs or the economy.

Let’s take a quick peek at the relationships that several cultures had with the tree people.  (Prehistoric dates are not certain, different sources cite different dates.)

Britain

When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea levels were much lower than today.  England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and continental Europe.  Barry Cunliffe noted that most of Western Europe essentially became a vast forest.  This expansion of forests displaced natural grazing land, which affected the abundance of large herbivores.

By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers had apparently made some small clearings in the forest to attract game.  By 6500 B.C., rising sea levels had made Britain an island, like it is today.  It was no longer connected by dry land to neighboring regions.  By 4500 B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, Britain was largely a forest, except for the highlands.  Hunters dined on red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and so on.  By 3000 B.C., substantial clearances for cropland and pasture were increasing.  By A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest.  By 1919, it was five percent.  Britannia was essentially stripped naked, a ghastly painful open wound.

J. B. MacKinnon mentioned a story about Mark Fisher, a British scientist who visited the U.S.  From an overlook in the White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres (323,748 ha) of woodland, an overwhelming experience.  He burst into tears and had a long, hard cry.  At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for the first time, and he dropped to his knees.  Fisher dreams of rewilding the U.K. — introducing long lost critters like beavers, lynx, wolves, and so on.

Ireland

The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508 cm) of precipitation.  The wet climate encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests.  Frederick Aalen noted that early hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with a dense unbroken forest.  Folks lived along coastlines, lakes, and streams.  In the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were apparently small in scale.

Then came a paradise-killing event of dark juju.  Farmers and herders began arriving around 3500 B.C., and the war on trees commenced.  By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly complete.  When Aalen wrote in 1978, only three percent of the island was occupied by natural forest or tree farms. 

Deforestation had many unintended consequences.  William MacLeish noted that in the good old days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and then released it into the passing breezes, which carried it away.  When the trees were gone, this dispersal process wheezed.  Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream faithfully continued delivering warm rainy weather from the Caribbean.  So, the heavy rain continued, and the water remained where it landed.  Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and the ground turned acid.

Deforestation blindsided the rainforest ecosystem.  The new manmade grassland ecosystem seemed to be a perfect place for raising enslaved livestock.  Winters were mild, the grass was green all year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed.  Barns were not needed to protect livestock from the cold.  Milk and meat were available all year round.  Herding worked well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite the rich soils.

In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus Cambrensis to visit Ireland and produce a report.  He mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before.  Common freshwater fish included salmon, trout, eels, and oily shad.  Along the coast, saltwater fish were abundant.  The woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.”  There were numerous boars and wild pigs.  Wolves had not yet been fully exterminated.  He said it was common to see the remains of extinct Irish elks.  Their remains were usually found in bogs, often in groups.

The herding life allowed the Irish people to survive, sing, and dance.  They did not have the slightest interest in the dreary backbreaking work of agriculture, a stupid fad.  Cambrensis felt great pity for the uncivilized natives.  “Their greatest delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the enjoyment of liberty.”

Maximum Security Forests

Rhineland

Julius Caesar roamed around Western Europe and wrote a report in 51 B.C.  He was the emperor of Rome, and his mission was to expand the Empire, collect tribute payments, acquire military conscripts, and vigorously spank uncooperative subjects.  During this campaign, he focused his attention on provinces of Celtic people in what is now France, Belgium, and England. 

He had also hoped to conquer the wild Germanic tribes that lived on the east side of the Rhine, but this fantasy promptly came to an end.  The Rhine was a large, treacherous, swift moving river.  No bridges.  It took a lot of effort and luck to get from one side to the other, and once you set foot on the German side, a super violent welcoming party was eager to immediately cut you to bloody bits.  

Each tribe preferred to keep their homelands surrounded with a barrier of uninhabited wilderness.  The Germans were primarily wandering herders who built no permanent settlements.  They had no granaries loaded with valuable food for raiders to swipe, and no roads to make invasions quick and easy.  When danger threatened, the people and their herds vanished into the deep forest mists.

For the German herders, nothing would have been dumber than to eliminate the vast ancient forests that provided this security system.  The Roman legions were fine-tuned for open battlefield combat, where heavily armored lads attacked in rigid formations.  Wild Germanic tribes excelled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.

