Ecological history of America

AN ECOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLES :  Tim Flannery

THE BEGINNING

·        At its dawn all the world’s continents were joined into one vast land mass known as Pangaea

·        Pangaea divided into two supercontinents – Laurasia and Gondwana

·        These landmasses then fragmented giving rise to the contemporary continents

·        Australia, Antarctica, South America and Africa all came into existence as a result of the break-up of the supercontinent Gondwana.

THE BIRTH OF AMERICA

·        North America was created differently.  Initially, there was no Mississippi and no Rocky Mountains.

·        The Appalachian Mountains formed 450 million years ago and were eroding 230 million years ago

·        America was two islands.  The western island had been joined to Asia via the Beringian land bridge for hundreds of millions of years.  Its flora and fauna were largely shared with Asia.

·        Washington and California were islands and Mexico was submerged under a shallow sea.

GROUND ZERO – THE ASTEROID

·        65 million years ago an asteroid 10 kilometres in diameter crashed into the northern tip of Mexico.

·        Today 70% of the globe is covered in water – at that time 75% of the land mass was water.

·        This catastrophe extinguished life in North America including the dinosaurs.  It fried America.

·        At that time the Earth’s atmosphere was about 10% richer in oxygen making it a more flamable world – there were vast forest fires. 

·        It opened  a hole 5 kilometres deep in the earth’s crust.  Waves were generated a kilometre high

·        The modern day version is Krakatoa 27^th August 1883.  Central Australia heard the explosion like the sound of distant canon.  The tsunami was as tall as a seven storey building and travelling as fast as a train – 36,000 died.

·        All conifers were destroyed and 80% of flowering plant species in the US.

·        Huon pine in Tasmania survived the consequences of the impact.  Huon pine does not rot – it can contain 2000 years of history.  The most remarkable tree of all was discovered in 1994 – a living dinosaur.  ‘Wollemia nobilis’ was found 100 kilometers from Sydney.  40 trees only were growing 40 metres tall in a valley.

REBIRTH OF AMERICA

·        As with Krakatoa – ferns appeared first.

·        Only 3 locations survived the asteroid being remote or sheltered – lee of the mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada and Appalachians and the Arctic circle.

·        Trees took on cone shape because this optimized the capture of light.

·        The turtles survived the impact.

·        Before the impact America was rich in marsupials.

TROPICAL AMERICA

·        51 million years ago North America was covered with evergreen tropical jungle.

·        Europe had polar connections with North America.

ICE AGE

·        Louis Agassiz discovered the ‘ice age’.

·        Two periods of very dramatic cooling – first 50 million years ago and the second at 38 million years ago.  The sea dropped by 4 –5 degrees.

·        The onset of the ice age some 2.4 million years ago is still fiercely debated.

·        Over the past 2.4 million years the Earth has flip-flopped in and out of the freezer at least 17 times.

·        The last freeze grew to intensity 35,000 years ago, peaked 18,000 years ago and deteriorated from about 15,000 years ago.

·        25,000 years ago the glaciers stole over the north of the continent.

·        18,000 years ago 80 million cubic kilometres of water was frozen in glaciers

·        The last shift to extreme icehouse conditions occurred around 18,000 years ago then returned to the present (still ice age) conditions just 10,000 years ago.  The town of Spearfish in South Dakota holds the world record – going from – 18 degrees Celsius to 3 degrees above in two minutes.  The Sioux came here to spear fish.  The Black Hills were their last refuge until gold was discovered in the 1870’s when Spearfish was born today having a population of 7000 residents.

MOUNTAINS

·        By 25 million years ago the Rocky Mountains has ceased to push skyward.

·        20 million years ago they were eroded flattened summits.

TORNADOES

·        Turbulent air flowing from the chilli north encounters the breezes of the hot south.  As the two fight it out over the plains – tornadoes are spawned.  90% of the worlds tornadoes occur in North America.

EARTHQUAKES

·        The San Andreas Fault begun life well out in the Pacific Ocean over 65 million years ago.

ELEPHANTS

·        Elephants arrived 17 million years ago and later rhino species.

·        Mammoths arrived 1.7 million years ago by the steppe bridge.

