The New Nature Read online

  Aborigines have opinions about wilderness – not always kind ones. The strong feelings they have for the land can be confused with love of wilderness, but many Aborigines distrust this idea. The notion of land untainted by people sails too close to the idea of terra nullius that was used to justify white occupation of black land. Colin certainly doesn’t like the word: ‘Wilderness is just the land with no-one living in it, only the animals living in it. It’s the country that people been living in a long time ago, but noone live there. Only the animal live there now. White people use that name. But it’s still tribal land. Even the rainforest. People lived there.’ As anthropologist Deborah Rose says:

  A definition of wilderness which excludes the active presence of humanity may suit contemporary people’s longing for places of peace, natural beauty, and spiritual presence, uncontaminated by their own culture. But definitions which claim that these landscapes are ‘natural’ miss the whole point of the nourishing Australian terrains. Here on this continent, there is no place where the feet of Aboriginal humanity have not preceded those of the settler. Nor is there any place where the country was not once fashioned and kept productive by Aboriginal people’s land management practices.

  The Aboriginal landscape is cultural, inhabited by conscious animals, trees and hills. ‘All the things on Earth we see as part human’, wrote Silas Roberts, former chairman of the Northern Land Council. Aborigines moved ‘not in a landscape, but in a humanised realm saturated with significance’, wrote anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. If anything, Aborigines may identify with the older, European idea of wilderness: a chaotic wasteland where management has lapsed. When Deborah Rose visited eroded gullies near the Victoria River, her Aboriginal companion, Daly Pulkara, complained, ‘It’s the wild. Just the wild.’ Rose noted, ‘We were looking at a wilderness; man-made and cattle-made. This “wild” was a place where the life of the country was falling down into the gullies and washing away with the rains.’

  Europeans have also shaped the land. All wilderness areas are marked by exotic animals, plants and diseases; by trails, campsites, litter, fire scars and old mines. High in the Australian Alps, grasses are dying from toxic industrial arsenic carried into the mountains by migrating bogong moths, which absorb it from the crops on which they feed. All wilderness areas are also subtly influenced by climate change. As American ecologist Paul Ehrlich noted, ‘every cubic centimetre of the biosphere has already been altered by the metabolism of the dominant animal; that is, by the economy of Homo sapiens’. Another American ecologist, David Ludwig, declared: ‘The biosphere itself is an anthropic system. The constraints of nature are those we impose. Evolution is now in response to particularities of human management.’ Bill McKinnon, in The End of Nature, concludes from this that nature has died. ‘An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is “nature”, the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted and under whose rules he was born and died.’ By ‘nature’, McKinnon really means wilderness.

  This grim conclusion shows how restrictive it is to define nature or wilderness in opposition to culture. We can’t bond well to something that is prone to define itself out of existence. Wilderness, if it exists, is rare. We can visit and be inspired by it but can never truly belong to it. And it’s not easy to visit because it hides away in remote places. There’s too little to go around, and over-use (in Tasmania especially) is a big problem. Most of us can make the pilgrimage only once a year on our holidays (when everyone else goes worshipping too). Yet a relationship with nature, like a relationship with a lover, fares best when it’s expressed regularly. Wilderness offers only fleeting contact, which may not prove ultimately satisfying. As William Cronon says, ‘the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very thing it teaches us to value’. It perpetuates our separation from nature. We should be placing more value on the plants and animals that live around us. The brown snake in my garden means more to me than any reptile in a wilderness. We are neighbours, neither distance nor definition separating us.

  Our ideas about wilderness and nature lead us to think that animals prefer to live apart from us. Nature, by definition, wants to be natural, we assume. So when birds and bats flock into farms and raid crops, biologists often interpret this as a desperate response to natural food shortages. I’ve seen this claim made again and again in books with never any supporting evidence. Many fruit farmers know that it’s nonsense. Another questionable idea is the assumption that animals living in our cities and wastelands are refugees from habitat loss who would rather be somewhere else. The truth is more interesting. Swallows and lorikeets and brown snakes like the resources we provide. Many animals, in effect, want a relationship with us. Our ideas about wilderness and nature blind us to this important truth.