On the west side of the Rhine were the Celts of Gaul (France), who were subjects of the Empire.  Their forests were mostly gone, roads crisscrossed the land, and folks were forced to engage in the backbreaking misery of muscle powered organic agriculture.  Their granaries stored the result of months of hard work. 

Stored grain was treasure that villainous raiders found to be irresistibly tempting.  It was impossible for farmers to hide or quickly move their treasure.  Raiding was popular, because it was much easier than honest work.  Consequently, highly vulnerable farm communities required constant military protection, for which they had to pay dearly.  In several Western European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root. 

So, the Celts that Caesar described did not reside in the primordial forest that their wild ancestors once enjoyed.  They were the opposite of wild and free.  Peasants were essentially wealth generating livestock controlled by local strong-arm elites.  On the east side of the Rhine, the Germanic tribes had not destroyed their forests.  They were alive and well, wild and free.

Tacitus was a Roman historian who wrote Germania in A.D. 98 (150 years after Caesar).  It described several fiercely independent tribes of that era.  They preferred the thrills and excitement of raiding to the drudgery of farming.  “They even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.”  Perhaps they learned this effective and profitable strategy from the Romans. 

Tacitus wrote a fascinating description of the vast Hercynian forest.  From the Rhine, it spanned east, across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia (Romania).  A quick traveler could cross the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to west.  Caesar noted, “There is no man in the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest, though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what place it begins.” 

Pliny also mentioned it:  “The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.”  In those days, there were still a number of primeval forests in the world. 

Scandinavia

In Sweden, forests also provided freedom and security for the common folks.  Vilhelm Moberg celebrated the fact that peasant society in Sweden had largely remained stable and functional for 5,000 years.  In most of the regions of Europe, peasants endured many centuries of misery under the heavy fist of feudalism.  Many Norse and Swede settlements were lucky to be protected by their vast, dense, rugged, roadless forests.  It’s simply impossible to kill or rob invisible folks who live in unknown wilderness settlements.  Moberg glowed with gratitude for his nation’s forests, which allowed the rustic peasants to preserve their freedom until the industrial era metastasized.

Aggressive invaders from elsewhere found no roads, and soon became perfectly lost.  Behind every bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The local folks knew every hill and rock in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When trouble was advancing, they gathered as many belongings as possible, and vanished into the greenery.

My Norse ancestors told the story of Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.  Some creepy gods had temporarily subdued nature, but in this great battle, the forces of nature rubbished the gods, and cleansed the Earth with a great flood.  Peter Andreas Munch described the dawn of a new era: “Out of the sea there rises a new earth, green and fair, whose fields bear their increase without the sowing of seed.” 

A man and woman survived.  From them sprang a new race of people.  A few minor deities also survived.  One was Vidar, a son of Odin (Viðr means forest).  Vidar was known for being strong.  His home was in a vast and impenetrable forest.  Rasmus Björn Anderson wrote that Vidar was the god of wild primordial forests, where neither the sound of the ax, nor the voice of man, was ever heard.  He is silent, dwells far away from, and exercises no influence upon, the works of man, except as he inspires a profound awe and reverence.  This was a culture filled with a deep respect and reverence for creation, in its wild and unspoiled form.  Forests were holy places. 

Forest Mining

In the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, forests had served as a limit to growth — grain, grass, and herds don’t thrive in shady places.  Deforestation cleared away the towering giants and let the sunbeams shine in.  When metal axes came into common use, lumberjacks could reduce vast tracts of primeval forest into rotting stumps and erosion gullies.  Early villages and cities were built with the mutilated carcasses of countless tree people.  The rise of civilizations would not have been possible without innovative advances in unsustainable forest mining and soil mining. 

George Perkins Marsh was a brilliant American hero that few modern folks have heard of.  He published Man and Nature in 1864.  This gentleman from Vermont served as the U.S. Minister to Italy.  While overseas, he visited the sites of many once thriving civilizations in the Fertile Crescent.  What he observed was terrifying and overwhelming.  Each of them had seriously damaged their ecosystems and self-destructed in similar ways.

Massive levels of soil erosion created surreal catastrophes.  He saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which were formerly located on offshore islands.  He saw the sites of ancient forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of precious living soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained. 

Far worse, Marsh was acutely aware that every day, back home in America, millions were currently working like crazy to repeat the same mistakes, glowing with patriotic pride at the temporary prosperity they were creating on their one-way joyride to oblivion.  In a noble effort to cure blissful ignorance, he fetched pen, ink, and paper and wrote a book to enlighten his growing young nation.

