Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem--and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk

In loving memory of my father,

who found beauty in his music,

all people, and all nature

Table of Contents

Title Page

PROLOGUE: THE HYENA

Part One - THE WAY OF THE WORLD

1 - A CREATURE IN THE FOREST

2 - LUSH LIFE

3 - EPHEMERAL LIFE

4 - ELEPHANTS, DUNG BEETLES, AND ECOSYSTEMS

5 - EVOLUTION–LIFE THROUGH A NEW LENS

Part Two - THE WORLD BECOMES MODERN

6 - ANCIENT GROUND

7 - IMPERIAL COLLAPSE

8 - THE DINOSAURS OF MIDDLE EARTH

9 - A FLOWER IN THE FOREST

10 - THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

11 - TOWARD A NEW ECOSYSTEM

12 - DINOSAUR CAMELOT

Part Three - DEATH AND RESURRECTION

13 - A PUZZLING CATASTROPHE

14 - THE ERA AFTER

Part Four - TERRA HUMANA

15 - WHO THEY WERE

16 - THE EXTERMINATORS

17 - THE CULTIVATORS

18 - LAND RUSH

19 - DARK FORCES

20 - THE WASTE OF A WORLD

21 - HEAT WAVE

22 - FUTURE WORLD

Also by

NOTES AND REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Copyright Page

PROLOGUE: THE HYENA

On a summer morning, just like summer mornings for hundreds of millennia, the Sahara turned its scorched earth toward the sun. We tentatively stepped out of the shadow of our Land Cruiser, from a cool dark place to the white hot of bleached cliffs. Earth is a planet of bountiful life, but the Sahara seemed to us the antithesis of anything living. Rock and sand stretched to the horizon, interrupted by only the bristle of a dead thorn-bush, enlivened only by the distant shriek of a shadowy bird. We were in this dead place not because of what it is but because of what it once was. As we crept along in the awful stillness of the heat, we bent over a heterogeneous surface of pebbles, rocks, and sand, picking out alien items: spool-shaped vertebrae of giant crocodiles, strange, polished combs of ray teeth, and pieces of turtle shells that were weathered to the texture of ancient bronze coins. Even with a dusty fossil bone fragment clenched in my hand I could not conjure at that moment the 60-million-year-old world it came from. I could not appreciate that I was in fact walking the ancient shoreline of a warm sea whose surface had once been wrinkled with rising fish and meandering crocodiles. I could not pick up the scent of primeval magnolias in a cool breeze. That world was gone, burned out of the intervening epochs. The sea had long ago shriveled away, and although in a subsequent stretch of time this place still harbored forest and stream, the desert had at last come and buried it all.

And this was not even the emptiest core of the Sahara. Our expedition was crisscrossing the edge land of northern Mali, the zone between sand seas and the brush-covered hills of the Sahel (pronounced Sa-HELL). We were a small group led by the paleontologist Dr. Maureen O’Leary, whose fluent French and organizational acumen had succeeded in providing us with six Kalashnikov-armed, blue-turbaned Tuaregs. She had made the deal with local militia at the town of Gao, our jumping-off point, some 129 kilometers (80 miles) to the southwest. Over the years I had worked in many hot places–southern New Mexico’s badlands, the cactus gardens of Baja California, the stifling humid clime of the Tehama along the Red Sea, and the solar oven formed by Mongolia’s Gobi Desert–but I had never felt heat so intense, so immobilizing. I climbed a pediment slope and stopped suddenly, panting in the thick air. I looked down the hill to the flats about a hundred feet below, where I could see our escorts lying below the bellies of their cars, only their sandaled feet exposed to the sun. It seemed that the only water left on the planet was being relentlessly sucked out of my tissues and would hardly be replenished by the two liters in my backpack. It was only 10:00 a.m., two hours until I too would be allowed to slither below the oily chassis of a Land Cruiser. I thought with some shame of the herdsmen we had seen two days before, driving their spectral goats through the ashen thorn forest to a tiny well, where their camels slurped. They greeted us, laughing generously. Not one of them mentioned the heat. Adaptation is an amazing thing.

Of course one does not wage the struggle for existence on spirit alone. The conditions of the southern Sahara for human habitation are marginal at best. At worst, in places devoid of resource, community, and humane treatment, they are simply a death sentence. Seventeen hundred miles to the east in the Darfur region of Sudan, hundreds of thousands of people were being driven from their homes and arable lands. Many of these victims were killed, wounded, or raped. Others were left starving, ravaged by disease, collapsing in the heat. They were casualties of a genocide being carried out by the Janjaweed militia, which conveniently relied on the forces of nature to inflict pain and suffering. The root of this tragedy involved the usual motivations for ethnic cleansing, but long-standing strife between farmers and nomadic herdspeople over dwindling water and productive land doubtless fueled the conflict. The Sahara is part of a global environmental disaster, desertification, which is spreading rapidly southward with the aid of a fickle climate and the mere trickle of a shrinking water table, incapable of supporting the 5 million people who live here. Indeed, of all natural resources, the most tenuous, most threatened, and most precious worldwide, freshwater ranks number one. In the Sahara the age of drought and devastation has already come.

