Despite being a fairly committed environmentalist, I rarely have the patience to read through an entire book about any of the environmental problems facing our generation, let alone Eric‘s. They’re usually written by committed treehuggers, a group of people with whom I sympathize, but with whom I have very little in common. I love trees, I respect their contribution to clean air, soil retention, habitat creation, and so on, but I can’t help thinking that if it comes down to a choice between me and a tree, I’ll choose myself every time. And I have a hard time denying anyone else the right to make that choice. At least, as long as they’re making it with the full knowledge of treeness that informs my own decision.
Imagine my enthusiasm, then, for Steve Nicholls’ Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery (2009, University of Chicago), a history of the environmental loss and degradation that North America has undergone in the last 500 years. Nicholls’ book, though, is both engaging and thoughtful, and, while slightly repetitive in places (“the role of x in the ecology of y seen by the first explorers and settlers must have been a very complex one. Which effects prevailed must have varied from place to place and from time to time creating an ever-changing pattern in the mosaic of z”), it is, on the whole, an engaging and thorough environmental history of our continent.
The Cliff’s notes version of this book review is below; those of you who have a bit of patience can follow me across the jump.
- Incredible abundance and biodiversity at the time of European settlement. Much much greater than most people today realize (due to the phenomenon of the shifting baseline);
- Incredible abundance leads to subsistence harvesting (think native americans, yeoman farmers), then economic exploitation;
- Economic exploitation leads to either ecological extinction (a depauperate but still “stable” population, no longer able to fulfill its role in the ecosystem, but still “present”) or real extinction (like the Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, Sea Mink, etc.).
If you are familiar with the descriptions of the American West provided by Lewis and Clark’s journals (and if you aren’t you owe it to yourself to check them out) will have an idea of the abundance Nicholls is talking about: vast herds of buffalo and deer, more grizzlies per acre than anyone would ever want to encounter; prairie dog towns hundreds of miles wide. These are just a few of the spectacles that greeted the Corps of Discovery as they explored Napoleon’s wartime real estate firesale that we call the Louisiana Purchase.
But those great herds might have been paltry and reduced spectacles indeed, if one can credit Nicholls’ reconstruction of past abundance. On the other hand, they could have been “rebound” herds, that is, overabundant as a result of reduced predation by native Americans, whose own numbers were wiped out by disease after their encounters with Europeans. Such “artificially” abundant populations tend to be reduced fairly rapidly to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. But Nicholls’ entire argument is that the carrying capacity of the original ecosystems of North America were truly immense.
Whatever the case may be, Nicholls’ accounts of the vast shoals of fish, lobsters, and mussels that greeted the early European settlers some 300 years before the Corps of Discovery defy belief. And he’s well aware of this, so he goes to great lengths, with considerable success, to persuade his reader. He cites a 1635 account of New England called, imaginatively enough, New England’s Prospect, in which the author, one William Wood, describes “a land full of huge trees; luscious wild strawberries, currants, and gooseberries; vast forests teeming with a large variety of birds and mammals; and rivers so full of fish as to defy imagination” (3). Later he cites a French explorer, Jacques Cartier (yes, the Jacques Cartier who discovered and claimed Canada for France) who described the seabird colonies off the coast, whose pitiful remnants in modern times are still quite impressive: “All the ships of France might load a cargo of them without once perceiving that any had been removed” (8).
On reading of this abundance, one tends to think that Nicholls has taken the fairly easy tack of uncritical acceptance of the gross exaggerations of the colonial publicists whose job it was to make life in the new colonies seem outrageously attractive to denizens of the old world. But Nicholls heads us off from this interpretation fairly quickly, by recalling Eirik the Red‘s “publicity stunt” in the naming of Greenland, “just as the first colonists in America half a millennium later would send back descriptions of Paradise to encourage expansion of their own settlements in the New World” (9). This rhetorical strategy implicitly acknowledges the possibility of a naive reading, but assures us that he has guarded against this trap as well. And rather than build his arguments on a naive reading of these travelers’ tales, he everywhere cites scholarly research that supports his thesis.
But these “publicity stunts” in the early travel writers’ accounts of America were based on the actual abundance of fish, birds, and mammals that these early pioneers encountered. From New England to Florida, and then slowly across the west as the USA fulfilled its “manifest destiny,” Nicholls describes how we hunted, fished, farmed, and ate the continent into its present state of ecological impoverishment.
