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@hans1671102377 · 26 Nov 2022

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The decline of the veins All that is alive

Human greed has destroyed the natural world. If we continue on the current path, the damage to our environment can ever be repaired?

Annie Proulx

November 23, 2022 — published in nr. 47 The green Amsterdammer

Morning at where the Ottauquechee meets the Connecticut rivers in the state of Vermont, USA © John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

I believe that the time in which you are born has a major influence on the way you look at the relationship between humans and the natural world. I myself was born in 1935 in eastern Connecticut, which was still rural at the time. Both of my parents were descended from seventeenth-century settlers. In 1935, it was two generations since their families swapped their independent farm for work in the textile factory. At that time, they were struggling with the more modern transition from the textile factory to office jobs and the middle class. Yet both families still kept chickens and a cow. There were many furniture makers and artists in my mother's family. They were all naturalists who knew about the habits and habitats of birds, insects and amphibians. They knew the name of each wild flower and tree and knew what to use its wood for.

The family had a camping spot on Lake Quinebaug, where my nephews, nieces and I learned to swim. They respected mossy, quiet forests and experienced excitement over and over again when they saw the hawks migrate northward in the spring. My earliest memory is that of the sunlight that shines between the leaves while I'm sleeping under a tree. Thanks to this family, who lived in exactly that decade, I got a glimpse into the infinite complexity of the natural world. I have my roots in a childhood where recognizing a sassafras bush by its mitt-shaped leaves felt like meeting a friend at the edge of the forest. I thought I knew something about the world.

As I grew older, read and traveled a lot, I learned that the 1930s had been an excellent period of abhorrent human action within societies that considered themselves “civilized”. These were years of economic decline, of global depression and mass poverty, severe persistent drought, prison and concentration camps, dictators, fierce nationalist demagogy, atrocities committed against ethnic minorities, deforestation, lynchings, gangsters and black trafficking. In the name of ever-advancing Progress, Western countries robbed both their own territories and those of other countries of raw materials, wood, fish and wildlife. They built dams and drained wetlands.

It was during this decade that the great ivory-billed woodpecker became extinct in the southern United States. Riverbeds were dammed and straightened by governments and entrepreneurs. They suffocated the coastline with cairns, blew up sections of the mountain, and dug deep mines. They polluted the air. And yet, the start of my life in the middle of this infamous decade, which was part of a larger time frame sometimes called the “psychozoic,” now seems like something from another world, like a time trip far away. Today, I can see that period as the harbinger of today's terrible things. But in 1938, I was three and knew nothing about murderous dictators, or triumphant loan sharks who destroyed untouched nature, or about pandemics, revolts, and toxic demagogic politics.

The private rural world of my childhood was teeming with the unknown and surprising. One day, my mother led me via berry bushes to an unexpected country, where she made the leap from a piece of dry land to first one and then the other pole. I tried to follow her. I managed to reach an unstable root ball and looked into the water. Something stirred in a soft cloud of mud. My mother's arm went up and down in a descriptive half arc. However, the next pole was far away and the zigzag-shaped threads of a web containing a yellow-black wasp spider hung between the grass stalks. Should I take the plunge, I would either end up in the sinister water or in the spider's arms. So I raised my throat and my mother carried me back to a place where we had solid ground under our feet again.

We continued our journey along the edge and, where possible, to the center of the country, past dead tree knots that were guarded by ranting birds, and lined pools of water lilies that no perfumer has ever been able to imitate the fuzzy scent of. Thousands of cobweb threads were strung between the stems and the reeds, attached to half-sunken tree trunks; frogs peered over the edges of pumpkin leaves with their bulging eyes; further on, unidentified creatures rustled for shelter. It was scary and exciting at the same time.

In this completely unknown and strange place, I had my first experience of the geographical Other, my first sensation of entering terra incognita. Polish artist-cum-writer Bruno Schulz caught that feeling when he wrote: “In our childhood, we acquire the images that will be decisive for us. They act as the threads of the solution where the meaning of the world crystallizes for us.“For me, this statement is very true.

The memory of that swamp spider would stay with me forever. Years later, I heard that it may well be that the zigzag-shaped center line or stabilimentum in the webs of wheelweb spiders is intended to strengthen, thus protecting the web against the disastrous blunders of flying birds. Some believe it can attract prey, as the stabilimentum consists of a shiny white, non-sticky silk thread that reflects UV rays that can be seen by both birds and insects, but stabilimenta reduce spiders' weitas by almost thirty percent, according to a study in Behavioral Ecology.

