At a time when most life on Earth is either human or livestock and populations of wild animals have crashed by more than 70% in the past 50 years, Sophie Yeo’s Nature’s Ghosts could not be more timely.
The British environmental journalist asks a simple question: when did nature cease to be wild?
The answer, of course, is everything but simple. There are the obvious time markers: the Industrial Revolution, the extinction of megafauna, our taming of wild animals and plants as we settled to work the land. But as Yeo time-travels through each of the periods that undoubtedly changed the landscape, she continues to reach further back in time, discovering a human imprint on the environment even beyond our own species.
Until recently, the oldest evidence of humans shaping their surroundings for their benefit came from Lake Malawi. There, remains of pollen, charcoal and stone tools suggest Homo sapiens used fire to convert dense forests into open bushland 85,000 years ago. But we now know, from an old lignite quarry in Germany, that Neanderthals also burnt a forest to set up camp in its ashes during the last interglacial period, some 125,000 years ago. They stayed for two millennia, beating back any encroaching trees to maintain the world they had created to make their life easier. Grasslands attracted the animals they hunted and they encouraged the growth of nuts and berries.
Reading this account, it quickly becomes clear that there is no specific point in time when nature was pristine. Instead, Yeo describes a constantly shifting baseline and an ever-changing world. Humans are a keystone species, tightly entwined with environmental change.
Clearly, as the human population has grown, the direction of travel has been towards ever poorer wild diversity. Even the places we treasure as wilderness today are docile compared with the continent-swaddling ice sheets or impenetrable forests of the past, let alone the long-lost beasts.
Given the lack of a baseline, Yeo explores the dilemma we face when trying to restore nature. Prevention of further extinctions is an obvious goal since human activities are driving endangered species closer to the brink. But Yeo argues that “rewilding”, an approach that often involves the reintroduction of species that were once part of an ecosystem, sometimes focuses too much on recreating a primeval landscape in a modern world.
“The natural world has never experienced one perfect moment of Eden,” she writes. “Rewinding the clock is not about the slavish recreation of the landscape at an arbitrary moment in time, but rather refreshing the memory of the natural world as a whole.”
Yeo sees people as integral to nature restoration – as long as they are part of it rather than exploiting it – and functioning ecosystems as the main goal, even if they no longer resemble their past composition. Despite the accelerating pace of our destructive impact, she finds plenty of examples where people manage to live within their ecological means. There are the hay makers in Transylvania who tend their meadows to support insects, which in turn attract lizards and frogs, birds and mammals. There are the ice fishers in Finland who maintain a traditional harvest method and a fragile seasonal ecosystem.
Despite several eloquently described examples from different geographical regions, Nature’s Ghosts largely focuses on European landscapes and their deep history of human intervention. Younger island ecosystems are missing, even though many represent ecological time capsules with a clear delineation of the times before people arrived. With a few exceptions, indigenous peoples don’t feature strongly either, despite passages about the obliterating effect colonialism had on landscapes across the world.
These gaps may stand out for readers in the Pacific, but Yeo is an engaging and convincing storyteller, worth following along as she explores our planet’s past to remind us of what is worth restoring, or even necessary to bring back.
Nature Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back, by by Sophie Yeo (HarperCollins, $59.99 hb), is out now.