Humans had been through hard times before. There is vivid fossil evidence of the harsh conditions faced by 2-million-year-old human populations in Africa. Not only did these small clusters of people have to track sporadic food and water sources through marked changes in seasons, but leopards, lions, and hyenas frequently preyed upon them. At Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, famous fossil cave sites in southern Africa, the gnawed bones of ancient australopithecine humans have been found strewed about the entrance to caves that were their shelter. But humans eventually found themselves sufficiently numerous and well armed to turn the tables, becoming hunters instead of the hunted.

Even with this accession of power, human predation on Africa’s wildlife seemed oddly well managed. Hunting did not lead to rampant extermination of large animals, as it did when humans arrived much later in Australia, Eurasia, the Americas, and numerous islands. Perhaps this difference was due to the long history of cohabitation of humans and large animals in Africa. Coevolution effected a balance in the alternating roles of prey and predator. African animals over millions of years evolved into forms more wary of humans; they kept their distance and survived.

Despite the vast evolutionary time invested in attaining this equilibrium, things do go wrong. During the recent centuries of its colonial imprisonment Africa was invaded by Europeans intent on farming, mining, enslaving indigenous human populations, and rampantly hunting out vast tracts of wildlands. During a single year, 1911, one safari company killed 700 to 800 lions. The carnage promoted by both foreigners and residents alike goes on. In defiance of conservation efforts of more recent decades, poachers have killed thousands of African animals. By 2003, the same year we were scrambling over the bleached cliffs of Mali, the numbers of elephants in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the most species-enriched reserve in Africa, were at an all-time low of fewer than 250 individuals. Poachers had relentlessly culled the elephant populations in the region from 1960 levels numbering more than 4,000. Less malevolent but equally destructive forces that come with human population expansion and development have either destroyed or marginalized many natural sanctuaries.

At the same time, our species has not totally domesticated any continent or indeed the planet. There are still wild places where humans are interlopers, where they must tread lightly. This has always been the case since humans first appeared. Even today wild animals kill hundreds of humans. In many cases, these deaths simply result from unhappy accidents, where the victims find themselves in the path of an aggressive and protective hippo, elephant, or African buffalo. In other cases, humans have once again found themselves repeating the roles of their ancestors: they are simply prey items. Since 1990 in Tanzania, lions have killed nearly six hundred people and injured another three hundred.

Sometimes wild predators terrorize in tandem. A 2005 World Wildlife Fund dispatch tells us that scientists visited an area in a Mozambique village near the Tanzanian border, where they discovered a nightmarish scene. Wild elephants had raided the farmers’ fields, absconding with an estimated two-thirds of the crops. Farmers were not allowed to shoot the recently protected elephants, so instead, they slept in their fields, only awaking to bang on pots in a feeble attempt to chase away the noisy invaders. Unfortunately, stealthy lions and hyenas soon learned that sleeping farmers were easy prey. Along a twenty-kilometer (twelve-mile) stretch of road thirty-five deaths were recorded, largely because of the gluttony of a single rogue lion. During the same year hyenas attacked and seriously injured fifty-two people, resulting in twenty-eight deaths. Many inhabitants were so terrorized by these predators that they fled the area; certain villages were rapidly transformed into deserted ghost towns. In the Sahara, where densities of lion populations vary from low to nonexistent, the hyena is often the top predator, feared by wild species, domestic animals, and humans alike.

As I walked along the scarred Saharan cliff, I picked up an evil scent, an incisive rot of decaying flesh. In a ravine descending from a dark overhang in a rock wall, I saw scattered bone. As I approached the ravine, I could inspect this graveyard with a paleontologist’s eye. There were small, slender bones of a hoofed animal, perhaps an antelope, and other small bones that clearly belonged to a goat or two. There were even some robust ribs, limb bones, and vertebrae of a large animal, most likely a camel. For someone like me who spends much time looking at the ground when walking the earth, piles of bones are not an unusual sight. Nonetheless, this isolated monument to carnage should have sparked some sense of trepidation in me. Why it did not I have pondered many times since. Perhaps the heat had dulled my brain. Perhaps for a moment I forgot I was in Africa, where the same formidable prowlers of the Serengeti can be encountered even in a lifeless desert.

Then I heard a heavy thud of a footfall, not typical of a two-legged human but of something four-footed and largish. In the dead air I picked up the sound of a low exhale, almost like the chuff of a locomotive. I stopped. A beast emerged from behind a boulder only eight feet from where I stood. The first thing that struck me was its mass; it seemed more the size of a pony than a typical African carnivore. Its body was as dull gray as the boulder between us. I could see shaggy, limp hairs, wet with sweat, hanging like entrails from its flanks. I could count ribs. The animal’s muscular neck ended in a head that was huge, ugly, and misshapen, with a tiny eye perched above an oversize jaw. The canines jutted from a rippling line of black gums. For a moment I was completely transfixed by the weirdness, the grotesque nature of the thing. My experience as a biologist counted for nothing. The beast did not look of this world. Then something more conscious and analytical came to the surface. This was in fact a very large hyena.

The creature gave me an evil and ambiguous beady eye and a snarl. I was too frozen in shock to tell whether it was standing still or slowly drifting to my right. Then I could perceive the hyena at last receding, with agonizing slowness. Suddenly it chuffed again and lunged down the ravine. Several yards away the hyena made a complete turnabout, and for one terrible instant I thought it had resolved to charge me directly. But it suddenly shifted again to the far end of the ravine and started loping up to the top of the cliffs. Even from that distant summit its silhouette had a striking mass to it.

