Accidental Rewilding

Thursday, November 20th, 2014

Many primeval forests aren’t in fact primeval but the result of recent accidental rewilding:

In the Americas — North, Meso and South — the first Europeans to arrive in the 15th and 16th centuries reported dense settlement and large-scale farming. Some of them were simply not believed. Spaniards such as the explorer Francisco de Orellana and the missionary Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, who travelled the length of the Amazon river in 1542, claimed that they had seen walled cities in which many thousands of people lived, raised highways and extensive farming along its banks. When later expeditions visited the river, they found no trace of them, just dense forest to the water’s edge and small scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. Orellana and Carvajal’s reports were dismissed as the ravings of fantasists, seeking to boost commercial interest in the lands they had explored.

It was not until the late 20th century that investigations by archaeologists such as Anna Roosevelt at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida suggested that Orellana and Carvajal’s accounts were probably accurate. In parts of the Americas previously believed to have been scarcely inhabited, Heckenberger and his colleagues found evidence of garden cities surrounded by major earthworks and wooden palisades, built on grids and transected by broad avenues. In some places they unearthed causeways, bridges and canals. The towns were connected to their satellite villages by road networks that were planned and extensive. These were advanced agricultural civilisations, maintaining fish farms as well as arable fields and orchards. As in Slovenia, what appeared to be primordial forest had grown over the traces of a vanished population.

It appears that European diseases such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, the common cold were brought to the Caribbean coast of South America by explorers and early colonists and then passed down indigenous trade routes into the heart of the continent, where they raged through densely peopled settlements before any Europeans reached them. So feracious is the vegetation of the Amazon that it would have obliterated all visible traces of the civilisations built by its people within a few years of their dissolution. The great várzea (floodplain) forests, whose monstrous trees inspired such wonder among 18th and 19th century expeditions, were probably not the primordial ecosystems the explorers imagined them to be.

Gruesome events — some accidental, others deliberately genocidal — wiped out the great majority of the hemisphere’s people and the rich and remarkable societies that they’d created. In many parts of the Americas, the only humans who remained were — like the survivors in a post-holocaust novel — hunter-gatherers. Some belonged to tribes that had long practised that art, others were forced to re-acquire lost skills as a result of civilisational collapse. Imported disease made cities lethal: only dispersed populations had a chance of avoiding epidemics. Dispersal into small bands of hunter-gatherers made economic complexity impossible. The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before. Humanity’s loss was nature’s gain.

The impacts of the American genocides might have been felt throughout the northern hemisphere. Dennis Bird and Richard Nevle, earth scientists at Stanford University, have speculated that the recovering forests drew so much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — about 10 parts per million — that they could have helped to trigger the cooling between the 16th and 19th centuries known as the Little Ice Age. The short summers and long cold winters, the ice fairs on the Thames and the deep cold depicted by Pieter Breugel might have been caused partly as a result of the extermination of the Native Americans.

(I don’t recall ever seeing the word feracious before. As you might infer, it means fruitful or fertile.)

Comments

  1. Toddy Cat says:

    Someone needs to explain to this idiot that “epidemics” do not constitute “genocide” unless they were intentionally inflicted, which these were not. Liberals are pretty free with the word “genocide”, unless they are talking about Ukraine or the Great Leap Forward. Then, suddenly, all sorts of hairs start to get split…

  2. Bert E. says:

    The Maunder Minimum was more than likely the cause of the Little Ice Age — no or almost no sunspots for more or less a forty year period, then followed by the two centuries of worsening cold.

  3. Entryism cropped up in GamerGate recently, but I realized I had first heard it from Monbiot. Those darn Trotskyists!

    Although this seems to apply today, which is not bad for something from 2003:

    “What I can say is that the scientific establishment, always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network.”

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