  Most animals now live in humanised landscapes. A typical animal now lives in a paddock or a logged forest, whether it wants to or not. Few animals get to see genuine wilderness. This becomes obvious when you look down at Australia from an aeroplane. You see patches of habitat set among paddocks and roads and dams. It’s the view most birds of prey must see. In Victoria only two places (the Big Desert and the Sunset Country) remain where an animal can get more than 5 kilometres from a road, track or structure. Forty-two per cent of Australia is grazed by stock, and 40 per cent of the Outback is moderately eroded. These are sorry statistics, and they go to show that wilderness has become as unreal for most animals as it is for people. Nature today is more about cities and farms than wilderness.

  The stories in this book make little sense if viewed through wilderness-tinted glasses. Like computers, humans are probably wired to think in opposites – yes and no, good and bad, winners and losers, nature and culture, natural and artificial. The world isn’t divided up like this, but our minds like to see it that way. ‘Wilderness’ is a child of this dichotomous thinking, existing only as the opposite of something – us. We define it by what it is not, then imbue it with values considered wanting in our cities: purity, innocence, goodness. What we really need are concepts that put people and nature in the same picture. We need an ecological framework that acknowledges the central role played by Homo sapiens.

  ‘A space satellite is no less a natural object than a robin’s nest;

  the one is more complex, that is all’.

  Colin Sutherhill, The Blue Bang Theory: New Nature Poetry (1997)

  One of the great myths of our times is the idea that humans are the only destructive species. We raze forests, erode hills and pollute land and sea, thinking that we are the only creatures who do these things.

  But Africa’s elephants are also masters of change. They destabilise slopes, bare riverbanks, debark trees and flatten whole forests. Some of the worst erosion I’ve ever seen was caused by elephants – collapsing muddy gullies and stones slipping down slopes. I’ve found ancient baobab trees mashed to pulp. When guerillas poach elephants during wars, grasslands often thicken up into lush woodlands. Elephants have trashed many of the national parks set up to save them. Problems are exacerbated by dams, put in to lure game to tourist viewpoints and help animals through drought, and by fences and settlements that curb migration, all of which encourage elephants to overuse small areas. Cambridge biologist R.M. Laws warned in a 1970 paper called ‘Elephants as agents of habitat and landscape change in East Africa’ of ‘a major conservation problem, if not the major problem, in Africa’. Elephants were destroying their own habitats and endangering rare species, he declared. Elephant damage remains a major worry today, one that challenges the notion of the ‘natural landscape’. In many national parks elephants are culled.

  Africa is battered by other beasts as well. I’ve seen crumbling riverbanks grazed and trampled bare by buffalo, and bushes stripped back by rhinos and giraffes. Biologists Norman Owen-Smith and Jock Danckwerts say that in the past ‘much of southern Africa may have existed in what would have been perceived today as a chronically overgrazed a
nd overbrowsed state’. Warthogs plough up floodplains (as feral pigs do here), and major habitat change is even attributed to mole-rats and termites recycling soil.

  African national parks often end up looking like cattle runs, with trampled and grazed grasses, pruned trees, and ground scuffed by hoofs, soiled by dung and strewn with bones. Australian reserves look much cleaner, with little eroding earth, no mud smeared against trees, and no stink of dung and death on the air. No wonder the wilderness myth took hold here and not there. But this soft-focus image of a land treated kindly by nature is an illusion. A hundred thousand years ago Australia looked very different. Snorting herds of diprotodons lumbered across the land, watched over by keen-eyed marsupial lions. Each diprotodon weighed nearly two tonnes. Big beasts back then helped shape the land, just as Africa’s animals do today. Our riverflats must have looked like farm paddocks, with bushes stripped bare, grasses shorn, networks of animal trails and steamy piles of dung.