Others suggested, perhaps somewhat far-fetched, that they protected a large colorful spider from predators thanks to a camouflage effect. It is also sometimes thought that spiders can get rid of their excess silk, as the silk glands must be empty before the process of making more silk can begin. Another possibility, which indeed has some indications, is for female spiders to make stabilimenta to attract males. Anyway, the only thing no one believes in anymore is the original idea that a stabilimentum actually gives the web stability. In short, we don't know why some spiders weave those zigzag lines into their webs, any more than we know when the next natural disaster will hit us.

Female Red-crowned Rooster migrating south in the Connecticut woods © Robert Winkler/Getty Images

Since that first adventure in the wetland, I've been sharing my mother's joy in this precious place, but over the years, I came to understand that the joy of seeing landscapes and untouched nature will be inevitable and inextricably intertwined with ever-increasing pain. In this century, many people are suffering from ecological grief and climate depression due to deforestation, the disappearance of bees and ash trees, the loss of coral reefs and kelp forests; we see polar bears on their hopeless quest for the robust ice of earlier years, and prairie grouses confronted with mega stables, wind turbines, and motorways in their breeding grounds.

Identifying yourself with where you come from down to every fiber of your body can be just as strong in humans as it is in birds and other animals. In prehistory, this identification started before you could focus your eyes. Since people were constantly moving through their landscape, it continued like this for the rest of their lives. This close connection between humans and their environment is reflected in significant Apache placenames, such as “Green Rocks Stick Side by Side”, “Grey Willow Around the Bend” and “Path Beyond the Scorched Rocks”.

Human migratory movements meant that our migrant ancestors broke the connection they had with the ancient landscape. Their memories were the emotional clusters that linked them to ancestral geography: birches in spring rain, a rocky cove. By now, few people will be able to identify with that old woman in Frank O'Connor's story The Long Road to Ummera, who fought her way home to die like a salmon swimming upstream. Her desire was finally fulfilled, where “the lake shone with mosquitoes; the sun's rays wallowed like a big mill wheel that poured out its abundant milky sunlight over the hills () and the little black cattle in the fields with scarecrows”.

In my life alone, I have witnessed a thousand ways in which people have damaged ecosystems and animal habitats. Worldwide, forests were destroyed and more than sixty percent of the rivers were dammed, breaking the age-old notion of the web of life. We've surrendered ourselves to a storm of greed that not only affected biodiversity and the natural world, but destroyed it outright. Since 1950, the world's population has grown by almost two hundred percent. Our growing, hungry populations are sloshing over the edges, as expressed in the title by David Quammens Spillover (2012). Quammen compares the explosive growth of the world population with the outbreak of a caterpillar plague. While we were clearing large forests and transforming untouched nature into cattle pasture and drained peatlands into cropland, we encountered other species, birds, mammals, reptiles, bacteria and viruses. Viruses whose hosts and habitats we have seriously dislocated and displaced, so that, for example, sars, ebola, mers, the cluster of variants of the “swine flu” and the coronavirus were forced to look for other places as well as other hosts, including humans.

So we humans, who can't even live together peacefully, could “manage” the entire Earth?

The fact that Asian countries are hotbeds of new viruses is partly due to strong regional population growth and massive deforestation, which are also taking place in areas where agriculture and ecology have been mixed for millennia. The degradation of ancient forests populated by microorganisms brings people into contact with viruses that we should avoid. Bats pollinate many plants and eat large amounts of harmful insects, but they also carry numerous viruses. When we drive them out of their ancient habitats, they will find a replacement for their caves in the barns, cellars and niches of urban buildings. By the way, these animals do not transmit viruses directly to humans. Often, there is an intermediate host that is traded or eaten by humans. Before the SARS virus in China, this was the civet cat and in the Middle East, mers could spread via camels. Although both bats and pangolins were at the top of the suspect list of coronavirus agents, the latter have now been cleared of all blame. In the journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution, published by Elsevier, the authors of a study into the origin of covid-19 drew the conclusion: “The true triggers for epidemics and pandemics are the forms of social organization, the ways in which society organizes contacts between humans and animals and the flywheel effects foreseen by modern society, ie contacts, the redesign of land, markets, international trade, mobility, etc.“In that “and so forth” lies our future.

