PARTNERING WITH A PLANET
Aboard a wooden sailing vessel at anchor in Cape Cod Bay in early years of the 1600s, a crew member penned a superlative about the sea lapping at the ship. The codfish were so numerous, he wrote, that one could walk on their backs to the shore and not get one’s feet wet.
Passenger pigeons in their annual migration up and down the eastern flyway in the 1700s were reportedly so numerous that their passage blackened the sky as if night for half the daylight hours.
On the Great Plains, buffalo were so plentiful in their vast herds that little else could be seen except their shaggy backs and the sky above.
And in the forests of the east the enormous chestnut trees ruled the kingdom, reportedly numbering one in every five standing trees.
Today, our biosphere, the living world that supports us and every other living thing, is in crisis. On almost every front everywhere in the world, flora and fauna are in retreat before the rapacious demands of our one species. Should this assault continue on every continent, we humans are headed toward disaster.
And yet, there are a few good people among us who know something about tapping into the most powerful of life’s survival strategies: life’s incredible fecundity. Life has a truly remarkable ability to rebound and rebuild its now threatened populations and even rewire the entire biosphere.
Here are a few jaw-dropping examples:
In the 1300s, bubonic plague erupted in the Orient or the Middle East and spread across all of Asia, Europe and northern Africa. Before it had run its course over three generations, plague killed one of every three people in Europe and probably similar catastrophic numbers to the east and on to the Far East.
The freefall decline in the human population resulted in the wholesale decline of acreage being cultivated and trees being felled for firewood, construction, and armorments. Those acres were overtaken rapidly by tree seedlings and young forests. Untold billions of new trees and shrubs reached for the sky across two entire continents. The rapid new growth is thought to have absorbed so much climate warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that the planet entered the so-called Little Ice Age, a 500-year cold spell that moderated finally about 1850. Only then, when humans were well within the grip of the Industrial Revolution and pumping coal smoke into the heavens in greater and greater quantities, did the climate we recognize as normal return.
During World War II, when the Atlantic became a red hot war zone above and below the waves, commercial fishing activity declined precipitously. Any surface craft was in danger from marauding U-boats, aerial strafing, and ship-to-ship shelling. Over the course of six years of hostilities, fishing stocks rebounded dramatically due to the lack of fish harvesting pressure.
In New England during the 1800s, the native wild turkey went virtually extinct, hunted to oblivion. Forty years ago, though, an effort was made to introduce the bird into southwestern New Hampshire, the new stock being imported from Pennsylvania. From the first few reproducing birds, their numbers exploded across New England. Today the turkey is common from the Atlantic to the Canadian border, so great are their numbers.
These three examples tell us something profound, I think. Given a chance, populations of living things will flood the environment with their kind, regain their former numbers, and do so in a very short period of time.
At a micro-level, individual humans can have a substantial impact on the living world where they reside. On his farm in Virginia, Joe Salatin thought he’d try a hunch twenty years ago. He had studied how immense numbers of animals on the vast Serengeti sea of grass in Africa somehow manage to keep the ecosystem in balance. He recognized that the big herds rotated through several times a year, each species utilizing the grass but some utilizing other growth. These herds were followed in their wake by birds who scratched apart the manure droppings and consumed fly maggots and other insect larvae. A few weeks after the herd animals had left the region, the newly fertilized grasses rebounded and insect pests were in check.
He thought he might duplicate the Serengeti example on his farm, only he’d use cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and turkeys. What he discovered was that all the animal players thrived in the new rotation pattern he put in place. But much more importantly, the land itself began to improve substantially. All the living systems on the farm began to exhibit real health and vigor without antibiotics, without pesticides, without chemicals of any kind. Productivity soared. Every facet of the local biosphere, from water retention to beneficial insect and bird populations, improved. Customers noticed and flocked to his farm. Today, his work is being copied all over the world.
On a macro-level right here in the megalopolis East, and without intention or intervention, the Northeastern United States witnessed the carpeting over of abandoned small farm acreage, once largely cleared for pasture and sheep production during the “wool fever” decades of the early 1800s. As agricultural production in the Midwest and Plain States developed through the later decades of the 19th century, farm families left hardscrabble farms in the Northeast in wholesale numbers. Forests reclaimed the farm fields, so much so that most of upstate New York and all of northern New England now boast forests covering nearly 90 percent of the terrain. And with those forests came the rebound of native animals such as moose and black bear to name a very few.
The great challenge facing people everywhere all over the globe this new century is to recognize the incredible capacity that life exhibits to re-colonize the ground that has been lost to humans. Simply allowing trees to reclaim land and purposely planting wide greenbelts on every continent, at desert margins and along rivers and streams, would in one generation reap immeasurable returns in improved water quality not to say quantity, wildlife and bird habitat, reduced pollution, reduced soil erosion, and simple earthly beauty.
Imagine scaling back ocean fishing dramatically in favor of building inland and coastal fish farms all over the world where non-predatory fish such as tilapia and carp are raised organically on algae and vegetable waste, and where local insect larva hatcheries generate the protein needed to rear other species of farmed fish. Would severely degraded world fisheries rebound before a human infant reaches his or her 21st birthday? No question!
At the same time, humans could rethink their cities. Every acre of abandoned city lot, every dilapidated building plot, and every rooftop could be planted to greenery and food. Millions upon millions of green-space acres could be revitalized using the power of local community residents to get the job done. Entertain the thought for a minute of how different our urban environments would be if millions of trees and shrubs sprang up amid the concrete, tiny wildflower fields proliferated, little ponds were dug and populated with aquatic and wetland plants, brooks were freed from pavement and culvert coverings, and greenways were planted along every river and atop abandoned streets, parking lots, and railway lines.
One generation. Just one! That’s all the time it would take to green up our sickly earthly home. Make the conversion to renewable energy on a massive scale in that same period of time and our skies would surely brighten and our entire biosphere breathe a sigh of relief. To do it would take an army of humanity, every one of us making changes large and small. For example, the work of rapid and positive change could be as simple as most everyone on the planet planting just one tree per year, each year, for a single generation. You do the math: seven billion people times one tree times twenty-five years.
That’s 175 billion trees planted. That would be a wonderful start. Maybe we’d be on our way to one blue planet restored.