Another of Nicholls’ themes is that the native tribes who were present at the time of colonial contact practiced a fairly large-scale version of silviculture and agriculture, but in such a nomadic way that the European settlers were unable to perceive it. The “deliberate fires” set by Indians “from New England all the way down to La Florida…had major effects on both the appearance and ecology of the forests” (120):
They cleared away dense underbrush to create forests that were so open they reminded many Europeans of the great parks they had left behind. This also probably helped some of the trees grow to the enormous sizes that so impressed the first explorers…. Indian fires also created large glades and meadows. (120)
These fire-maintained ecosystems, with clearings 25 or 30 leagues wide, also increased the amount of edge habitat that many species need in order to thrive. The middle of an unbroken forest sees considerably fewer species than the forest edges; Nicholls postulates that Native American land management practices account, at least in part, for the incredible numbers of both species and individuals that were present on the continent before European land management practices became widespread.
One thing that Nicholls points out that we tend to forget is the large size, not just of the populations, but of individuals within those populations, that was present “originally” (if we can so designate the state of Nature prior to the European arrival). Not only were vast shoals of cod and salmon present everywhere, but the fish themselves were quite a bit bigger. Because of that shifting baseline, we think of a “large” salmon as 4 feet long. But old individuals before economic exploitation of the fishery were quite a bit larger than that. While it’s obvious that overall numbers of cod dwindled rapidly once modern commercial exploitation began, Nicholls also takes care to point out the consequence of market demands, which led to most vessels high-grading the catch: raising large nets of fish, but keeping only the largest and best specimens, while the others literally rot.
This completely understandable practice (bigger fish sell better) means that the oldest, largest individuals are the first to be caught, and that’s a problem. These large fish aren’t just the ones who lay the most eggs, but they’re also “the ones that know what they are doing….[T]hese big, old fish lead the shoals from spawning grounds to feeding areas. So targeting the big fish might be the most profitable but could both reduce the number of eggs laid and disrupt the cod’s social system” (41).
On land as well the effects of unregulated market hunting made themselves felt. Beavers were trapped out quickly in every territory the fur traders entered. Nicholls cites two accounts from 18th-century fur traders, then comments:
“A few years ago beaver were plenty on the upper part of these forks [the confluence of the Red and Rat rivers] but now they are nearly destroyed.”
“I am, however, sorry to remark that this part of the country is now very much impoverished since; beaver is getting scarce, but I have nevertheless managed to keep up the average of returns by shifting from place to place every year and increasing the number of posts.”
As with the fish off the coast, increasing scarcity meant increasing value, which made it worthwhile to pursue beavers with increasing vigor even as numbers declined. A growing demand also pushed up prices, which began to rise from about 1730 onward, increases that were mirrored through the middle years of the century by a rising number of furs arriving at the trading posts. (184)
This cycle of environmental overexploitation in service of economics has been hard, to say the least, not just on the abundance of certain key species in the region, but on the biodiversity of the region as a whole. As key predators are fished or trapped out, their prey species explode, which can lead to different problems. Green turtles, for instance, were responsible for maintaining the health of the seagrass beds in the Caribbean. When there numbers were reduced from (by one estimate) 660 million in the Caribbean basin alone to their current global population of 2.6 million, the sea grasses exploded. But without their two major grazers, the manatee and the green turtle, both of which have become ecologically extinct, the health of these beds is precarious:
The fronds are covered in algae and slime, and piles of decaying leaves have smothered some patches. This buildup of detritus also contributes to turtle wasting disease, which is killing off large areas of these undersea grasslands. (239)
Like the Carolina Parakeet, the turtles of the Caribbean seemed innumerable, so numerous that taking any amount didn’t seem to dent the population. But, as with the parakeet, the crash came quickly. For the classic account of turtle science, see Archie Carr’s Windward Road; for an updated account of Leatherback research, see Carl Safina’s Voyage of the Turtle.
All in all, Nicholls provides his readers with an excellent reintroduction to the major ecosystems of the United States, and in a way that reminds us of–or acquaints us with–the historical roots of our land. Highly recommended.