Netherlands, Voorthuizen. Green frog on water lily leaf © Els Branderhorst/Buiten-Beeld/ANP

Deforestation for more arable land opens another door behind which we find the pulsating bulk of factory farming, in particular poultry and pigs. Rob Wallace's collection of blog essays, Big Farms Make Big Flu, offers a combative investigation into the large-scale agricultural monoculture that replaced wetlands, pastures and forests.

Our species is not equipped to notice subtle, slow changes. We are actually living in the moment. (This feature explains the success of the Internet store Amazon).) There is a tree and we cut it down: then we immediately see that something has changed. But if there is a tree and we see it again a year later, we are blind to the new lots on the trunk (which are “similar” to the tree); we see no change. We are never surprised by 'the imperishable difference in the corner of the field'. We are simply blind to the slow metamorphosis of the natural world. Because we've freed ourselves from that (or maybe better: thinking away). Except during our annual vacation, when we travel by vehicle to a nature reserve or go on an adventurous nature cruise to the Galápagos Islands or the Southern Ocean, where we damage nature even more.

In order to notice gradual changes, we must return to the same regions for years, week after week, season after season, and observe new life, flowering and decay and pay attention to the local animals and the tidal effects of the water. So watch carefully, in line with how early humans lived. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) from Concord, Massachusetts, observed the same thing over and over again. Although Thoreau had frequent tuberculosis for most of his adult life, he was on the road for many miles each spring and then wrote down the dates of the flowering period of wild plant species in his lousy handwriting. In the period 1852-1856, his notes were very extensive. Before 1857 and 1858, when the TB flared up again, data on some plants are missing. In 1860, he undertook a trip to Minnesota, his last long trip ever. After returning to Concord, he edited his diaries. In December 1861, on a rainy day, he went out to count the annual rings of a tree trunk. Soaked and shivering from the cold, he came home. He subsequently suffered from bronchitis, which worsened his tuberculosis. In May 1862, he was too ill to get out of bed. He died while the new flowers of spring blossomed.

Many of his busy neighbors in Concord saw Thoreau as a loser, a lunging fool who wandered through the woods instead of hoeing the field or making the anvil reverberate. Yet some followed his example. For example, on his farm in Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold kept similar notes about the flowering periods of spring flowers for years, and so did many forgotten rural people who paid attention to phenology. Also in Concord, and closer to Thoreau's time, there was, for example, Alfred Winslow Hosmer (1851-1903), a photographer, dry goods dealer and an ardent admirer of Thoreau. Sixteen years after Thoreau's death, Hosmer decided to paint on the spring canvas of wildflower flowering periods. He maintained that until 1902. The biologists Richard B. 150 years later, Primack and Abe Miller-Rushing followed in their footsteps and observed the 43 plants that were most common in Thoreau and Hosmer. They used their comparative data as hard evidence of global warming. Primack wrote about women's pink shoes and his own wildflower searches around Concord, referring to Thoreau's notebooks: “In 1853, he [Thoreau] noted that this species first blossomed on May 20. In the following years, it was between May 24 and 30 () But if I look for the pink women's shoe on May 20 today, I'm too late. In Concord, women's shoes have brought forward its first heyday compared to the past by three weeks. Only by juxtaposing these notes — Thoreau's notes from the fifties of the nineteenth century and my own observations from 160 years later — was I able to discover the changes in flowering times.’

Maple leaves cover the path of an old forest in the Hot Rain Forest. Olympic National Park, on the coast of Washington, Forks © Larry Clouse/CSM/Shutterstock/ANP

Today's Thoreaus are the Inuits and the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, Miami, Siberia, and Easter Island, who see water levels rise, and the Yakuts, who see their land sink and disappear as the permafrost thaws and collapses under their roads and lands. Some still honor the art of observation. Like the ecologist Charles Crisafulli, who, two months after the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helen explored the ash landscape in 1980. There he discovered a plant, the “crucified roller fern” or cryptogramma crispa, a true pioneer type that dares to grow on slopes of acidic debris and is the companion of volcanoes there. Since then, Crisafulli has returned there every year to greet the plant again.

In The Whale and the Supercomputer, Charles Wohlforth investigated the tensions and similarities between two groups that have a lot to do with climate change in the Far North: indigenous peoples and scientists. When an older satellite was replaced by the so-called Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (Ice-2) in 2018, the technological equipment became as important as human perception. Ice-2 provides very accurate details about the thickness of the Antarctic ice above water level, and also does so over a large surface area. With a margin of error of a few centimetres, this equipment can indicate where the ice melts and where it thickens.