My hand radio crackled. Did you see that? That’s the biggest hyena I’ve ever seen! Eric, one of the team geologists, was calling.

I saw it, I replied.

I could hear excited shouts in French and Tamashek, the high-pitched dialect of the Tuareg soldiers, rising from somewhere below. Please don’t unload your automatics, gentlemen, I thought. I’m up here.

In the end this unexpected encounter in the Sahara failed to distract us from our morning’s prospecting for fossils. By noon I was lying under the Land Cruiser, only consumed with avarice as I watched Leif, one of the young geologists, pour his private stash of Gatorade into a canteen full of hot, alkaline water. My meeting with the hyena seemed worthy of only brief conversation; it was too hot to talk much. Compared with the grim statistics on animal attacks and the horrific tragedies that were part of life in this harsh place, the whole affair was hardly dramatic. Later, though, my memory of that encounter came back, and I relived the few seconds of that Saharan rendezvous. I have many times seen that gray, ugly head and that beady eye and picked up the foreboding stench from a hyena’s cave. It is a memory that shocks me with its oddity and its potential primal violence. It seems an event reincarnated from someplace deeper in my own history, from a time when my ancestors walked the plains of Africa in trepidation. Ecologists often point out that the image of Earth still harboring unspoiled, pristine wild places is a myth. We live in a human-dominated world, they say, and virtually no habitat is untouched by our presence. Yet we are hardly the infallible masters of that universe. Instead, we are rather uneasy regents, a fragile and dysfunctional royal family holding back a revolution. The relationship between what we call the civilized and the untamed can be mysterious, changeable, and unpredictably violent. Sometimes nature can show its awesome, intolerant power, a power that emanates from a history much longer than our own. Where does that history lead us now?

About 7 million years ago–58 million years after the great dinosaur extinction event, nearly 100 million years after the modern land ecosystem of flowering plants and pollinating insects emerged, and 3.493 billion years after life first appeared on Earth–humans became the primate group to watch. At first there was not much to see. Small bands of primitive, humanlike species lived out desperate lives, dividing their time between being either slow-moving, poorly armed predators or, as I have noted, prey items themselves. Six million years later or more, tens of thousands of years ago, humans made deeper incisions on the land. They decimated large animals on many islands and most continents and, later, created their own biofactories through plant cultivation and animal domestication. The advent of agriculture fueled an unprecedented acceleration of human populations, but one that seemed sustainable in a wild and bounteous world. It was not until 1800 that global human population reached 1 billion. And still, even in the face of this horde of humanity, Earth seemed an expansive, mysterious, even intimidating place. Major tracts of rainforest in Africa and South America were inhabited only by small clusters of people who carried on their secretive hunter-gatherer traditions amid a staggering cornucopia of life. Huge areas were poorly known or not known at all. Antarctica, an entire continent larger than Europe and only slightly smaller than South America, was not seen by humans until 1820. A well-known European map from that same year shows western North America, interior Australia, and central Africa in blank white. These were spaces of terra incognito, whose landforms, animals, plants, and indigenous peoples were all but unknown to Westerners. Not until well along in the nineteenth century did Western scientists encounter, describe, and name the Sumatran rhino, the blue whale, the two living species of tree sloths, the wombat, the pigmy hippo, the spider monkey, and huge numbers of insects and plants. Meanwhile, the passenger pigeon, one of the emblematic casualties of the decades to come, numbered an estimated 3 to 5 billion birds, its flocks engulfing the sky of North America in deep shadow.

How things can change in a few short years! Joel E. Cohen has described the change in terms of the human population explosion:

It took from the beginning of time until about 1927 to put the first 2 billion people on the planet; less than 50 years to add the next 2 billion people (by 1974); and just 25 years to add the next 2 billion (1999). The population doubled in the most recent 40 years. Never before the second half of the 20th century had anyone lived through a doubling of global population. Now some have lived through a tripling. The human species lacks any prior experience with such rapid growth and large numbers of its own species.

The matter of sustaining such an unimaginably huge human population today becomes more challenging. Our voracious use of land for food production, energy, and habitation is necessary for our survival. As Norman Myers has pointed out, in less than thirty years we shall need to feed an estimated 8.2 billion people, 32 percent more than exist today. This requires a boost of 50 to 60 percent in food production from current levels, or about a 2 percent increase per year. The immensity of the challenge and what it will cost can be appreciated by considering the so-called miracle of bioagriculture in our time. The agricultural breakthroughs of recent decades have produced only a 1.8 percent cumulative increase in food in the decade between 1985 and 1995, for example. To make matters worse, the agriculture that has thus far sustained human populations is hardly itself sustainable enough for future needs. Land use over the past two decades presents a disturbing picture of degradation. In that short span of time 5 billion tons of topsoil have been removed from formerly arable lands. During the past forty years at least 4.3 million square kilometers of cropland (more than twice the size of Alaska) have been abandoned because of soil loss.

