Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
lesson of the Anthropocene is that nothing is pristine, another is that nature is resilient and resourceful.
And while many endangered species are vulnerable to our activities, others really rather like us. Humans
are not always bad news for nature. Some forests died, but others grew up in their places. By breed-
ing some species as crops and livestock, we increased their genetic diversity. And by moving species
around the world we dramatically increased local biodiversity in many places and may sometimes have
triggered a burst of evolution. The discovery of the longevity and extent of our influence also underlines
the resilience of nature to our depredations.
We have assaulted forests on a big scale. Yet where we have walked away, they have generally re-
vived. That is especially true in the tropics, the area of our greatest current environmental concern. “So-
called virgin forests have in fact undergone substantial prehistoric modification,” says Kathy Willis.
“Tropical forest ecosystems are not as fragile as often portrayed, and in fact are quite resilient. Left for
long enough, forests will almost certainly regenerate.” There is, she says, no reason why that should not
remain the case in the twenty-first century.
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The new forests won't be pristine. But they never were.
A double-edged story shows the dramatic scale of the changes that humans can cause to the environment
by an apparently unimportant introduction. It also shows the extent to which we can be misled about
what is natural and what is not. The man who encapsulates that misreading of the land is Teddy
Roosevelt, US president and supreme outdoorsman, in a great tradition of men who liked both to con-
serve nature and hunt it.
In 1909, Roosevelt went on an infamous safari. He, his gun-toting son Kermit, and a rogue's gallery
of British imperial hunters set out with more than two hundred porters from the port of Mombasa in
Kenya. Their yearlong spree in the African bush involved daily killing. They eventually shipped more
than eleven thousand carcasses back to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. Roosevelt ob-
served with sometimes touching sympathy the wild animals he met before stalking and killing them.
This “great adventure” in what Roosevelt called “the greatest of the world's great hunting grounds” was
big news back home. It cemented his reputation as macho adventurer and our American image of Africa
as somewhere primeval and apart from the rest of the world.
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Roosevelt called what he traveled through a “Pleistocene” landscape. Most of us still have the same
vision of a wild African bush teeming with wildebeest and elephants, lions and zebras. We've seen it on
TV in endless wildlife documentaries. We often mourn its retreat, at the hands first of European hunters
and later as Africa's indigenous population has soared. But, like our presumptions about pristine rain
forest, it is a myth. Pre-European Africa wasn't like that. Africa's jungles and savanna grasslands—the
surviving fragments most redolent of what we imagine to be pristine Africa—are almost as artificial as
an English country garden. Africa's gardener, the force that shaped today's landscape, was a microbe
from Asia that arrived little more than twenty years before Roosevelt. That day changed the continent
forever.
In 1887, a small force of Italian soldiers made a foray into the Horn of Africa during Europe's
colonial-era “scramble for Africa.” They didn't get far. But the cattle that accompanied them as a mobile
source of food carried a vicious hitchhiker—the virus that causes a disease called “rinderpest” (German
for “cattle plague”). The virus is native to the steppes of central Asia and periodically swept through
Europe in the Middle Ages, usually with cattle feeding armies during military campaigns. But it was un-
known in Africa until it showed up on the Red Sea coast of modern-day Eritrea, at the site of the Italian
invasion. It spread through the animal herds of Tigray Province in Ethiopia in 1888, and then it followed
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