The collapse of the Ancestral Pueblo culture

One of the four original tribes to settle in the American Southwest, you came to the Colorado Plateau in 1200BC. Over a thousand years your Anasazi culture slowly developed; from seasonal migration to cultivating crops, from basket-weaving to pottery-making, from building pit-houses to constructing massive settlements in the cliffs.

The landscape was harsh, but between 900 and 1130AD good harvests let your people flourish, increasing ten-fold. You became more and more sophisticated, creating magnificent, five-storey palaces aligned with the stars.

Your growing ambitions consumed more and more resources. When the local area was de-forested you had timber carried in by hand from mountains fifty miles away. And still your society grew. Ruled by an elite who loved turquoise and ate well even when the rains didn’t come, even when the water table fell and the crops began to fail.

Eventually you lost faith. Legend says you felt your ancestors must have abused their power, causing changes which were never meant to occur. You suffered with the land. Your people fought each other, sometimes eating their enemies.

As one, you decided to abandon the civilisation you had created and move to better lands. Quietly you left, merging into the new cultures in the south, turning away from the destruction and loss you had left behind.

The decline of the great civilisation of Sumer

You came from the north 7000 years ago and settled between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. With little rain the land was hard to farm but you found a way: you built massive levees to collect water in spring and store it for the autumn planting. Your work transformed the desert into an oasis. You were the first people in history who could count on a surplus.

You built magnificent cities, filling the plain. Your civilisation was stable and creative. You made breathtaking advances in science and technology; in writing and mathematics; loving above all else the music of the lyre.

But it was the intensity of your culture that was its undoing. The land needed to rest, but there were too many mouths to feed. The soil became water-logged, drawing salts to the surface, made worse by summer evaporation. After 2000 years of slowly declining yields, you wrote how finally the ‘earth turned white’.

And then, when you were at your weakest, the conquerors came. First Sargon of Akkad, then the Gutians, followed by the Elamaites and the Amorites; until all that was left was dust. Raised mounds where cities once stood. And buried within them, clay tablets inscribed in a language long dead, a last echo of great times gone.

The deforestation of Ethiopia

In a few decades, you said, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict will seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace. We need to plant trees you told them, not just cut them down.

But they wouldn’t listen. Wanting power, like those who came before, and those before that, they fought each other, ignoring the lessons of Ethiopia’s history. In 1000CE, Aksum, the capital city grew so large the land couldn’t sustain it any more. Its people moved south to Lalibala but they exhausted the surrounding land again and were forced to move further south to Shewa, then later to Gondar. From 1883 it took just twenty years for the voracious new capital of Addis Ababa to raze a treeless zone 150km wide around the city.

The vast Ethiopian forests are nearly gone with all their creatures and plants; the last wild coffee in the world. In the 1980s, poor harvests threatened ten million, triggering the largest famine relief effort in history; yet tens of thousands still died.

You did not give up. Your Green Belt Movement planted trees, helping farmers find new ways to build a future for your beautiful, scarred land.

The Evacuation of St Kilda

After seventy five years, you came back. On June 6, 2005 you stood on the shore and stared out at the empty sea, thinking of the night they rowed your pregnant mother out to the lighthouse ship; how she waved, trying to make things well.

But her death ended it all: the struggle your people had waged on the isolated St Kilda archipelago since the Bronze Age; scaling the high cliffs for seabird eggs; tending the scraggy sheep. Your people knew how to survive in that harsh environment.

Somehow the thing that made life unravel was people trying to help: the missionaries who came and told you how to live; the do-gooders with their charity; the tourists who bought your tweeds but treated you as curiosities, stealing your self esteem. When the military base was built for the First World War the twentieth century finally broke through. You had contact with the Scottish mainland 160km away and nothing seemed the same. Many of you left. For the last thirty six, it took until that night in 1930 when Mary died for you to decide to evacuate for an easier life.

Does it comfort you to know the grey seal breeds now, on the shores where you once played?

The extinction of the moa

You arrived in New Zealand in 1280 from Polynesia, ready to start a new life. The uninhabited lands were temperate and your topical crops wouldn’t grow. You must have been overjoyed when you saw the Moa; giant, flightless birds, some the size of turkeys, others towering three-and-a-half metres tall.

You named them Kuranui, ‘the great treasure’ and you hunted them for their flesh and eggs. You made clothing from their skins and feathers and carved pendants from their bones.

Your folklore taught you to respect the environment, hunting different creatures by seasons, giving them time to recover. But the Moa were slow-maturing; they took ten years to reproduce. When their number dwindled, why didn't you stop?

You used fire as you’d always done, burning the land to cleanse it, to allow new growth. But the broad-leaf conifer forests didn’t regenerate like the jungle had; burning left it barren.

In a hundred years you altered the landscape beyond recovery. You made the Moa extinct; the giant Haast Eagle too, and twenty other birds. But still you didn’t stop. In the 1770s, when Captain Cook came he saw ‘smoke by day or fires by night’ in the scorched islands you now called home.