Eco Eco Ecology

Ah, for the good old days on this glorious, once-verdant Earth! When there were only a few of us humans! Mostly, we were nomadic, and supposedly we were matriarchal. We lived naturally, in harmony upon the land; with the land. We took merely what we required and no more, sharing equally with Brother Wolf, Sister Otter, Father Snake, Mother Corn, Aunt Aurochs and Uncle Mammoth...

A rather cozy picture of our pre-technological past. It is often feared that with technology that we are running ahead of ourselves and losing our environmental instincts for maintaining balance. Our population grows apparently unchecked, and we double our numbers in less and less time. Some of our technological advances possess the potential to wipe out life as we know it many times over.

But did humans walk lightly upon the land, in the days before we relinquished a nomadic life-style; before the onset of monotheism? And before our numbers began their inexorable exponential increase?

There were indeed a multitude of places and times where our lives were kept in checks and balances by the environment which surrounded us. These checks by no means made it easy for humanity to thrive or even survive.

However, no system is completely stable - all ecosystems are subject to a slow change. Extinction, for instance, is one of those changes - something, perhaps slowly and subtly, turns against a species, which then has to adapt, move out, or die off. Ecosystems are a process; perhaps even a verb. The adaptations and changes are complex, and frequently set up internal feedback loops. Some species are endowed with certain advantages which in certain situations can work to their advantage -- humanity learned to adapt and even thrive in a variety of circumstances. Brain power and a tool-making capacity permitted adaptability.

A marked increase in prehistoric extinctions has a tie-in with the advent of prehistoric human spread. The evidence is very strong that Pleistocene peoples hunted the mammoth and mastodon into extinction.*** The moa, a giant flightless bird of New Zealand, was rendered extinct soon after human appearance there. Similar patterns of unexpected extinction can be determined globally wherever our early ancestors moved. As late as the 16th century, the last of the aurochs of northern Europe were hunted to death. In these cases, similar large herbivores did not move in to fill the vacated niches. An appropriate level of species diversity is one indicator of ecosystem health. Extinctions worldwide are increasing exponentially.

Over prehistoric/historic time, plant life has also been adversely affected. Mediterranean regions such as Greece once were heavily forested, supporting a diverse and healthy ecosystem, prior to the onset of agriculture. The Mesopotamian breadbasket eventually became desert, except along the riverbanks, due to changes in soil conditions brought about by agricultural methods. The ongoing situation in our rainforests is worthy of an article of its own.

Part of the difficulty in thinking about Pleistocene extinctions and early agricultural environmental disruptions lies in accepting the fact that early humans, who supposedly lived natural lives in tune with their environment unlike our own technologically-removed ones, would still foul their own nests. The record, unfortunately, is clear.

This "natural/unnatural" dichotomy may well be artificial. What one defines as "natural" or "unnatural" tends to depend on one's own likes and dislikes. It is indeed natural for people to use mental skills to create tools -- we do it all the time. What is needed, however, is an informed awareness of our steps upon this planet, and this is something requiring cultivation. Many native peoples eventually established something of this awareness, although even something as "simple" as the introduction of the horse changed the lives of Plains Indians, and may well have eventually shifted the overall environmental situation if the European invaders and settlers hadn't done so first. Technology per se isn't our problem. It is more a lack of informed awareness, concern or will to address problems in a long-term fashion.

Prior to the advance of high technology, certain ecological balances were eventually struck in most of the regions humans settled. Humans filled a niche, and were acted on by the environment, as well as influencing it in turn. It took time, for instance, to adjust to the excesses of the beginnings of the Industrial Age -- in some ways, we are still adjusting. In the midst of this and other changes, population of many regions began to rise noticeably.

Our problem of diminishing resources and ecological stress is aggravated drastically by our sheer numbers. The carrying capacity of a population is that number of a species which can be sustained in a given environment without subsequent decrease in quality of life for that species. If an environmental balance is not met, that population will eventually crash (or otherwise fluctuate) until some balance is reached. It is believed that certain important technologies sustain us from this crash. In many regions, overpopulation has resulted in disease and famine, although socio-political factors have their own major role in creating artificial shortages.

The Club of Rome and Paul Erlich have pointed out the dangers of overpopulation - giving time frames for population crashes which so far have not been realized. This lack of predictability has given anti-environmentalists ammo with which to tar the ecological movement, speciously enabling them to avoid a discussion of underlying problems.

In some measure, it is changing advances in technology and in agricultural practice which have helped us maintain a growing population. We currently number approximately 5.6 billion. In 1950 we numbered 2.5 billion. In 1650 we numbered 550 million. Can this growth be sustained forever? I suspect not. But the actual limits to growth are probably unknowable - until we reach them. Do we really want to discover them the hard way?

Technology and our thinking, tool-managing mental processes, enable us to better survive adverse conditions. However, it is important to note that individuals in technologically-advanced regions tend to use and use up more resources and impact the biosphere proportionally more than others. However, other recent technologies (solar power, the communications revolution, some of our agricultural advances, etc.) enable us to live more in harmony with our world. All these features have a role in determining our ultimate and unknown carrying capacity upon this planet.

There is likely no one solution for these problems. We cannot help but influence and interact with our world. We can each, however, choose to walk more lightly upon her, choosing our technological advances wisely and with an eye to their possible impact on our future. We can begin to choose to address the issues of population in an intelligent and realistic fashion. There are those who claim we are too late. Perhaps this is so, but since we do not know, wisdom may lie in choosing not to act fatalistically.

For Further Information

1) Detwyler, TR, ed. 1971. Man's Impact on Environment. McGraw- Hill, Inc., New York. Includes the following articles: "Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture" (Jacobsen and Adams), "Prehistoric Overkill" (Martin), "Man's Use of the Earth" (Nicholson) and "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" (White).

2) Kennedy, P. 1993. Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. Random House, New York.

3) Erlich, P 1988 (rev. ed.) The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books, New York.

4) Meadows, D. et al. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New American Library, New York. (The Club of Rome report.)

5) Bailey, R. 1993. EcoScam. St. Martin's Press, New York. (An interesting book more for what is ignored and unsaid than for what is included, as it spends more time shooting down straw men than in discussing actual environmental concerns.)

*** 1998 UPDATE: I am currently reading Vine Deloria Jr.'s new book, Red Earth, White Lies (Fulcrum Publishing, ISBN 1-55591-388-1), where he takes on scientists who state that prehistoric peoples evidently hunted the mammoth and mastodon to extinction. He makes a convincing case at least on this issue. The bison, a smaller (easier-to-hunt) herbivore, remained unaffected in North America during this period. The early peoples had insufficient technology / numbers / spare time on their hands to accomplish this task. Running these large mammals off of cliffs would have only worked regionally, and there is only sporadic evidence supporting this. While I personally consider it possible that prehistoric peoples may have adversely affected populations of these animals already on their way out, it no longer seems likely to me that they entirely implemented extinction for mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, etc. (Climatic changes may be a more likely culprit, and at the moment I will hazard a semi-educated guess that some of the changes that encouraged prehistoric peoples to migrate may have put pressure on the animal populations as well...) -- J.S.

(Document Copyright as Freeware © 1994, 1998 by Jehana Silverwing. Permission is hereby granted to reprint this document in its entirity. My name and this notice must remain intact.)