The human population curve

Of course, to have degraded soils, you must first have converted land that was once untamed and used it for cultivation. From the advent of agriculture eleven thousand years ago humans have converted more than half of Earth’s once pristine forestland. Today’s forests occupy only about 30 percent of the total land surface (about 4 billion hectares, or 8 billion football fields’ worth). Deforestation is carried out at a global annual rate of 7.3 million hectares (17.5 million acres); in the last five years alone the world has lost 37 million hectares (91 million acres) of forest, about the size of Germany. This number is also somewhat deceptive; the real loss of original forest has been about 64.4 million hectares, about 13 million hectares a year, but 27. 8 million of those hectares are either naturally regenerated or have become converted, industrialized tree farms, such as the timber plantations in North America and oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia. There is no guarantee that regenerated forests or especially those tree farms have recovered many of the species that once lived there.

The situation for tropical rainforest, the habitat that is estimated to account for 40 to 50 percent of all species on Earth, is particularly distressing. Despite impassioned pleas and elaborate strategies for conserving rainforests in places like the Amazon or the Congo River basins, the rate of loss has hardly abated. Brazil lost 16 million hectares between 2000 and 2005, at a rate that, if unchecked, will reduce its forestland to 60 percent of its current size by 2050. In fact, Brazil’s annual rate of loss in the first decade of this century actually increased over that for the 1990s. During the same 2000–2005 interval South America as a whole lost 21 million hectares. Africa, with a significantly smaller amount of forest cover, lost a comparable 21 million hectares. If the pace of deforestation continues, many of the world’s tropical rainforests will be gone in a few decades. Even the great tracts of forest in the Amazon and the Congo seem destined not to outlast this century.

Relentless conversion of land for habitation and agricultural product is not the only dangerous driver of environmental destruction. Humans have promoted some other contributors, dark forces, along with land conversion, we might analogize with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: oppression, war, famine, and pestilence. Like the Four Horsemen (Jared Diamond has called a very similar list the Evil Quartet) bearing down on us, these forces are assaulting the planet. Deforestation or other forms of habitat conversion and destruction are only the first; overharvesting of certain animals whether through hunting and fishing, the introduction of invasive species into new habitats, and pollution are others. Fisheries have erased more than 25 percent of the productivity in upwelling ocean regions and 35 percent of the productivity in shallow temperate waters along coastlines and over continental shelves. Invasive species have wiped out resident birds on Pacific islands, destroyed the original fish communities in African lakes, and choked the waterways of eastern North America. Most of the major coral reef systems in the world have been more than 50 percent degraded through a combination of overfishing, pollution, disease, and bleaching caused by warmer waters. The sixteenfold increase in energy use during the twentieth century created 160 million tons of sulfur dioxide emissions per year, twice the levels of emissions from natural sources. The last decade marks the time when air pollution became global in extent, when we humans freely exchanged our polluted air across oceans and continents.

Some of these actions have cascading effects. Fossil fuel burning and agriculture have together created an ultragreenhouse atmosphere, with an increase in carbon dioxide of 30 percent and in methane by more than 100 percent. More CO2 in the air means a warmer planet, and here the historical facts are riveting. CO2 levels in the atmosphere have not been so high in 10 million years, when climates were warmer, sea levels were higher, and large portions of land now occupied by millions of people were under water. A significant chunk of what we now call land we may soon call ocean. Models that account for the complexities of climate change over time predict an increase in global mean surface temperatures by 2030–2050 of anywhere between 1.5° and 4.5°C, depending on the region. This range of increase in temperature will not only dramatically warm the climate but disrupt current weather patterns and threaten the survival of many life-forms. Adapting to this profound climatic change will be enormously difficult for many species, since the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats will make it impossible for them to escape the heat and expand into more hospitable areas.

Some people have the temerity to act as if this destruction were the inevitable result of progress, the necessary by-product of the human path to world domination. But if that is so, then our ecological conquest is a pyrrhic victory. Not only do these destructive forces erode the potential of the biota to sustain humans more efficiently, but they have massively negative impacts on species living in those destroyed habitats that are critical to maintaining the ecosystems and of enormous benefit to humans. To biologists, a record of species loss is a particularly important measure of environmental destruction. Species, the fundamental units in biology, are groups of individuals, reproductively isolated from other similar groups, that share a unique evolutionary history. They are the points on the map of the biological world. With the upsurge of the human invasion, some species have become marginalized in fringe habitats, hanging on in small highly vulnerable numbers. In other cases we’ve taken no prisoners; species have been entirely eliminated.

The casualty list of extinguished or endangered large animals likely resulted from hunting by humans started about fifty thousand years ago. Those casualties are easily recognized, offering vivid images of the mighty and the fallen–cave bears, woolly mammoths, giant kangaroos, and Irish elks. Most of the species currently under threat or facing extinction would hardly be recognizable to all but a few specialists; some are not even known to science. We can estimate that the destruction of natural habitats along with the dark forces of overexploitation, invasive species, pollution, and human-induced climate change means that every year thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of species are going extinct. This means that 30 percent and perhaps as much as 50 percent of all species might be extinct by the middle of this century. Not all these endangered species are the familiar and the cherished–the tiger, the polar bear, the right whale, and numerous birds. They are also certain moths, midges, wasps, flies, worms, flowers, fungi, protists, algae, and bacteria that keep the energy flowing through the global ecosystem.