BISON

·        Arrived 400,000 years ago.  Disgusting and wasteful slaughter between 1830 and 1868.  In the early 1800’s the population ranged between 30 and 60 million.  In 1492 there were 400,000 wolves (by 1965, just 500 remained) in the US, 200,000 – 400,000 plains Indians and both depended on the bison for their survival.  Buffalo urine was the critical fertilizer for the grasses of the plains.  The bison were accompanied by 9 million American antelope, 3.6 million elk and 2 million bighorn sheep.  In the early days, Bison were shot for their skins, later for their tongues or from railway carriages for sport.  1884 was the year buffalo lost the battle for the plains.  With the vigilance of park ranges 200 buffalo found refuge in Yellowstone National Park.  The Custer State Reserve in South Dakota’s Black Hills plays a crucial role in keeping 1000 of the great beasts seen trudging across the grassy valley there.

DEER

·        North American deer appear 5.2 million years ago.

HORSES

·        45 – 50 million years ago horses established themselves in North America.

·        The horse became extinct 13,000 years ago.

·        The re-emergence occurred on the second fleet of Columbus in 1493.  It was the mustangs that would fill the continent.

·        By 1900 there were 2 million mustangs roaming North America – by 1967 there were 17,000 left

·        Kentucky bluegrass arrived from Eurasia

·        1886 the tumbleweed would blow in from Russia.

FOX

·        No European carnivore has succeeded as an immigrant into the New World except the red fox – it has no negative impact on the environment: not like Australia

SQUIRRELS

·        Trees want squirrels to eat their nuts.  Many are eaten but others are carried into the perferct environment to nurture a young tree.

CROWS

·        Ravens arrived in North America with the jays via the frozen land bridge.  The ravens originated from Australia.  Very few, if any, bird families have originated in North America.

BIRDS

·        The flocks follow 4 major flyways – the Mississippi marks the most important route.  Gliding species such as the birds of prey prefer the uplift from the Appalachians.  Perching birds take the oceanic route.

·        The Ivory-bill woodpecker was in decline for most of the 1800’s.  In 1946 ornithologists located a population in the Singer forest tract of northern Louisiana and begged politicians and timber companies to spare its habitat but the pleas were ignored.  The final habitat was cleared to grow Ford’s beloved soybeans.  By 1968 only 6 pairs were known to exist and today the world’s largest woodpecker is extinct in the United States

RACOON

·        Arrived 4 million years ago.

SNAKES

The back-fanged snakes, which evolved in Europe some 32 million ago, reached North America 30 million years ago via Asia.  Today, they are the dominant snake of North America.

THE GOLDEN AGE

·        24 – 5 million years ago the planet warmed but rainfall did not increase.  North America became wooded savanna.

·        By 15 million years large mammal diversity reached its peak.

·        10 million years ago cactuses appeared.  They occur because the rainfall is regular – they are shallow rooted and have no access to ground water and hence they are absent in Australia.  In Australia with erratic rainfall deeply buried water resources will produce eucalypt species.

SOUTH AMERICAN LANDBRIDGE

·        By 2.8 million years ago dry land connections existed between North and South America which resulted in animals transforming South America.

·        Today half of the modern South American mammal genera are derived from North American groups.

ARRIVAL OF HUMANS

·        Most archaeologists agree that the Clovis people whose artifacts date to around 13,200 years ago were the first people to enter America via Alaska.

·        Reason for the lateness of settlement: barriers of extreme climatic conditions, the Bering Strait, and the great continental ice sheet that divided Alaska from the rest of ice-free North America.

·        Native American people are an Asiatic people.  American Indians left north- east Asia before all the characteristics of the modern Asian population had become established.  6000 years ago, 60% of the Earths habitable land surface was then occupied by people of Asian origin.  They moved into the Pacific Islands and by 800 years ago they had reached New Zealand spawning the Polynesian and Maori cultures

·        With the end of the Clovis culture 12,900 years ago – America’s first human frontier closed.

·        Not all native peoples of North America are descendants of Clovis.  At least two other migrant groups established themselves on the continent before 1492.

·        Contact between Indian and Eskimo have always been minimal: active avoidance alternating with hostility.  The very name Eskimo supposedly derives from a derogatory Indian term connoting ‘eater of raw meat’.

·        By 8,000 years ago a marked diversification of Indian cultures began.

·        By 4,500 years ago some Indian groups seem to have settled down in permanent camps.  Evidence of trade became apparent at this time.

·        North American Indians had only two domestic animals: the dog and the turkey.

