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Book Review: The Once and Future World
Nov. 19th, 2023 08:43 amJ. B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be is about the human relationship with the natural world, a vastly complicated subject which I will attempt to tackle in list form. (As usual, I will probably manage to miss some key point that is absolutely in the book but slipped my mind in the gap between reading and writing.) MacKinnon’s points include, but are not limited to:
1. Humans are a part of the natural world.
2. Humans, like a number of other species (elephants, whales, beavers), tend to play a large role in shaping their natural environment. (Elephants’ voracious eating habits tend to create the kind of open savannah country that humans find particularly pleasing, for instance.)
3. Unlike elephants, whales, and beavers, humans tend to shape the environment in ways that decrease rather than increase biodiversity.
4. Humans have been doing this for a long time, starting back at the end of the Ice Age when we spread out across the globe to the exciting new continents of Europe, Australia, and the Americas, and proceeded to drive the megafauna to extinction. (Megafauna = mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, etc.) MacKinnon notes that scientists often hedge by asserting that both climate and people drove the megafauna to extinction, but when we say this, “we really mean we did it.” (Compare the habit of saying that certain animals are endangered because of “habitat loss,” when really we mean “human destruction of habitat.”)
5. In recent years, each human generation tends to hand on a world with less biodiversity - fewer types of animals and also fewer animals of most types. (Obviously there are individual exceptions. We’ve been great for rats!) Generation by generation, we adjust to this new normal so thoroughly that we often refuse to believe that there truly were more animals in the past. A micro-example: Grandpa talks about the big fish he used to catch on the Gulf, and we roll our eyes and say “Sure, Grandpa” - but if you compare fishing photographs from the Gulf of Mexico between now and Hemingway’s day, people were catching more and bigger fish.
6. This is my thought, not the book’s, but I think this is part of a more general pattern where we dismiss the inconvenient observations of elders with “Oh, old people always think it was better in the past,” often even when we have ample proof that what they are saying is true. Winters really did used to be colder!
7. To tie this back in with the book, MacKinnon notes that many more species than we previously realized rely on the guidance of their elders. Cod migration, for instance, apparently depends not on mysterious cod instinct, but on elders who know the way acting as guides. We know this in part by observing the behavior of schools of migrating cod, and in part because after the cod fisheries collapsed, leaving basically no cod elders (because humans like to catch the biggest fish), the migration stopped.
8. In general, the human preference to catch the oldest, largest, most impressively-antlered (wisest and best suited to lead the herd) animals has probably had catastrophic effects on animal populations, particularly in social species like elephants.
9. (This one is once again my extrapolation.) Everything we think we know about elephant social dynamics probably needs to be filtered through the knowledge that elephants as we know them are the refugee population of a human war against elephants that is still ongoing. Elephant societies almost certainly used to be much richer and more complicated, because, well, societies just are when they haven’t been shot to pieces. Ditto whales and other intelligent and social species that humans have hunted near the brink of extinction.
10. It appears that fully stocked ecosystems just plain work differently than ecosystems as we know them, which are generally depleted by our handiwork. MacKinnon describes an isolated coral reef in the middle of the Pacific, as close to untouched by humans as you’re going to find on this earth, where the biomass was 85% sharks and other predators. This flies in the face of everything biologists thought they knew about how ecosystems work. The biologists who first described the reef couldn’t get their paper published until they included photographic evidence that, no, really, there are that many sharks.
11. Does this mean that undoing our handiwork would mean coming to terms with a world that is 85% sharks? All evidence suggests that human beings don’t want to live in a world that is 85% sharks (or bears, or wolves, or insert your favorite large predator here.) Many people like the idea of bears existing… somewhere… far enough away that we don’t have to take bear spray on every walk to the supermarket.
(The specific 85% thing is probably a moot point, but “Do we actually want predators around?” is, in fact, an issue with reestablishing predator populations at basically any level. If there is a bear population there will, occasionally, be people mauled to death by bears. Not many! Certainly not as many people as die in car accidents! But for some people any risk of death by bear feels too high.)
1. Humans are a part of the natural world.
2. Humans, like a number of other species (elephants, whales, beavers), tend to play a large role in shaping their natural environment. (Elephants’ voracious eating habits tend to create the kind of open savannah country that humans find particularly pleasing, for instance.)
3. Unlike elephants, whales, and beavers, humans tend to shape the environment in ways that decrease rather than increase biodiversity.
4. Humans have been doing this for a long time, starting back at the end of the Ice Age when we spread out across the globe to the exciting new continents of Europe, Australia, and the Americas, and proceeded to drive the megafauna to extinction. (Megafauna = mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, etc.) MacKinnon notes that scientists often hedge by asserting that both climate and people drove the megafauna to extinction, but when we say this, “we really mean we did it.” (Compare the habit of saying that certain animals are endangered because of “habitat loss,” when really we mean “human destruction of habitat.”)
5. In recent years, each human generation tends to hand on a world with less biodiversity - fewer types of animals and also fewer animals of most types. (Obviously there are individual exceptions. We’ve been great for rats!) Generation by generation, we adjust to this new normal so thoroughly that we often refuse to believe that there truly were more animals in the past. A micro-example: Grandpa talks about the big fish he used to catch on the Gulf, and we roll our eyes and say “Sure, Grandpa” - but if you compare fishing photographs from the Gulf of Mexico between now and Hemingway’s day, people were catching more and bigger fish.
6. This is my thought, not the book’s, but I think this is part of a more general pattern where we dismiss the inconvenient observations of elders with “Oh, old people always think it was better in the past,” often even when we have ample proof that what they are saying is true. Winters really did used to be colder!
7. To tie this back in with the book, MacKinnon notes that many more species than we previously realized rely on the guidance of their elders. Cod migration, for instance, apparently depends not on mysterious cod instinct, but on elders who know the way acting as guides. We know this in part by observing the behavior of schools of migrating cod, and in part because after the cod fisheries collapsed, leaving basically no cod elders (because humans like to catch the biggest fish), the migration stopped.
8. In general, the human preference to catch the oldest, largest, most impressively-antlered (wisest and best suited to lead the herd) animals has probably had catastrophic effects on animal populations, particularly in social species like elephants.
9. (This one is once again my extrapolation.) Everything we think we know about elephant social dynamics probably needs to be filtered through the knowledge that elephants as we know them are the refugee population of a human war against elephants that is still ongoing. Elephant societies almost certainly used to be much richer and more complicated, because, well, societies just are when they haven’t been shot to pieces. Ditto whales and other intelligent and social species that humans have hunted near the brink of extinction.
10. It appears that fully stocked ecosystems just plain work differently than ecosystems as we know them, which are generally depleted by our handiwork. MacKinnon describes an isolated coral reef in the middle of the Pacific, as close to untouched by humans as you’re going to find on this earth, where the biomass was 85% sharks and other predators. This flies in the face of everything biologists thought they knew about how ecosystems work. The biologists who first described the reef couldn’t get their paper published until they included photographic evidence that, no, really, there are that many sharks.
11. Does this mean that undoing our handiwork would mean coming to terms with a world that is 85% sharks? All evidence suggests that human beings don’t want to live in a world that is 85% sharks (or bears, or wolves, or insert your favorite large predator here.) Many people like the idea of bears existing… somewhere… far enough away that we don’t have to take bear spray on every walk to the supermarket.
(The specific 85% thing is probably a moot point, but “Do we actually want predators around?” is, in fact, an issue with reestablishing predator populations at basically any level. If there is a bear population there will, occasionally, be people mauled to death by bears. Not many! Certainly not as many people as die in car accidents! But for some people any risk of death by bear feels too high.)