The statistics on current and projected extinction of species can be rolled out, and they have been in many papers and books. But what do all the horrific numbers mean? After this massive destruction will life starkly change for the human and other remaining denizens of the planet? Various scenarios are proposed for the future of the biota and the future of our world resulting from the current catastrophe. Many of these are far from precise; there are many things we do not know and many events we cannot forecast. Nonetheless, there is also a sobering baseline certainty about the nature of the Earth shock we are experiencing.

How did we get to this place, this pivotal and troublesome moment? Perhaps we have relied too much on a conviction, whether explicit or subconscious, that nature will sustain itself in spite of our meddling. The fossil record tells us otherwise, however. We learn from it that life, notwithstanding its vast diversity and apparent robustness, has an unpredictable and tenuous quality. Life’s history is tumultuous. The present-day diversity of life–some 1.75 million named species and doubtless millions more yet to be discovered–is but the surface coating of the multitudinous life-forms on this planet that have appeared and disappeared over eons. There are no more arthrodiran fishes with their robotic-looking armored heads, nor are there trilobites sporting spines and hundreds of beady eyes. Gone are the dinosaurs as tall as a three-story town house. Gone are the beautiful coiled-shelled ammonites, the brachiopods or lampshells, dragonflies with the wingspans of seagulls, ferns as tall as date palms, trees with barks like crocodile skin, twelve-foot-long dragons with sail fins along their backs, Australian mammals as big as rhinoceroses, lemurs as big as gorillas, giant hairy elephantine mammoths, countless small fungi, bacteria, pond organisms, insects, and all but one of the nearly twenty species of human and humanlike apes.

So, during this long history of appearance, flourish, and decimation, what spawned the living world so familiar to us? What are the roots of our lively planet, the wild, the cultivated, the harvested, the stripped, and the scorched habitats of us landlubber humans? To answer these questions, we must focus on entire ecosystems, the name we give for the complex, interconnected networks of energy exchange among huge numbers of different species in a single habitat. It would seem that the modern land ecosystems, whether pristine or altered, contain only an echo of an ancient world where long-necked seventy-ton swamp monsters cropped the foliage off huge, grotesquely twisted trees. Indeed, even scientists have long emphasized the radical transformation of ecosystems in the aftermath of species extinction, climate change, and the jostling of landmasses over the past millions of years.

But another history is emerging, one more accurate and illuminating for contemplating our evolutionary past as well as our environmental future. This book is based on the late-breaking evidence for that revised history. It covers not only new discoveries and new ideas but major questions that still challenge us. The quest of science is never completely fulfilled; science would indeed degrade to ennui if there were no remaining puzzles, dilemmas, or debates. The book is meant to provide a statement of the ancientness, resiliency, and, at the same time, the vulnerability of the biological world we call modern. I argue that this modern world took shape certainly much earlier than the last few thousand years that have marked human dominion over the land. It indeed long preceded the 7-million-year-old appearance of humanlike species in gallery forests of the African continent. The essential architecture of our modern land habitats–in scientific parlance, the present-day terrestrial ecosystem–was built in the very distant past, before Tyrannosaurus rex stalked the Earth and before our furry mammalian forerunners exceeded the size of a house cat.

This book is a chronicle of 100 million years of modern living. Roughly that long ago, while dinosaurs were the big animals on Earth, our planet’s terrestrial ecosystem began its metamorphosis into one like our own. The chapters in Part One, The Way of the World, provide the diagnostics: the fleeting and threatened wildlife in the crypts of nature; our knowledge and our ignorance about the diversity of life; the dominance of diverse insects, plants, and microbial life-forms; the stark statistics for the current mass extinction event, which is strikingly reminiscent of some mass extinction events we have learned about in the past; the chugging energetics of modern ecosystems and their instability in the face of human expansion. The final chapter of this section describes how science has developed the theory of evolution, the great explanation for the diversification of all present and past life, and how denying the power of this theory through ignorance or antipathy not only impedes enlightenment but threatens any practical strategy for our own survival.

In Part Two, The World Becomes Modern, I trace the roots of the modern ecosystem, from 475 million years ago, when creatures from the sea invaded the land, to some 300 million years later, when the dark pine forests and fern gardens of the early dinosaurs dominated the landscape. To understand the scale of this history, we must dissect another dimension, time, and learn how the calendar of Earth’s history marks both the birth and death of species and their replacement by new species as well as calibrates the milestones in the history of the modern ecosystem. This is an epic about a topsy-turvy world, the saga of the rise and fall of biological empires that culminates in a 100-million-year-old realm teeming with florid color and texture. I make the case for the intimate likeness between the present and past on the basis of many factors, not the least the appearance and enrichment of flowering plants and the coincident diversification of pollinating insects such as bees, wasps, and butterflies.

Part Three, Death and Resurrection, deals with the destruction–possibly the incineration–of life coincident with the asteroid impact 65 million years ago, a catastrophe that wiped out all those dinosaurs except their living descendants, the birds, and erased more than 70 percent of all the species then living on Earth. Nonetheless, the basic architecture of what I call the modern ecosystem was, though battered, not completely shattered. Within a few million years following that dinosaur apocalypse, the garden was restored, albeit with a few changes. It bore more fruit, grew grassy around its edges, and was subject to vigorous cropping by big mammals that filled the ecological roles of the extinguished dinosaurs. Still, the prolonged recovery of the ecosystem was not at all complete.