·        Columbus was an Italian who arrived 11^th October 1492 with the support of Spain.

·        Between 1850 and 1870 California saw the worst massacres of indigenous peoples ever to take place in the United States at the hands of  frontiersmen, miners and camp followers.

·        Traditional Indian crops were corn and squash.

·        As late as the 1960’s the average age at death for Indians In North America was 43 and 500 out of every 1700 Indian infants died in the first year of ‘preventable diseases’.

·        Whole groups of Indians were rounded up and killed simply for their land.

·        The last tribes to maintain their autonomy were the plains Indians.  Horses and guns gave the plains tribes resilience in the face of European oppression

·        The United States had made more than 370 individual treaties with various Indian groups – every single one of which had been violated by European Americans.

·        In the final phases between 1865 and 1890 the United States Army alone killed 6000 men, women and children

WOUNDED KNEE

·        3 days after Christmas 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, 300 unarmed Sioux men, women and children were murdered by the Seventh Cavalry, George Custer’s unit, which has been shamed at Little Bighorn in 1876.

·        1973: two more Indians were to die under European fire at Wounded Knee – this time Indians protesting at the site were surrounded by 300 national guardsmen and US marshals who opened fire on them.

BOW AND ARROW

·        The weapon was present in North America around 4,500 t0 7,000 years ago.

·        It was present in Eurasia for 20,000 years.

VEGETATION

·        15,000 years ago conditions were even drier and colder than they are today and there were no trees or shrubs in the North.  Eskimo culture was far in the future.

·        After this the Earth began to warm rapidly and trees migrated north in response.

EXTINCTION

·         What caused the extinction of mammoths, sloths, camels and mastodons.  The majority of scientists seem to favour global climatic change and human impact.

·         “I believe that global extinction points towards human rather than climate change as the cause of the demise of North America’s giants and compelling evidence implicates Clovis hunters as the killers.  The smoking gun of direct evidence concerns sites containing both Clovis hunting points and mammoth remains.”

FIRST SETTLEMENT

·         The first English settlement in the new world was Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.  The Mayflower

·         The English viewed Indians not as valued trading partners or a resource to be exploited but as competitors.

·         In 1621 the first pilgrims began constructing their shelters.

·         The first settlers were a downtrodden and oppressed people with few skills -  they were company fodder, poorly supplied and equipped.  They died like flies in Feb 1621.

·         Between 1621 and 1640 more than 20,000 immigrants arrived in New England.

·         Within 8 years of the cessation of immigration, the religious fanaticism of Puritan society had become extreme.  By 1648 you could be strung up for idolatry, blasphemy, man-stealing, adultery, perjury, cursing a parent (if over the age of 16).  Tarring and feathering was practised with enthusiasm in order to bring about conformity with the new laws.

·         The Virginians looked upon their northern neighbours as dangerous, sour faced wowers in matters of religion and politics.  Virginia enjoyed cock-fighting, horse-racing and the theatre

SLAVERY

·         Through the 1700’s and the early 1800’s slavery became ever more rigid and institutionised.  Tobacco supremacy was challenged by cotton

·         In 1500 over 50 million Europeans, Africans  and others would flood into the new continent.

·         African slaves – 84,500 arrived in the fifteen years to 1775 alone

AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE APRIL: 1775

·        Almost all American Indians who fought took the side of the British, as did 800 slaves.  The Indians were supporting a law limiting European colonisation to the East of the Appalachians.

INDEPENDENCE FOR CANADA

·        Came peacefully in 1867

ALASKA

·        Sold to America by Russia for US47,200,000 in gold in 1867

DANIEL BOONE

·        Laid out the Wilderness Road across the Cumberland Gap and Kentucky and the rich western horizons lay open.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

·        An amazing man: his home can still be visited today in Monticello.  He obtained funding to send Lewis and Clarke over the mountains and on to the distant sea.

OPENING THE FRONTIER

·        Frontier expansion began in earnest in 1844

·        The Indian wars continued unabated between 1608 and 1890 which delivered the lions share of North America into British American hands.

STRESS ON FLORA AND FAUNA

·        Much of the native fauna and flora of the continent came to be seen either as a resource to be exploited to the full or as a pest to be gotten rid of.

·        The passenger pigeon accounted for 4 out of every 10 birds in America but the pigeons met their match with the Europeans.  The last bird was killed in Ohio in 1900.