Sales were respectable for a few decades, but America did not see the light and rapidly reverse course.  Folks thought that the cure was worse than the disease (like today’s climate emergency).  A radical shift to intelligent behavior would not have been good for the highly unintelligent lifestyle.  Tom Brown’s mentor, Stalking Wolf, lamented that our culture was “killing its grandchildren to feed its children.”

Marsh’s book has stood the test of time fairly well.  It presented a wealth of vital information, none of which I learned about during 16 years of education.  Forests keep the soil warmer in winter, and cooler in the summer.  Springtime arrives later in deforested regions, because the land takes longer to warm up.  Forests absorb far more moisture than cleared lands, so after a good rain, runoff is limited, and flash floods are less likely.

Deforestation dries out the land.  Lake levels drop, springs dry up, stream flows decline, and wetlands are baked.  Back in the fourth century, when there were more forests, the water volume flowing in the Seine River was about the same all year long.  When Marsh visited 14 centuries later, water levels could vary up to 30 feet (9 m) between dry spells and cloudbursts.  In 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen in three years on the island of Malta, after the forest had been replaced with cotton fields.  And on and on.  The book is a feast of essential knowledge. 

Walter Lowdermilk was deeply inspired by Marsh’s work.  In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited China, Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.  His mission was to study soil erosion, and write a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  They created a short booklet that was very readable and filled with stunning photographs.  Over a million copies of it were printed.  Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years is available as a free download. [Link]

Industrial Wood

Marsh generally discussed the environmental impacts of deforestation that he had observed at the sites of extinct or wheezing civilizations.  These catastrophes were usually the unintended consequences of clearing forest to expand cropland or grazing land.  Over the passage of centuries, clever people discovered many new ways that dead trees could be used to generate wealth and power. 

John Perlin wrote an outstanding history of deforestation.  It’s a modern book (1989), and much easier to read than Marsh.  It devotes more attention to the political, military, industrial, and commercial motivations for forest mining.  It visits locations including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil, and America. 

Dead trees were used to build houses, bridges, temples, and palaces.  Wood was made into fences, docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.  It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass, bricks, cement, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.  Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry.  Very importantly, wood was used to build cargo, fishing, and war ships.  Navies sped the spread of colonies, empires, trade networks, and epidemics.

Cultures that mindfully limited their numbers, and continued living in a low impact manner, had no future.  Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of golden treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts.  In other words, if you didn’t destroy your forest, someone else would. 

Perlin described the copper industry on Cyprus in around 1300 B.C.  Copper was used to make bronze, which was in high demand during the Bronze Age.  For each 60 pound (27 kg) copper ingot produced, four acres of pine (120 trees) had to be reduced to six tons of charcoal.  Each year, the copper industry on Cyprus consumed four to five square miles (10-13 km²) of forest.  At the same time, the general society consumed an equal amount of forest for heating, cooking, pottery, lime kilns, and so on.  Can you guess what inevitably happened to the forests, soils, industry, and affluence of Cyprus?

Shortages also affected the use of firewood.  In chilly regions, a city of one square mile might depend on 50 square miles of forest to provide the firewood it consumed year after year.  In the good old days, this was often possible.  Later, as forest area decreased, and population grew, limits spoiled the party.

If Perlin’s work sounds interesting, but you can’t get his book, a similar book is available as a free download.  In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter published Topsoil and Civilization.  Readers are taken on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  The free PDF is HERE.  It is not available in some countries, for copyright reasons, but I once saw a pirate copy on Google.

New World Forest

Richard Lillard described how early European visitors experienced the ancient forests of North America.  When standing on mountaintops, they were overwhelmed by the fact that as far as they could see in any direction there was nothing but a wonderland of trees.  The intense experience of perfect super-healthy wildness was surreal, overwhelming, almost terrifying. 

Walking beneath the canopy at midday, the forest floor was as dark as a cellar, few sunbeams penetrated through the dense foliage.  At certain times, some sections of the forest were absolutely silent, a spooky experience that bewildered the white folks.  They saw vast numbers of chestnut trees that were nearly as big as redwoods. 