What are the current state and prognosis of this 100-million-year-old ecosystem? Part Four, Terra Humana, describes how humans evolved and took possession of the Earth and how the biota from the dinosaur age has been plowed, harvested, exploited, destroyed, and, in some rare salutary instances, even sustained. Chapters in this section deal with the evolution of the human family and our ancient roles as exterminators and then cultivators. Subsequent chapters describe the dark forces of habitat destruction, overhunting and overfishing, invasive species, and pollution, all drivers of extinction promoted by our own species. The penultimate chapter looks at the arresting new evidence that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are changing the climate in fundamental ways, often to the detriment of species and ecosystems. The final chapter builds on the past and the present to forecast, with understandable qualification, the evolutionary future of our own species and other species. Here I also cite some examples of our remarkable capacity for mitigating some of the destruction engulfing the planet, efforts that must catch on in a much more comprehensive, global-scale way if we are to improve the odds for a sustainable future.

The mark of history that shaped the present-day planetary biota and its diverse species–the source of food, medicine, materials, and aesthetic pleasures so important to human lives–is indeed a profound one. But the mere last slice of this chronicle, the last few decades of our history, is perhaps the most dramatic and, from the perspective of our own self-interest, the most alarming. A forecast of how those systems may change brings us back to the central argument of this book. What has happened since the Industrial Revolution, especially during the last few decades, and what will happen in the next few decades are not simply degradations of various habitats that are accustomed to disruption and ready-built for response. We are seeing an unprecedented transformation of an ecosystem that evolution has refined to wondrous complexity and powerful function over 100 million years. As a function of its wealth and its countless benefits to ever more needy and voracious humankind, the modern ecosystem may be today facing its greatest threat in its 100-million-year life span. The wild garden that embraces us, and compels us to strike a balance between our perceived needs and our existence in a sustainable biological world, indeed has a long history of cultivation that is again under grave threat.

Many of the classic and powerful disclosures on environmental deterioration by Rachel Carson and others eventually in the 1990s inspired a much broader perception that something was actually amiss. Perhaps pivotal dates came with two events, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 and the Kyoto Conference in 1997, events that galvanized many of the world’s nations (but sadly not all, including the United States) and prompted the first massive efforts in developing international collaborative strategies that involved conservation and self-restraint. Thus in the last decade of the twentieth century a sense of urgency about the destruction of the natural world inspired a scientific effort to identify, once and for all, what we have and what we are losing. The mission was outlined by some key scientific leaders, including Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, the indefatigable ant specialist and evolutionary biologist. Wilson was the first to publish the word biodiversity in the 1988 proceedings from a conference organized by W. J. Rosen, who originally coined the term. Biodiversity refers to the totality of diverse species and the myriad interconnections of those species. When it first appeared in print, the word was recondite, even esoteric. Now it is common parlance for scientists, environmentalist, economists, and policy makers.

The current decimation of species is commonly called the biodiversity crisis. Wilson himself wrote a book about this crisis entitled The Diversity of Life, published in 1992, a clarion call for urgent, high-priority work to be done by biologists and for swift and effective conservation action based on their results. Subsequently there have been many books, including one that I edited (The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts), that have addressed this problem. Yet it seemed to me, from my paleontological point of view, there was another dimension to this problem and to the saga of our biota, a history with a rich narrative, that needed further probing. Much of that history has been revised in the last five years with fresh discoveries about the fossil record. We are now, for example, in a new phase of exploration, and we better understand how the evolution of species and ecosystems has dovetailed with the physical transformation of the planet–the changes in atmosphere, oceans, and landforms. Such new insights have great implications for our prognostications about such matters as land fragmentation, invasive species, global climate change, and the current mass extinction event.

This book draws heavily on the past but in many ways it is more about our present and especially our future. I am a paleontologist by profession, but I must confess that beneath my professional interest lies a strong emotional attachment to the wonder of that past world. It is important to me and to us all. When I was younger and newer to science, it seemed that the fossils we found and the sites we uncovered generated their own isolated, autonomous awe, one remote, even detached from the present. But I have found it increasingly difficult to separate that past from the present. In relating this history of our modern ecosystem, I hope to deepen a sense of the extraordinary biological wealth that was cultivated through the epochs and that we have inherited. When an item is up for auction, its value is often elevated by knowledge about the source and the intricate history behind the piece. My unabashed bias is that a great history lends value to something and that this increase in value provides a truer sense of what we have and what we risk not having. Perhaps, I hope not too hubristically, this might help cultivate yet more motivation for stewardship at a time of great crisis.

Part One

THE WAY OF THE WORLD

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

–William Shakespeare, Hamlet

1

A CREATURE IN THE FOREST

The most precious things in the world may be the things we never see. Perhaps at this very moment in a rain-doused stand of pristine forest in the Truong Son Mountains in central Vietnam, one of the last and least explored wildernesses on Earth, a creature with long, slightly recurved horns is emerging from an undergrowth of bamboo, palms, and saplings in the shadow under the forest canopy. A fleeting sunburst between the trees highlights an elegant black stripe on a chestnut back that looks like a signature of ancient calligraphy. As the 220-pound animal bends its thick neck down to a stream, it plants the cloven hoof of each foot on the bank. The sun catches the sharp etch of a white band above the feet, an anatomical accoutrement that looks like a bad practical joke, as if the animal were sporting black-and-white spats. In the shadows a tricolor tail of brown, cream, and black whisks against the first battalion of morning flies.