  Marks of the megafauna still lie upon the land. The CSIRO’s James Noble has found large crescents of pale sand, sometimes a hundred metres wide, showing – he suggests – where burrowing marsupials ploughed the sand. Detected from the air in western Queensland and New South Wales in the early 1990s, the crescents, nominally attributed to giant rat kangaroos, were found when dire droughts laid bare the terrain. In mulga country James found round mounds twenty metres wide, sometimes half a metre high, ‘usually remarkably well preserved’ – arguably nesting mounds of giant mallee fowl. Ruined burrows of Phascolonus, a wombat nearly two metres long, may also linger in the sand swirls of the Outback, although they would be harder to detect. Noble’s interpretations are by no means fantastic: in North America signs of prairie dog warrens have persisted for thousands of years.

  Of Phascolonus Tim Flannery has written:

  Their burrows must have been enormous and their backdirt piles must have been prominent features of the flat inland Australian landscape of the time. The burrows doubtless provided other animals with shelter in the harsh land and the churning and loosening of the earth must have encouraged the growth of plants on the enormous piles of excavated soil.

  Here’s an important point. Phascolonus promoted diversity by adding structure to the land. I assume the long-snouted marsupial Palorchestes did too. Its forearm architecture suggests that it tore off limbs to feed (Tim Flannery calls it ‘tree-feller’). Wallabies may have harvested the pods and leaves it dropped, just as dik-diks (tiny antelope) feed in the wake of elephants and kudu today. Our big animals may all have contributed to diversity by churning soil and opening the forest canopy, offering opportunities for smaller creatures. Disturbance-loving herbs such as velvety peppercress may once have grown in earth heaved by mega-wombats and raked by diprotodon claws. Mosquitoes bred in rain-filled paw-prints, and dung beetles tended opulent droppings. In Africa grass trampled by game feeds hordes of termites, and this would have happened here too.

  Plants adapted to the megafauna still survive. The savage spines on vicious hairy Mary (Calamus radicalis) and limebush (Citrus glauca) – the latter up to seven centimetres long – show that giant animals once browsed these plants. (In Africa, plants favoured by elephants and giraffes sprout the longest spines – to fend them off.) The big musky fruits of wild orange (Capparis mitchelli) and scrub guava (Siphonodon australis) were probably diprodontoid foods.1 Rosewood trees (Alectryon oleifolius) growing today in semi-circular stands sprouted around ancient burrow systems, James Noble suggests, in soil fortified by long-forgotten dung.

  It’s a revelation to know that animals do to the land most of the things we do: they fell forests, dam streams, farm, build cities, force roads through wilderness, erode hills, and pollute land and sea. Elephants are so adept at pushing over trees they are sometimes employed to clear land. They also make dams, as do beavers and alligators. Coral polyps build vast cities beneath the sea. Breeding seabirds and seals erode slopes and pollute soil, often killing plants. Western Australia’s buffalo bream (Kyphosus cornelii) create patchwork ‘farms’ of grazed algal turfs bordered by tall seaweed hedges. Their polygonal paddocks, each about six metres wide, are visible by the score from low-flying planes. In New Zealand old paths over hills are attributed to moas, gigantic extinct birds. These winding trails often lead to the feet of cliffs, taken to be old nest sites.

  Visitors to Africa rarely realise that many of the waterholes they gather around began life as termite mounds. Elephants excavate old mounds to eat the mineral-rich earth, sometimes gouging so deep they leave a hole that collects rain. Wallowing warthogs, buffalo and elephants deepen the pool by carrying off coats of mud. The growing ‘pan’ becomes a lifeline for mammals and birds, greatly enriching local biodiversity. Visiting elephants pull down nearby trees, creating grasslands ideal for zebras, buffalo and the lions that stalk them. A new food web grows. Elephants can turn a termite hill into a pool in a matter of months. For this and other reasons the Kruger National Park management plan calls elephants ‘important agents of habitat modification’ that ‘contribute to biodiversity’ – although not all animals benefit. Beaver and alligator dams also aid other species. In Wyoming I’ve watched musk rats swimming about in beaver dams, and in the Everglades fish survive within the dry-season pools gouged out by alligators.

