Lands of Ghosts

8/5/21

Aug 06, 2021

Hi everyone: This week in other news I’ve got 1) adventures in rewilding, including an armadillo obstacle course, 2) the threat of deep-sea mining, 3) an increase in illegal land-grabs of indigenous territory in the Amazon, 4) climate change hitting wealthy countries at last, and 5) a new atlas of disappearing places around the world.

And now for the main story:

I think of ghosts as the animation of a fear. Storytellers and screenwriters do too, keying in on our weak points, whether rational or irrational. They know that often we simply fear the unknown, and that sometimes we fear that one who did dark things while living will continue, after death, to do things in the dark. As entertaining as those may be, my focus this week is on the fear that we will be haunted by our mistakes.

The kind of notional ghost I’m focused on is on the rational end of the spectrum. It shares some headroom with the irrationality of guilt and of sin and spiritual consequence, but neither of those is my point. I’m not at all interested in provoking guilt or hypothetical damnation, since both are useless in the Anthropocene. We need motivation, not hand-wringing. The question is whether we can find motivation in contemplating the lands of ghosts we inhabit, which is to say that I’m thinking about what we’ve done as a species, what remains of the world that made us, whether we’re haunted by the losses, and what we do to heal them.

To some degree this question hangs over this entire writing enterprise, this Field Guide to the Anthropocene. Rather than describing the transformed world and exploring how we got here, should I focus on providing a weekly to-do list for reducing CO2 emissions and biodiversity loss? It may yet evolve in that direction, but as I’ve written before I feel strongly that we need to know the story in order to change the story. And so this week the story is a ghost story.

Only in the last two centuries or so have we been forced to believe that change and transformation are a normal background for life. We cope with constant arrivals of “a new normal.” Nothing in our evolution resembled this current chaos we inhabit, in which landscapes disappear overnight and people multiply in their place while information flows like a monsoon-flooded river around our necks. We evolved in a largely predictable world rocked gently by seasonality and migrations and tides. Certainly chaos is built into every level of reality, from the galactic down to the quantum, and life on Earth is rife with it – tornadoes, plagues, cancers, earthquakes – but generally transformative change occurs on a slow, non-human time frame, branching species into new species, converting grassland into forest, turning mountains into hills and ancient seabeds into mountains.

Until it doesn’t, and the equilibrium is punctured: clouds gather in rare ways and remain overhead, a supervolcano emerges and jolts the climate, or a species rises and pushes a host of others into extinction. Against the unfathomably long backdrop of Earth history, the brief rise of humans is just another signal of chaos in the noise of life. One way or another, by our hand or not, a new equilibrium will be reached when the energy feeding the chaos subsides. A quiet complexity will evolve to meet the new conditions for life.

In the meantime, though, we’re erasing a heartbreaking array and astonishing amount of life from the planet. Whole landscapes are being lost to memory, whole groups of species are pushed to the brink of disappearance, and whole relationships between living communities – and between those communities and us – are half-intact and half-remembered. 85% of the world’s wetlands are gone, half of amphibian species are in trouble, and coral reefs will scarcely exist by mid-century. The U.N. estimates that a million species are in danger of extinction by 2050. Only four percent of Earth’s mammals are wild; the rest are humans, livestock, and pets. And so on and so on.

But I’ll zoom in and count some of the ghosts around me. I know my readers range from Maine to California to New Zealand (and beyond?), and there’s a complex ghost story written around each of us. Here in Maine, a heavily forested state that takes pride in its still rich connections with the natural world, much of what we call nature would be unfamiliar to the first generations of settlers, much less to the pre-invasion Wabanaki peoples (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Micmac) who lived within these lands rather than on top of them, and who for thousands of years knew the wild and shaped it without destroying it. Their descendants are here still, living rich lives as best they can in a world deprived of much of its richness.

Let’s start with the forests. Chestnut trees, which ranged from Maine to Mississippi and made up as much as 25% of the hardwoods, disappeared in the early 20th century from a human-introduced blight that, along with our own deforestation, killed four billion trees. Likewise, elm trees once grew tall and stately across the entire eastern half of the U.S. but were largely wiped out by an introduced disease a few decades after the chestnuts. Beech trees are being decimated by beech bark disease. The next forest single-species disappearances have begun already for ash trees (from the emerald ash borer) and hemlocks (from woolly adelgids).

Much of North America was deforested for farms, firewood, and fuel in the 18th century, then converted to large-scale pasture in the 19th. In New England, much of that land returned to forest in the 20th century as rural families moved either to cities or to richer soil in the Midwest. In Maine, about 3 million acres had been cleared. (Here on the coast, as elsewhere, you could see for miles across the cleared landscapes until the regrowth.) But up in northern Maine, nearly 15 million acres were left intact because settlement was limited. The good news is that Maine has about as much forested land as it did centuries ago, but nearly all of that land has been under private ownership – rather than under federal management that’s common out west – and it has been cut hard, repeatedly, for wood and paper products since then. About half a million acres are cut annually. For a comparison to natural rates of forest disturbance (fire, etc.), research in the last significant stand (5,000 acres) of old growth forest in Maine “found that the average stand disturbance rate is only about 9 to 12 percent per decade and projected that a major disturbance (over 50 percent disturbed) would occur only once every 1,100 years.” As for so many other natural systems, humans have been a fast-moving, comprehensive agent of forest community transformation and destruction.