This scenario is entirely plausible but has probably never been witnessed. Yet the beast by the stream is not a fiction. This is the mysterious saola, scientifically known as Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, of Vietnam and Laos. The name saola is a local one, referring to the beast’s horns (sao, spindle; la, post), which resemble the parallel posts on the spinning wheels used by people in the region.

The saola is one of the rarest creatures on Earth; few specimens have been collected, and scientists have never seen this animal in the wild. Most biologists, like George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have tracked it by surveying the horns and other remnants of hunting forays in villages along the border between Laos and Vietnam. Most remarkably, the saola was first discovered by the Vietnamese ecologist Do Tuoc during a field survey of central Vietnam’s Vu Quang Nature Reserve in 1992. In 1812 the great naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier had declared that no more large, hoofed, herbivorous mammals would be discovered in any part of the world. But here is this creature whose discovery did not come until the last decade of the twentieth century.

The saola, Pseudoryx nghetinhensis

Aside from a few color markings and its long recurved horns, the saola looks like a typical hoofed mammal–say, a deer or an antelope. Indeed, its appearance is a helpful clue to its reasonable scientific identification. The saola is related to deer and antelope, but it is also very different from these animals. The scientific name Pseudoryx nghetinhensis is from the Greek, meaning false oryx, suggesting the saola is deceptively similar in appearance, especially in its long curved horns, to the better-known oryxes; the second part of the name simply means of nghetinh, a regional name that combines the names of two provinces in Vietnam, Ha Tinh and Nghe An, where the animal has been seen. Pseudoryx denotes the group, in traditional classification the genus, to which it belongs. The second name is meant to distinguish this species from all other species of Pseudoryx. Thus the horse, Equus caballus, and the donkey, Equus asinus, are separate but similar species that both belong to the genus Equus. The saola is so distinct, however, that it gets its own genus; there is as yet no other species of Pseudoryx.

As for the broader affinities of Pseudoryx, the cloven hooves, the shapes of its grinding teeth, and the structure of its anklebones are giveaways, demonstrating that the saola belongs to a diverse order of mammals known as artiodactyls, the cloven-hoofed mammals that include antelopes, bovids, giraffes, deer, camels, pigs, and hippos. Surprisingly, there is new evidence from DNA and anatomical features that whales might have diverged from some very early and primitive artiodactyl group, perhaps from a lineage that also led to pigs and hippos. Artiodactyls, the dominant large plant-eating mammals of today, were even more diverse in the past. The saola fits clearly within the artiodactyl family Bovidae, the group that contains cows, bison, many African antelopes, goats, and sheep, but just where it fits within this family is a trickier problem. Some students of saola anatomy have assigned it to the tribe Caprini, which includes goats, chamois, musk oxen, and relatives, but recent studies based on DNA put it within the tribe Bovini, which includes cattle and buffalo. For now this alliance seems to stick, and more comprehensive studies of both genes and anatomy are anticipated.

Since the saola was first discovered, researchers have accumulated only a small collection of twenty partial specimens, including three complete skins and two skulls. The saola has even taken pictures of itself, images snapped when the animal unknowingly tripped a camera as it trudged through the steep thick forest of the Truong Son. Yet these animals have not been observed up close by anyone except the people of the forest who have hunted them. Today locating the whereabouts of the saola is both a scientific mission and a sacred one, for this precious animal is making its last stand. It is estimated that only a few hundred saolas may be left in the forests of Vietnam and Laos, in a total area of about two thousand square miles (five thousand square kilometers). Sadly ironic is the increased local effort to find and kill these animals because of their great interest to outsiders and their presumed monetary value. In the Vu Quang Reserve twenty-one saolas were killed and three were taken alive and brought to Hanoi between 1992 and 1994. In Laos seven saolas were caught, but only one survived, and then just for three weeks. This individual, a female, was shy and docile, allowing herself to be petted and hand-fed. The Hmong people of Laos call the saola saht supahp, the polite animal. Unfortunately, it may be too polite for its own good; its numbers are dwindling as it falls prey to hunters and its habitat is winnowed away by loggers and farmers. In recent years measures have been taken to establish more nature reserves and to strengthen their protection; a new initiative extends some of these protected areas across the international border between Vietnam and Laos.

In the spring of 2002 I had a chance to observe at close range the efforts to preserve Vietnam’s wildlife, though that was not my primary assignment. At the behest of my employer, the American Museum of Natural History, I traveled to Hanoi with the museum’s president, Ellen Futter, and several other officials to announce the opening of the first major U.S. exhibition on Vietnamese culture since the Vietnam War. The exhibit, to be curated by Dr. Laurel Kendall of the American Museum, an expert in Asian religious and cultural ritual and practices, was jointly developed with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, and its director, Nguyen Van Huy, was cocurator. The topic turned out to be as complex as it was fascinating. Vietnam has more than fifty ethnic groups, not all of which could be fairly represented in one exhibit. Nevertheless, the exhibition opened to wide acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in New York in the spring of 2004, and by spring 2006 it had been installed in Hanoi.