  Not realising that animals alter landscapes so much, we see ourselves as uniquely destructive. In reality, however, we can be placed on a continuum alongside corals, beavers and buffalo. In 1994 Clive Jones, John Lawton and Moshe Shachak coined the term ‘ecosystem engineer’ for habitat-changing animals and plants. It’s a concept that puts our actions in a larger context. Homo sapiens is ‘a physical ecosystem engineer par excellence’. Africa’s elephants, the earth’s biggest land animals, stand beside us as the second most disruptive species. We do far more damage than elephants or anything else, but we are not fundamentally unique, only different by degree. Our earliest African ancestors wielded less power than elephants. Only when we mastered fire could we outdo the megafauna as landscape engineers. Yet most of us don’t view things this way because opposing labels like ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ distance us from other species. Words like ‘pollution’ and ‘habitat destruction’ we apply only to ourselves, but when nesting seabirds excrete so much waste that shrubs die and soil slides into the sea, as happens often on islands, the word ‘pollution’ seems apt to me. Botanist Mary Gillham, visiting one Western Australian island, wrote of ‘dead trunks and branches’ and ‘a late stage of degradation’ leading to a ‘logical end point of bare soil’. Seabirds evidently bred colonially back in Jurassic times, and dinosaurs in the Triassic era, which means that soil pollution dates back 200 million years.

  If the engineering feats of elephants and beavers can help some animals (while harming others), why should ours be different? The obvious difference is that elephants have roamed Africa for millions of years, allowing ample time for adaptation, while humans in Australia are relatively new. Yet some animals obviously adapt fast, as swallows and seagulls and brown snakes have done. Today we can find animals and plants benefiting from almost everything we do, including salinisation (banded stilts), sand-mining (New Holland mice), erosion (mangroves) and global warming (seals). Even our slaughter of whales has benefited Antarctic fur seals that eat the same foods – their numbers have never been higher (and the islands they sleep on are suffering from erosion as a result). It should not surprise us that animals often benefit from our actions. Organisms are often opportunistic, exploiting change whether it is wrought by people, animals, storms or fire. Jones, Lawton and Shachak say that ‘at sufficiently large scales . . . the net effect of engineering will almost inevitably be to enhance regional species richness via a net increase in habitat diversity’.

  Red kangaroos roam the Outback in millions. They’ve done well from the sowing of lush African pasture grasses, the sinking of bores, the felling of trees to encourage grass, and the removal of dingoes and Aborigines. But the CSIRO’s Alan Newsome found something mo
re important helping them along. It was, he said, ‘an improved food supply, in the subclimax grassland created by the ruminants’. He was referring to cows and sheep. In a 1975 paper he explained that ‘during drought, the standing dry grass, of little use to kangaroos, was cropped short by stock and was forced to respond with green shoots of great use to kangaroos’. Cows are like mowers, clipping away coarse stalks and stimulating green pick. Once the mowing has begun, kangaroos can take over as engineers, maintaining a ‘marsupial lawn’ (Newsome’s words) by diligent picking. The parallel with Africa is striking. Ecologists in Africa, wondering how so many antelope coexist, have found that grazers with broad muzzles – buffalo, zebras and waterbuck – mow down coarse grass, bringing new shoots into view of smaller ‘bite-selectors’, such as sable and roan. Bite selectors have small, slender muzzles. Without coarse feeders to prepare the sward, their food is hard to find.

  Returning once from Africa, I looked at a kangaroo and recognised a bite-selector – a pouched antelope with a dainty snout. Kangaroos in the past probably fed when they could in the wake of heavy-jawed giant wombats. When the megafauna perished, Aborigines took on their job, burning dry grass to promote fresh feed. They helped kangaroos deliberately, if only to harvest them later. Cattle now do this work – like giant hoofed wombats – and they do it well. The short turfs they make suit many animals including magpies, peewees, plovers (masked lapwings), pipits, brown snakes and beetle grubs.