Yet there is a gaping gap between our former idealistic reverence for the web of life, that wordless union of everything on Earth, and the contemporary world that humans control. It shows how an interdivided and impulsive species “can] manage the entire planet as a combined physical and biological system,” as was the goal of dr. Thomas Lovejoy, the well-known advocate of a market-based conservation system. So we humans, who can't even manage to live together peacefully, could “manage” the entire Earth? May we guard against the app-happy future of artificial intelligence, geoengineering and gigs controlled by Big Tech.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the signs of the changing climate in the West of America were upon me when the spinning pines in the Rocky Mountains forests became ill and died en masse due to both drought and bark beetle infestation. These highly flammable grey forests scattered across the Rockies prompted me to write a novel in which I followed the trail of deforestation for three hundred years. At the time of writing, the same western forests are falling prey to the raging flames.

Peatlands cover three percent of the Earth's surface — more than all rainforests combined

After moving from Wyoming to the Pacific Northwest coastline, I had to get to know a new place where land and water interact. Just recognizing the intertwined layers of the estuarine habitats took time. Nothing seemed to have a solid existence. From the tides, the sea level, the bull's ankle, the eroding cliffs, the lives of shorebirds to the forests and their undergrowth: the explanation of each phenomenon was accompanied by the explanation of persistent problems. I constantly heard comparisons with the recent past, where lush kelp forests near the coast were a kind of paradise for marine life. That was when large parts of the Olympic Mountains had not yet been mapped, the waters of orcas were swirling, and the wandering whales — not the cruise ships — were in service in the Neptune domain.

I read about the huge oyster beds and giant gooseneck mussels that the region was famous for. But the construction of settlers and the runoff of sewage from the growing cities put an end to that past golden age. Even the ocean was no longer the same, as the alkalinity was too high in acidity. In some places, the coastline has been raised with cairns and breakwaters. There, homeowners mistakenly believe they can cope with rising water. A busy railway is ruining much of the mainland's coastline. The roar of container ships, waste boats and tankers, pleasure boats speeding by, stomping ferries that travel endlessly through the water, and the wandering seismic ships that search for oil and gas disturb the ocean's own silence. The cacophony reigned underwater until during the short corona lockdown in the spring of 2020, the waters suddenly became relatively quiet; maybe the whales, whose youngsters had never experienced silence, were delighted. Although we are terrestrial beings who grow fields, that is not enough for us: we also shamelessly grab the fish and even the krill on which marine animals depend. As the waters tremble under our brutality, everything indicates that we will not change.

Netherlands, Emmen, Drenthe. The Bargerveen near Zwartemeer. The Natura 2000 area is the most beautiful and largest bog area in our country. The remains of dead birch forests stick out of the water © Bert Verhoeff/ANP

Oliver Rackham rightly wrote that the history of the wetlands is the history of their destruction. Most wetlands were created when the world thawed at the end of the last ice age and everything swirled, clattered and seeped that it was a sweet treat. In those days gone by, the bogs, wetlands, wetlands and river deltas were the most attractive places on Earth, because they contained plenty of nutrients. They lured and maintained numerous species. In the spring, the diversity and number of creatures that lived in (and above) the wetlands must have produced an astonishing and audible noise from afar. We have no idea.

Peat is not a simple matter. It consists of partly rotted and thickened plant remains: a sediment of leaves, reeds, grasses, mosses and roots that have ended up in the water. The water excludes oxygen, which is the main cause of the rotting process. These spongy deposits are created over centuries. Each bog and raised bog develops its own character. Peat contains free cellulose, high humidity and less than sixty percent carbon. The composition varies depending on the chemical structure and macroscopic and microscopic matter. Under the upper layer of the raised bogs, the peat that has been used for centuries to heat homes has the appearance and texture of a riveted chocolate pudding. It can be cut off with a sharp instrument. The peat is slightly more flexible when it is damp and, like green wood, must be dried first before you can burn it.

Ever since feudalism gave way to modern nation states, Western capitalism and imperialism in the fifteenth century, we have heard time and again say that the wetlands and peatlands are worthless because the same land can be used for agriculture after drainage. We are now slowly becoming wise due to damage and shame and discover the importance of these places, which consist of 95 percent water but are sufficiently fibrous to maintain. The climate, weather, seasons, Earth's movements, and wet and dry areas are all flexible and all based on give and take. These shifting, changing processes are only briefly influenced by river dikes, dams, drainage channels, flood defences and divers. Water has the ultimate flexibility, as Fela Kuti already sang in Water No Get Enemy. And so water always wins. Or not? Some researchers believe that in the next fifty years, humanity will take all the remaining land on Earth for agriculture and use every drop of fresh water. And then what?