British visitors to early settlements were stunned to see amazing luxury — wooden houses, sidewalks, fences, and covered bridges!  Commoners were free to hunt large game because the forest was not the exclusive private property of anyone.  In the old country, their diet majored in porridge.  Now it could major in wild grass-fed meat.  Commoners were free to cut as much firewood as they wished, and keep their cottages warmer than the castles of royalty.  Michael Williams mentioned one winter night when the king of France sat in his great hall.  He was shivering as he ate dinner, the wine in his glass was frozen. 

William Cronon noted that settlers with sharp axes went crazy on the forests, cutting them down as if they were limitless.  Lots of excellent wood was simply burned, to clear the way for progress.  They built large houses, and heated them with highly inefficient open fireplaces.  By 1638, Boston was having firewood shortages.

As clearing proceeded, summers got hotter, and winters colder.  As stream flows dropped in summer, water-powered mills had to shut down, sometimes permanently.  In winter, upper levels of the soil froze solid on cleared land, and snow piled up on top of it.  When springtime came, the frozen land could not absorb the melt, so the runoff water zoomed away, and severe flooding was common.

Stewart Holbrook wrote about the fantastically destructive obliteration of ancient forests in the U.S. upper Midwest.  On the same day as the great Chicago fire, October 8, 1871, a firestorm obliterated the backwoods community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing five times as many people as in Chicago.  On this day, the new word “firestorm” was added to the English vocabulary. 

Holbrook interviewed John Cameron, an eyewitness to the Peshtigo fire.  Cameron noted that there had been little snow the previous winter, and just one rain between May and September.  Streams were shallow, and swamps were drying up.  Logging operations left large amounts of slash in the woods (piles of discarded limbs and branches).  Slash piles were eliminated by burning, even when it was very hot, dry, windy, and extraordinarily stupid. 

The morning of October 8 was hotter than anyone could remember, and the air was deadly still.  At noon, the sun disappeared.  By nightfall the horizon was red, and smoke was in the air, making their eyes run.  At 9 P.M., Cameron heard an unusual roaring sound.  The night sky was getting lighter by the minute.  A hurricane force wind howled through.  Suddenly, swirling slabs of flames were hurtling out of nowhere and hitting the bone dry sawdust streets.  In a flash, Peshtigo was blazing — maybe five minutes. 

Cameron saw horses, cattle, men, and women, stagger in the sawdust streets, then go down to burn brightly like so many flares of pitch-pine.  He winced when he spoke of watching pretty young Helga Rockstad running down a blazing sidewalk, when her long blond hair burst into flame.  The next day, he looked for her remains.  All he found was two nickel garter buckles and a little mound of white-gray ash.

The river was the safest place that night.  People kept their heads underwater as much as possible, so the great sheets of flame wouldn’t set their heads on fire.  Within an hour, the town was vaporized.  Big lumberjacks were reduced to streaks of ash, enough to fill a thimble.  In this village of 2,000, at least 1,150 died, and 1,280,000 acres (518,000 ha) went up in smoke.

Also on October 8, 1871, numerous big fires raged across the state of Michigan, where it had not rained in two months.  These fires destroyed 2.5 million acres (1 million ha) — three times more timberland than the Peshtigo blaze.  This was an era of countless huge fires.  For example, in just the state of Wisconsin, tremendous fires destroyed huge areas in 1871, 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908, 1910, 1923, 1931, 1936.

Paul Shepard wrote, “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.”  In 1990, I chatted on an internet bulletin board with a Shawnee man named Nick Trim.  He talked about a project 300+ years ago, along the Mississippi.  In a kindly gesture, some French soldiers were teaching the Shawnee how to build log cabins.  This required cutting trees.  The natives were very nervous about chopping down living trees, because they were often home to spirit beings, the little people.

To avoid spiritual retaliation, a respectful process was essential.  They knocked on each tree, described the situation, and explained why they wanted to take lives.  This was followed by a ceremony, prayers, and apologies to the trees.  Then they waited a day or so, to give any spirit residents adequate time to find a comfortable new home.  This took so long that the French lost their patience, and the project ended.

Peter Wohlleben, a German wood ranger, developed an extremely intimate relationship with the forest he cared for, and wrote a precious celebration of his love for it.  Modern folks who spend most of their lives in civilized space stations almost never get to know the tree people.  Some do not eat meat because they sense that animals have souls.  In an interview, Wohlleben conveyed a deeper understanding.  Killing an animal is the same as killing a tree.  He once oversaw a plantation of trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced.  It was a concentration camp for tree people.