I was also in Vietnam for a second, biological purpose. Soon after arriving, I joined Dr. Eleanor Sterling, the talented director of the American Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC), launched in 1995 to link the formidable effort being made by the museum’s curators to discover diverse species all over the world with conservation needs and action. Vietnam, with its cultural diversity, its dynamic economy, and its unique but threatened natural habitats, was a logical target. In 1998 the CBC had joined forces with the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources (IEBR) in Hanoi, the World Wildlife Fund Indochina Programme, and BirdLife International’s Vietnam Programme to make an exhaustive survey of important forestland and to apply the findings to help the government establish secure reserves. In addition to the research and conservation applications, the project was intended to enlighten and educate people about the tenuous natural wonders of Vietnam. To this end, Eleanor wrote, with coauthors Martha Maud Hurley and Le Duc Minh, Vietnam: A Natural History, a comprehensive and handsomely illustrated volume which was published in 2006.

Vietnam and Laos for decades had been responding to local and international demand for timber. During the 1990s, Vietnam ranked second only to Thailand in exports of wood from mainland Southeast Asia to the European Union and Japan. By the end of the century logging in Vietnam had reputedly declined; there had been a sharp decrease in economically retrievable timber, and the government acknowledged that runaway depletion of forestland would soon deprive the country of this resource entirely. Deforestation, a complex process not simply confined to logging, is not always easy to estimate, especially when reliable records of past forest cover and forest loss are nonexistent. The real rate at which deforestation in Vietnam slowed is controversial, and reports about it are conflicting. Of main concern to us were the primary forests, or those that show little or no evidence of past or present human exploitation. Vietnam purportedly lost a staggering 51 percent of its primary forests between 2000 and 2005.

The logging industry is the blunt edge of the wedge into the forest. Logging roads become lifelines for migrating people who slash and burn, grow crops, hunt for meat, establish villages, carry on commerce, build dams and irrigation systems, and develop towns and cities–in other words, do all the things people normally do when they colonize new land. We have seen this pattern of invasion throughout the world–in the Congo, in the Amazon, and, a few centuries back, in the virgin woodlands of North America. Whatever people gain from the forest in the way of goods and cropland, they may lose in the form of invaluable biodiversity. Vietnam is now a signature example of this problem. In its postindependence phase since the war with the United States came to an end in the 1970s, the Vietnamese government relocated almost 5 million people from the crowded lowlands along the coast and the Mekong Delta to the biologically diverse uplands. The exploitation of land was intentional; logging was succeeded by agriculture, including vast plantations of such cash crops as coffee. Unfortunately, the government officials who endorsed this transformation overlooked the fact that these fragile upland forests were incapable of supporting so huge an influx of humanity.

If these threats to Vietnam’s natural habitats weighed heavily on Eleanor Sterling, she did not show it. Two mornings after my arrival in Hanoi she greeted me at my hotel with a broad smile. Eleanor knows what it is like to experience the profound and magical isolation of the forest. Her dissertation fieldwork as a doctoral candidate at Yale’s School of Forestry required that she observe, over several years, the secretive comings and goings of lemurs in a thick stand of rainforest on an uninhabited island off the northeastern coast of Madagascar. But Eleanor is not simply a reclusive scientist; she is also a person comfortable with the world at large, an internationalist, who quickly learned the most appropriate dialect of Vietnamese for her work. Her sincerity and quiet optimism attract many fans and young team members, who believe in her and in what they are doing.

Today we are going to the institute. They are a great bunch, good friends, great scientists, Eleanor announced.

Will I get to see a saola specimen? I asked. I wanted to skip the main course for the ice-cream cone.

Yes, but first you will have to work.

In this case, work meant a meeting or two or three, an activity that fails to delight me. I too am a field person, and I had just escaped a New York full of meetings. Fortunately, the staff at the IEBR turned out to be delightful. Particularly memorable was Professor Nguyen Tien Hiep, who greeted Eleanor with a hug of sibling affection. Dr. Hiep loves the field too. With his wide, bright eyes and a round face always poised for a laugh, he rhapsodizes about plant life like a forest wise man, a youthful Yoda. We followed Dr. Hiep up a few flights of external stairs, like a rickety fire escape, to his office. There we sat and sipped tea as he proudly showed us his latest pressings of plants collected in the wild. His workplace, with its windows open to rustling trees that crowded the building, seemed more like a tree house than an academic office.

The forests of Vietnam are distinctive not just for their saolas and other rare mammals. Their flowers and other plants, many of them not found anywhere else in the world, are showy and diverse. A special gift to Vietnam is its cycad flora. These spiky, somewhat palmlike plants are not palms at all, but nonflowering plants that hold seeds in cones consisting of overlapping seed-bearing leaves. The blossomlike appearance of these seed-bearing structures has inspired some botanists to argue that they are closely related to the most primitive flowering plants. But cycads preceded the appearance of flowering plants by more than 100 million years. They heralded the Mesozoic Era, the age of the dinosaurs, beginning about 250 million years ago,