All in all, the world's peatlands look like a book of wallpaper samples. Each one has its own design and character. Some areas are little more than thatched water, others include luxuriously diverse and colorful landscapes that we townspeople would never have imagined: silent sepia-colored waters, radiant mosses, pale lichens, sundew in the shape of thick water droplets. Everything always takes place in excruciatingly slow motion, which we can only determine if we keep track of measurements. Even if you stood by for a year, you wouldn't see how a saltwater swamp silts up to become lowlands. And these places are invariably threatened.

In 2015, the legally binding Paris Agreement was signed by all countries of the world, with the exception of Nicaragua and Syria, to keep the global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius. In several ways, these agreements were obsolete even before the ink had dried. For example, peatlands were not actually discussed, apart from the recommendation that each country should take steps to protect its own wetlands.

When the fact of our own climate crisis slowly came to the collective consciousness at the end of the twentieth century, the Amazon rainforest was seen as the Earth's major CO2 store after the oceans. Those concerned about climate change placed their hopes on the vast tropical forests. But a handful of scientists discovered that peatlands in particular were able to retain a lot of carbon. Their argument became all the more convincing when they pointed out that peatlands can not only absorb and store large amounts of toxic gases, but also cover three percent of the Earth's surface — more than all rainforests combined.

Lake in the Olympic National Park forest, Washington © Alberto Zanoni/EyeEm/ANP

In the few years that I lived in Port Townsend, Washington, I often walked along the North Beach cliff in Fort Worden. In 1900, this was an important link in western coastal defense; today it is a protected park where many arts and science programs take place. While walking with a friendly geologist, she pointed me to a dark layer of peat at the bottom of a cliff that occasionally crumbles. Up close, I noticed crushed layers of plant debris. The protruding, soapy material gave me the impression of squashed reeds. It was woody, moist and crumbly, very different from the dried peat from the Irish bog. In the shale layers, I was hoping to find the rare mineral vivianite, a hydrated iron phosphate that seems to take on a radiant shade of blue when air is added. Ötzi, the mummy of an alpine hunter who emerged from the ice in 1991, was littered with vivianite. This mineral is formed by contact with organic matter, especially iron.

When, in 1979, Alaskan archaeologist Dale Guthrie uncovered the 'Blue Babe', an extinct Pleistocene steppe bison, that animal was also embedded in vivianite. Many of the corpses found in Northwestern European peatlands showed traces of vivianite. Johannes Vermeer used the mineral for the background of the carpet on The Matchmaker. Just applied, the color was intense blue, but over the years it has faded to a dull grey-green — we should imagine the bright blue in the painting when it was still on the easel. In the local bog, I saw only tiny white specks. But when a huge chunk fell from the cliff to the beach a year later, I finally saw the steel blue, scattered between the suddenly uncovered layers of the ancient bog.

I kept thinking about the crushed stems in the layers of peat at the bottom of the Admiralty Inlet cliffs. At first, I thought it was sedge that had once grown in a swampy little boy. I am a supporter of the historian Fernand Braudel and, like him, believe that we can follow the traces of the past by looking at “the climate conditions, demographics, geology and oceanography and () at the effects of the events that take place so slowly that they remain invisible to those who experience them”.

In the region of the Puget Sound, a Pacific estuary in Washington, the icy and curly Vashon lobe from the Ice Age began to melt some 16,900 years ago. For hundreds of centuries, the ice lobe grew and declined alternately: over the course of alternating glacial and warmer intermediate periods, it expanded southward and retreated. In those warm interglacial periods, forests and forest areas grew until they were crushed by a new ice offensive. Eventually, this pattern was broken and rivers and winding streams of meltwater were created.

This wet conveyor belt rearranged one layer after another of soil, rocks, and mammoth debris that had formed the sandy cliff over thousands of years. It is likely that this exciting layer of peat would not have been a blessing, but Broekland. I felt a shiver of recognition at the constant and fundamental series of eternal change, from rainfall somewhere far away that grows into an unimpeded deluge, of all-absorbing drought, of question-and-answer in every fiber, every vein and every atom of everything that lives.

This is a pre-publication from Annie Proulx's Veen, dras, swamp: The underestimated importance of peatlands for our planet (De Geus, Alexander van Kesteren translation) that will be published this week.