A New Green History of the World Part 6

A NEW GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD

THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE COLLAPSE OF GREAT CIVILISATIONS

CLIVE PONTING

VINTAGE BOOKS              2007

PART VI

 

Chapter 8: The Rape of the World

Over the last 10,000 years human activities have brought about major changes in the world’s ecosystems. The expansion of settlements, the creation of fields and pastures for agriculture, the clearing of forests and the draining of marshes and wetlands have all reduced the habitats of almost every type of plant and animal. The deliberate hunting of animals for food, furs and other products (and in many cases ‘sport’) has drastically reduced numbers of many species and driven others to extinction. In addition humans have moved plants and animals around the world, often with unexpected and near catastrophic results. The scale of wildlife losses in earlier periods is difficult to assess. There is more evidence, though still very patchy, for the period after 1600 but it was not until the 20^th century that detailed research was undertaken, largely prompted by growing awareness of the scale of losses. Overall there is no doubt that the scale of destruction has increased markedly in the last couple of centuries.

• A reduction in wildlife habitats and the extinction of species on a local scale can be identified from the time of the first human settlements.
• By the time of the Old Kingdom in the Nile Valley (2950-2350 BCE), animals such as elephants, rhinoceroses and giraffes had disappeared from the valley.
• By about 200 BCE the lion and leopard were extinct in Greece and the coastal areas of Anatolia, and wolves and jackals were confined to the remote mountainous areas.
• The scale of destruction, which continued across several centuries, can be guessed from the fact that 9,000 captured wild animals were killed during the 100 day celebration to mark the dedication of the Colosseum in Rome and 11,000 were slaughtered to mark Trajan’s conquest of the new province of Dacia.

 

Europe

• The great festivals of the Roman empire stopped in western Europe after the 5^th century but the destruction of wildlife continued in other ways and eventually on a far larger scale.
• The steady expansion of settlements, particularly about 1000 CE, gradually reduced the habitats on which plants and animals depended for their survival.
• Many species which were common in Europe have become extinct across large areas.
• It is clear from contemporaneous texts that the idea of conservation and the preservation of wildlife was noticeable by its absence until the 20^th century.
• In every area of England large hunts were carried out to try to exterminate various animals.
• Shooting birds for food has always been on a massive scale – in 1898 the Paris markets sold 270,000 wild quail.
• Wild bird eggs were considered a delicacy – by the 1870s the lapwing was almost extinct in the north of England because of the demand for its eggs.
• The great crested grebe was driven to the point of extinction in 19^th century Britain because of the demand for its down to make ladies’ muffs.
• In 1850 the large copper butterfly became extinct because people collected its caterpillars.

 

The impact of Europe on the rest of the world

Outside of their home continent the Europeans had an even greater impact and in a much shorter period. When the first Europeans reached the America’s, Austalasia and the Pacific they were overwhelmed by the new and strange animals and plants that they found.

• The first settlers and explorers were stunned by the sheer profusion of wildlife in areas that has seen little or no human settlements.
• The vogue for big game hunting, fashions for crocodile skins for shoes and handbags, elephant tusks for ivory and rhinoceros horns added to the slaughter.
• In 1913 the London salerooms offered feathers from 77,000 herons, 48,000 condors and 162,000 kingfishers. Similar numbers could be found in Paris, Rome, New York and other major cities in the industrialised world.
• Plants were affected too – the craze for rare orchids in 19^th century Europe meant that Brazil was exporting over 100,000 plants a year from the tropical forests.
• The European impact on the wildlife of North America was even greater than in Australia. There were probably between 40 and 60 million bison roaming on the Great Plains. About 3 million a year were being killed in the 1870s and 1880s, enough to drive the bison to the point of extinction.

 

The passenger pigeon

• Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter was not the bison but the passenger pigeon – it is a story that almost defies belief.
• On 8 April 1973 at Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Other reports describe flocks a mile wide flying overhead for 4 or 5 hours from the south to their breeding grounds.
• The flocks were so thickly packed that a single shot could bring down 30 or 40 birds and many were killed simply by hitting them with pieces of wood as they flew over hilltops.
• The exact number of passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans arrived is unknown – the best guess would suggest about 5 billion, or a third of all the birds in the region and the same as the total number of birds found in the United States today.
• The billions of passenger pigeons were driven to extinction in about 50 years. The last pathetic survivor died in captivity in 1914.

 

The introduction of new species

The expansion of European settlement after 1500 drove many species to extinction and severely reduced the numbers of many others. However, this was not the total of the European impact on ecosystems around the world. They took with them the domesticated plants and animals (and many of the pests) they had known in Europe. It was the start of a major homogenisation of the world’s plants and animals. Many of the animals escaped and went wild, and plants often replaced established native species. The effects of this movement were felt in every part of the globe but especially in the Americas and Austalasia.

