The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 199

Americans. (There is little danger that rewilding would cause a little
ice age today: human activity has raised carbon dioxide concentra-
tions in the atmosphere by over one hundred parts per million.)
If another fascinating speculation is correct, Native American civiliza-
tion may have begun with a similar impact. The biologist Felisa Smith
proposes that the extermination of the American megafauna by Meso-
lithic hunters was responsible for another mini ice age, the Younger
Dryas,* which began 12,800 years ago and lasted for 1,300 years. 13
The wild herbivores of the Americas were, like cattle and sheep, mag-
nificently flatulent. Smith calculates that they produced around
10 million tonnes of methane a year. Methane is a greenhouse gas,
active for a shorter period than carbon dioxide, but, while it persists,
around twenty times as powerful. The sharp decline in methane pro-
duction when the large herbivores became extinct might have been
sufficient to account for the collapse in temperatures (a global decline
of between 9 and 12° Centigrade) at about the same time. If this is cor-
rect (it is one of a number of competing explanations), the history of the
first peoples of the Americas was bookended by catastrophe and cli-
mate change.
In his masterpiece Landscape and Memory , Simon Schama explores
the narratives and impulses which gave rise to what could be described
as Nazi rewilding projects. 14 One of the most powerful myths of Ger-
man nationhood arose from a remarkable event that took place
2,000 years ago in the great primeval forests around the River Weser,
that the Germans later called the Teutoburger Wald. The people of
these forests, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, were wild
and free. They worshipped beneath the trees and offered human sac-
rifices to the god of the woods. Uncorrupted by luxury, dressed only
in pelts and cloaks, they were, he claimed, chaste, tough and massive.
These Cheruscan tribesmen were the people organized by the man
Tacitus called Arminius and the Germans call Hermann.
Hermann was the son of a German chief captured by the Romans.
He was recruited into the Roman army and rose through its ranks,
* The name refers to a tundra flower, Dryas octopetala , that became common in this
period.