MYTHS OF THE PRISTINE - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 81

The conventional view has for a long time been that the planet—and especially the tropics—was largely
unaltered by humans until recently. But that looks increasingly wide of the mark. Most of the world is
profoundly altered by human activity often stretching back thousands of years. We knew what we were
doing, says Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. From the tropical
rain forest to the tundra, from the tussock grasses of New Zealand to the once-forested Scottish peat
bogs, and from the floodplains of China to the heaths of central Europe, we have been transforming
landscapes, wetting and drying, foresting and deforesting, planting and burning, grazing and plowing,
hunting megafauna to extinction, and transporting new species in their place.
Our early hunting exploits were probably responsible for major extinctions among the planet's
largest creatures, the saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, two-ton sloths, and mastodons. Faced with
a decline in big game between thirty thousand and twenty thousand years ago, the tribes of Europe and
Asia started to diversify their food sources by hunting a wider range of smaller animals. They started to
manage wild herds of deer and gazelle to ensure that they did not die out. They extended their diet fur-
ther by learning to grind, boil, ferment, and roast food, and they developed early techniques of farming,
such as seed propagation. It was an early example of adopting a more sustainable lifestyle to cope with
resource shortages.
British author Colin Tudge argues that by then humans were managing the land enough to be called
“proto-farmers.” 19 They were planting primitive crops and raising domesticated animals even as the last
ice age ended and ice sheets retreated across North America, northern Europe, and Asia. They were cul-
tivating squash by ten thousand years ago and maize by nine thousand years ago, and by eight thousand
years ago some European farmers were using manure from sheep and goats to fertilize crops of wheat
and barley and to maintain soils. 20 Humans were consciously engineering ecosystems, using fire to en-
courage annual plants that attracted game, for instance.
The bison-grazed plains of North America were remade by Native Americans setting fires long be-
fore Europeans showed up. And the Australian outback was similarly treated by Aborigines using their
fire-stick farming systems. 21 The mist-shrouded and treeless grasslands of the tropical Andes, known as
the paramos , are also thought to be the result of burning and grazing after locals cut down the natural
forests centuries ago. In the Scottish Highlands, the moorland wilderness loved by natives and visitors
alike is a result of ancient deforestation and recent depopulation through the “Highland Clearances,”
forced displacements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ellis calculates that at least a fifth
of the Earth's land surface was transformed by humans as early as five thousand years ago. 22 But farm-
ing was primitive and soils were quickly exhausted. So humans used a lot of land even though there
were relatively few people—tens of millions at most, says Steve Vavrus of the University of Wiscon-
sin-Madison. Our ancestors spread out, leaving the cleared land fallow for twenty years or more before
returning to take another crop. As we have seen, they farmed large areas that today look like virgin
forests.
“Conservationists in many parts of the world are attempting to conserve what they take to be wil-
derness, but increasing evidence suggests that the territories involved are or were cultural landscapes,”
created as much by human activity as nature, says Cambridge botanist David Briggs. 23 His Cambridge
colleague, the British landscape historian Oliver Rackham, agrees: “Most of the world's land surface
results from long and complex interactions between human activities and natural processes.” 24
We live in what geologists are now calling the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the planet is shaped
primarily by humans. We need to get used to it, but we shouldn't be depressed about it. For while one