·        The beautiful parakeet – North America’s only native parrot – was common enough in the 1800’s but was seen as an agricultural pest.  The last ones were seen between 1914 – 18.

·        The settlers then found a new supply in the great quantities of plover and curlew in the Mississippi Valley

·        This mad shooting spree saw the trumpeter swan and whooping crane brought within a few shotgun blasts of extinction.

·        By the early twentieth century after blasting their way through the larger species, commercial hunters were reduced to the pitiful expedient of shooting swallows.  At this time each year the following were sent to England:  pelts of 50,000 wolves, 30,000 bears, 22,000 American Otters, 750,000 raccoons, 40,000 cats, 100,000 pine marten and 265,000 foxes.

·        As a result, the grizzly and wolf would be all but extinct in the United States.

·        For other places that have suffered extinctions, such as Australia, lost rarer, larger or more solitary species, rather than those that congregated en masse.

·        “By the 1950’s North American’s had eliminated four fifths of the continents wildlife, cut more than half its timber, all but destroyed its native cultures, damed most of its rivers, destroyed its most productive freshwater fisheries and depleted a good proportion of its soils.  By 1999 nearly1200 native North American species had been placed on the official endangered list, this is a gross underestimate, for it has been reliably estimated that 16,000 species are in grave danger of extinction on the continent.  What is most worrying about this dismal history is that, on the frontier, ruthless exploitation, greed and senseless environmental destruction had become an honoured tradition.  Various states made laws to protect wildlife such as passenger pigeons and at times Indians were granted respite from the reign of terror, yet frontiersmen ignored the law that irked them, they did so with impunity.”

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

·        Abraham Lincoln saw the situation clearly – the war was fought principally to maintain the union.

THE WATER RESOURCE

·        The exploitation of the water frontier is, if such a thing is possible, an even more sorry story of greed than the extermination of the buffalo.

·        The destruction of North American’s waterways is arguably the greatest blow every struck by the European Americans at the continent’s biodiversity.

·        Of all the losses North America has suffered since the arrival of the Europeans, I find the rape of its fresh waters the saddest, both because is still happening, and because it slashes at life that has been so enduring.

·        The United States 2.5 million dams were probably the main culprits.

·        In 1982, only 2% of the country’s streams were free flowing.

·        Sports fish such as trout have been introduced outside their natural range and in many instances have driven native fish populations to extinction.

LAND

·        April 1934 a giant black dust cloud blew over the parched fields of eastern Colorado and western Kansas

·        14 million hectares of arable land was destroyed, 50 million hectares severely depleted and a further 40 million hectares made marginal for agricutural use.  In all 750,000 Americans were made destitute and forced to leave their homes.

THE MAKING OF A GIANT

·        At the beginning of the 1800’s the United States had a population of 5 million and had 5 millionaires.

·        1908 it had the world’s first billionaire: John D. Rockefeller

·        The construction the Erie Canal cut transportation costs hugely.

·        The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869

·        The great plains produced two thirds of the world’s wheat.

·        These activities unleashed a monster that would drink many of her rivers dry, consume her plains, blight her deserts and sterilize her seas.

·        Henry Ford relied on mass production and this was to be the catch cry for many other fields.

THE FUTURE

·        The US Congress established the world’s first national park and today Americans take the lead in many aspects of the world environmental movement.

·        At the most brutal and recent level, the great national parks and reserves of North America were created out of the dispossession of Indians

·        Today 362,000 square kilometres of the Great Plains have land that is too poor to provide a financial base – perhaps elephants will once again roam North America together with large numbers of bison, llama, tapir, jaguar, camel and Chacoan peccary.  These could well form the nucleus of a smaller yet sustainable economy.

REMEMBER PERSPECTIVE

·        To a human being, 50 years is everything – the best part of a lifetime – but in the scale of these events it is nothing, a mere grain in the Sahara of time.

·        The 50 years of US pre-eminence have come at a high price, for they have cost the continent much of its natural wealth and ecological stability.  Even now aggressive capitalism is sacrificing the rivers, soils and poorer people of North America at the altar of the god of fortune.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

·        Is popular even with some of the conservative right and is slowly closing what remains of the land, water, timber and fisheries frontiers of North America before complete disaster ensues.

GREENHOUSE

·        The greenhouse is of special interest for North America will feel its effects more violently and well in advance of other continents.  Global warming will, paradoxically, hail another advance of the ice.