You can see in the graph here that, as of 1995, over 50% of Maine trees were 75 years old or younger, and almost none were older than 150 years. 75% of presettlement forests, in contrast, were 150 years old or older, with nearly 30% over 300 years old. By itself, that’s a description of two different worlds.

souce: Northern Woodlands magazine - link below

Forests are not just trees, however. The apex predators that roamed Maine’s woods – wolf and mountain lion – were killed off long ago, as were the hundreds of thousands of woodland caribou that shaped northern Maine for thousands of years. Recent attempts to reintroduce caribou failed miserably, in part because the animals evolved with mature forests, not the young stands that sprout up after logging and farming. It’s impossible to overestimate the impacts of losing these key species for centuries, particularly when combined with the impacts of cutting, piece by piece, 99% of the forest and introducing numerous pests and invasive species.

Plants, including mosses and lichens, that depend on intact and long-lived forest have become rare. And who knows what’s happening in the soil, particularly to the extraordinary relationships between fungi and trees we’re just learning about – most notably from the research of Suzanne Simard – particularly in logged areas where the soil is repeatedly compacted by machines. And speaking of soil, perhaps one of the more surprising invasives in Maine forests is the common earthworm. Because the region was recently glaciated (until 11,000 years ago), we have no native earthworm species. European worms introduced by settlers have become common, and are good for gardens, but are disruptive for forests. Insect population declines are harder to assess, in part because, as an excellent Northern Woodlands article (which I’ve used extensively for this writing) on this history of the Maine woods points out, “Our knowledge even of Maine’s current biota is far from complete, especially for the small, the inconspicuous, the economically unimportant, and those with too many legs.” There are fourteen insect species on Maine’s lists of endangered and threatened species, and it’s safe to assume that the diversity of insects closely associated with mature forests, with caribou, with wetlands and hemlocks and everything else that’s been lost, have long been in decline.

North America has seen a massive reduction in bird population – 3 billion birds – just in the last fifty years, and Maine is no exception. An annual count in downeast Maine shows a 40% decline over the same period. Quite a few birds that have long defined a landscape, from thrushes in the woods to puffins offshore, struggle to maintain viable populations in a disturbed, fragmented, overharvested, polluted, warming world. Fisheries in the Gulf of Maine will be upended by rapidly warming waters, but for a long time the balance of species in the gulf has changed according to overfishing, coastal pollution, and for migratory species a lack of access to dammed rivers. Salmon, eel, and alewives, among others, once moved out to sea and back in vast numbers, enriching both freshwater and oceanic ecosystems.

As dams hinder riverine migrations, so cities and suburbs and industrial development interfere with migratory birds and monarch butterflies. Artificial lighting pulls countless insects off of their ancient paths and into a strange, hyper-lit deathtrap. Natural fire, in contrast, is suppressed rather than given its rightful place in the landscape, where species had evolved to benefit from it. And our massive, ongoing movement of species around the globe – what has been called a “functional Pangaea” because the oceans no longer separate the continents – continues to trigger the struggle or collapse of native species which cannot compete with the new arrivals.

Urban hardscapes are surprisingly full of interstitial life, life which may rival in its diversity what remains in heavily harvested forests, but these cities and towns and highways are all built on mass graves of ecological communities. This is as true in Maine as in the Amazon. If we still existed in not-so-distant historical numbers – two hundred years ago, for example, when our population was a mere one billion – these diminished cities and towns wouldn’t matter so much. Recognizable communities of life would still exist alongside them.

Which is all to say that, as you look out the windows of your house, apartment, car, bus, or train, what you see scarcely resembles life on Earth a century ago, much less before the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Much of the species loss has occurred in our lifetime, and most of it occurred in the last hundred years. These ghosts of salmon runs and chestnut groves, puffin colonies and damselfly hatches, wood thrush calls and eel migrations, wolf hunts and caribou herds: they are not old ghosts.

When I think about these litanies, as I’m now forcing you to think about them, the world seems to be – choose your metaphor here – a house of ghosts, a landfill of ghosts, a war zone of ghosts. Not that all of these species have disappeared, but that they are ghosts of their former populations, mere traces in the landscape where once they were essential.

And so I could have talked about “absences” or “shadows” instead of “ghosts” this week, but I wanted a word that suggested more fully their vibrancy and their vital, longstanding, meaningful existence. But maybe I should lift my eyes to the living rather than wringing my hands about the disappeared, since it’s hypothetically possible that some or most of these populations and communities can someday be restored to health. A shrinking human population intensely focused on planetary well-being could somehow bring CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels, replant complex forests, protect wetlands, de-acidify the oceans, and nurse amphibians and insects and mountain lions back to widespread and noisy vigor. Already this work is being done in small doses, even in the face of tsunamis of destruction and despair. Dams are coming down and fish ladders are being built and corals are being safeguarded in aquaria and forests are being replanted. Above all, research is being done to guide us toward a better future if our civilization chooses to go that way. It will be impossible to rebuild the world of our great-grandparents, but we can build toward that world in an attempt to be good ancestors to future generations.

So if this story of the heartbreaking past doesn’t motivate you, there is always the story of love to fall back on, whether it’s love of a particular species or place, love of a child or grandchild or great-grandchild who should have an intact world to inhabit, or love of the better angels of our nature which, in the Anthropocene, have so far been overwhelmed by the consequences of our worst actions.

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

Lands of Ghosts

8/5/21

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