• The greatest environmental disaster came in Australia with the introduction of the rabbit in 1859. Rabbits are rapid breeders and with no natural predators their numbers rose rapidly and soon crops were being devastated over a wide area.
• In the mid-1880s large-scale eradication campaigns began that had little effect. A 1600 kilometre fence was built in 1902-07 but it was breached in the 1920s.
• Within a century the rabbit population increased to 500 million. In 1950, as a desperate measure, the disease myxomatosis was deliberately introduced but some rabbits were immune and continued breeding.
• Despite periodic outbreaks of the disease the rabbit population of Australia has survived and numbers are once again rising rapidly.
• Accidental introduction of mice and rats on nearly every ship proved to be just as damaging as rabbits as they ate most of the precious stores of grain of early settlers.
• 32 million mice were killed in 4 months in just one area of South Australia in 1917.
• Goats were introduced onto the island of St Helena and 33 native plants died out, unable to withstand the intensive grazing.
• On the pampas of South America in the 18^th century the artichoke and giant Mediterranean thistle went wild and created impenetrable areas.
• Half the plants now found in New Zealand are of European origin.
• Increased communications between many parts of the world have also spread pests and diseases. In 1889 the Italian army trying to conquer Somalia imported the rinderpest virus, killing millions of cattle and wild buffalo, antelope and giraffe. Probably about ⅔ of the Masai people died as a result.
• The effects of the expansion of Europe – its people, plants and animals – were far reaching. The wildlife of the world was never the same again.

 

The problem of the commons

The extinction of the passenger pigeon (and others such as the great auk and the dodo) and the near extinction of the American bison pose a series of quite difficult questions. Why did the slaughter continue so indiscriminately? Why was it not seen as ultimately counterproductive in that it would destroy the foundations of the industry that was exploiting these resources? Why did the killing not stop when it was clear what would happen and be followed by a shift to sustainable exploitation? These are the problems of what the American ecologist William Ophuls called ‘the problem of the commons’. Strictly speaking these herds of animals were not ‘commons’ in that they were not owned on a communal basis. It is therefore better to speak of ‘the problem of open access regimes’.

• No one ‘owned’ these animals and no one had an interest in controlling the rate of killing and ensuring that there was sustainable exploitation.
• In a highly competitive situation the most rational action for any individual hunter was to maximise their immediate kill before a rival did the same.
• The pattern of maximising short-term gains at the expense of longer-term considerations, even if it meant the ultimate demise of the resource, is a central feature of the way in which humans have hunted animals.
• The history of 4 major areas of exploitation – fishing, the fur trade, sealing and whaling – all illustrate the same dismal truth.

 

Fishing

• Until the 20^th century the stocks of fish in the vast oceans of the world seemed inexhaustible. The collapse of fish stocks can be traced in area after area.
• Overall the world fish catch was still relatively small until after the 2^nd World War – about 20 million tonnes in 1950, rising to 130 million tonnes by 2000.
• The fish catch from the North Atlantic is now half the level of 1950.
• As stocks in European waters and the North Atlantic collapsed, fishing fleets moved elsewhere.
• By the early 21^st century almost ⅓ of the world’s fish catch was farmed.

 

The fur trade

Sealing

Whaling

Conservation and extinction

The same pattern has been repeated in industry after industry – the bison, the passenger pigeon, fishing, the fur trade, sealing and whaling. For centuries humans have acted as though the supplies of animals were infinite or if they were not it did not matter. It has been a monument to human short-sightedness. Not only have the industries involved declined or collapsed altogether but there has been a catastrophic loss of wildlife around the world. Across large areas of the world animals have been driven to extinction and overall numbers have fallen dramatically – total extinction was only avoided in some cases because it became uneconomic to hunt the last remnants of a once thriving species. The result has been the creation of an impoverished world.

A reaction to much of this slaughter and the continuing destruction of forests and other wild areas developed in the late 19^th century with the rise of movements demanding greater efforts at conservation. This led to the creation of special areas to preserve natural ecosystems and their wildlife.

• The conservation and protection movement has raised public awareness and achieved a number of small-scale victories.
• It has, however, been overwhelmed by the tidal wave of destruction that continues to sweep across the world.
• There is no doubt that the world is now facing its 6^th great extinction of animals and plants (the last one was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs became extinct).
• It is caused by human actions – habitat destruction (especially the clearing of the tropical forests), hunting and, increasingly, climate change.

Species become extinct naturally for a variety of reasons and this ‘background’ rate is about one to three species a year. Between 1600 and 1900 human actions increased this rate slightly but not to a catastrophic extent. The 20^th century has seen this rate rise to unprecedented levels. Now the extinction rate is about 1,000 times greater than the natural rate and the human impact on the natural world is even greater than these bare statistics would suggest because other species are being eliminated in many areas of the world and reduced to living in a few remote, isolated refuges. In the past 400 years 83 mammals, 113 birds, and 288 other animals and 650 plants have become extinct. But nearly all of these have occurred in the last century – of the 21 marine species known to have become extinct since 1700, sixteen have occurred since 1972. The extinction rate for mammals in the 20^th century was 40 times the ‘background’ rate and for birds it was about 1,000 times higher. It is clear that this rate will rise even further in the 21^st century. The best estimates (as published in Nature in January 2004) are that as the world’s climate changes rapidly and the remaining tropical forests are cleared, about half of the world’s existing species will be extinct by 2100.

• Many would argue that this mass extinction either does not matter or is not happening. The scientists who study in this field beg to differ.
• The future of these species will not be decided on the basis of a balance of arguments. The economic forces promoting habitat destruction and climate change will be the driving force behind species extinction.

 

Chapter 9: The Foundations of Inequality