The Sahel

From the days of the earliest Muslim travellers, the land south of the Sahara has been called the ‘Sahel’, or ‘shore’ of the desert. It is where your family has always lived, in this arid belt stretching right across the African continent.

You are used to hardship. In the seventies, when the rains failed, you witnessed one hundred thousand people starve to death and seven hundred and fifty thousand become dependent on aid. Scientists argued about who was at fault. Some said the drought had been magnified by overgrazing and poor land management; that it was all caused by the Sahel’s rising population. Others said air pollution from other countries had stopped the rain and you were the victims of global warming.

You would not leave your land. You thought back to the traditional farming practices of your schooldays, and began to experiment by laying stones across your fields to slow down rainwater and catch silt and seeds. You dug pits filled with manure to attract termites so the soil would become absorbent again.

In twenty years you had a forest. Other farmers were learning from you, joining the fight against the creeping tide of the desert, expanding south by up to forty eight kilometres a year. Seeing your success, local officials annexed your now-valuable land.

Hawaii

Ignoring the heat, you lift the stone to count the ants, bracing yourself for what you might find. You will publish your research and it will be discussed by eminent ecologists and scientists. Surely someone will know what to do.

You look out across Hawaii’s scattered islands. This paradise you call home is the planet’s most isolated archipelago. In the seventy million years since its creation, a new species arrived only every hundred thousand years.

But then your Polynesian ancestors came and settled the islands, hunting the bright-plumed birds to furnish their king with feathers until there were none left. The pigs they brought colonised forests, damaging trees and rooting up the forest floor.

In 1778, Captain James Cook took news of your islands to Europe. Traders came, bringing diseases which reduced your people’s numbers by a fifth. New settlers cut down forests and brought animals and plants from their native lands.

Today half of the islands’ one hundred and forty bird species are extinct. Nearly a third of the twenty thousand species of animals and plants are alien. Like the forest grasses, tree snakes and carnivorous snails, the Argentine ants you study pose yet another risk to Hawaii’s diminishing ecosystem.

Rabbits in Australia

Arriving from England, you became a pioneer settler in Winchelsea, building a mansion in Barwon Park. You joined the Acclimatisation Society, dedicated to studying local plants and animals, introducing any felt to be lacking.

In 1859 you wrote to your nephew in England asking him to send twenty four grey rabbits, five hares, seventy two partridges and some sparrows. You explained, “The introduction of just a few could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition a little spot of hunting.”

Your nephew couldn’t find enough grey rabbits so he added some domesticated creatures into the shipment. The two types created a new breed which was exceptionally hardy and virile.

Your contemporaries praised you for the sport you provided. No-one could have foreseen that within a decade there would be so many rabbits that two million could be culled without noticeable effect; that by the 1950s there would be six hundred million, causing untold damage to crops as well as to the local ecology. That their destruction of native plants would leave the topsoil exposed, creating deep gullies across the landscape. In spite of attempts to control their numbers through trapping, poisoning and the introduction of specially-created diseases, your rabbits continue to multiply.

Juana Maria, the last Nicoleňo

Your island was isolated enough to be missed by ships sailing along the Californian coast. In 1602, a passing Spanish captain named it San Nicolas, but finding no harbour, he sailed away. Your people lived on happily in sixty eight villages with ample food from the sea and seeds and roots from the island’s lush plants to grind into flour.

Little is known of you for the next two hundred years, except that your numbers declined as the last trees were cut down and San Nicolas grew barren.

In 1811, Russian traders brought Aleut huntsmen to kill sea otters. You resisted, and in the battle that followed, many died. In 1835 only seven of your mysteriously tall race remained. The Santa Barbara Mission sent a rescue ship, but in the rough seas, they left with only six.

For eighteen years you lived alone on the island. When another boat finally came, your joy knew no bounds.

They called you Juana Maria. You danced and sang for your new friends. But no one could understand your language, and your body couldn’t cope with mainland food and germs. In just seven weeks, like the rest of your people, you were dead; the last of the Nicoleňo.

The Aleuts

The scattered archipelago of three hundred rocky islands far out in the Pacific Ocean was your home for eight thousand years. You called yourself Unangan, and your community of twenty five thousand people lived by hunting sea otter and fishing.

In 1741, Russian explorers ‘discovered’ you. They called you Aleuts, and sent back news of rich hunting grounds. Russian fur traders descended on your islands, forcing you to hunt for them. When they ‘discovered’ sea cows, they ate them in such numbers that within twenty seven years they were extinct.

You tried to resist, mounted a revolt, but their brutality and mainland diseases diminished your population to less than a tenth of its original number. You were slaves. You killed more and more otters until they were ‘commercially extinct’ and otter hunting was banned in 1911.

For a while, conservationists were overjoyed to see otter numbers increasing. But today over-fishing has depleted herring and pollock stocks so badly that it has caused sea lion numbers to drop, and killer whales, deprived of their usual prey, are hunting sea otters into a second wave of extinction.

Eleven thousand Aleutian islanders claim Aleut ancestry, but no full-blooded Aleuts survived the Russian occupation.

Kaskaskia, Illinois

Looking out over the bustling river, you think back to how things used to be when the Mississippi’s only traffic was flat-boats piled with hemp and cotton. There were no engines then, river traffic simply floated downstream. You picture yourself in 1823, amazed to see a boat travel against the current, envying the Virginia’s ten lucky passengers.

Now you wish they’d never come. The crews have cut too many trees from the riverbanks to power the steamboat engines. It’s not as if anyone owns those trees; but you think of how much land is barren now, of the bluffs eroding. When you complained in town, no one would listen. Thanks to the riverboats carrying wheat and corn to New Orleans, Kaskaskia had grown to a rich town of seven thousand. Why would anyone question that?

When the riverbanks start to collapse, you say nothing. Everyone puts it down to the rains, and the crews carry on felling trees.

It is only in 1881 that people realise, but it’s too late by then. The Mississippi shifts eastwards into a new channel, destroying most of Kaskaskia. People try to rebuild, but when the town floods again, it is abandoned. Today only nine people remain.

Cahokia

You settled the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi valley one-and-a-half thousand years ago.

After five hundred years of stable occupation, your numbers suddenly exploded. You created a magnificent city with over a hundred mounds linked by community plazas. Your workers took decades to realise this vision. With no pack animals or wheel, they hauled the earth by hand; the largest pyramid, Monks Mound, took more than fourteen million baskets of soil.

By 1250, your culture was one of the most advanced in ancient America and your population was larger than London’s. But it was not a peaceful time; you built a stockade around the city centre, and archaeologists found the largest mass grave in the Americas; with the bodies of those who had been brutally killed, others buried alive.

As your rising population put more and more pressure on the land, you deforested river edges, causing them to erode. The resulting floods made cropland too marshy for corn. Wood ran low. The oak and hickory you burned in the early centuries was replaced by energy-poor softwoods.

Your city went into decline and the population dropped away until, six hundred years ago, you abandoned it, leaving no record of your language or your culture’s real name.

The ancient Olmec civilisation

People can only speculate at the scale of your influence. The Mayans and Aztecs worshipped your gods long after they had forgotten your name. Your city layout was the blueprint for later civilisations. You traded vast distances; your elite collected beautifully-crafted artefacts in jade, obsidian and magnetite. Your people invented the ball-game, the long-count calendar and you started the practice of human sacrifice. Experts wonder what else you bequeathed down the generations, what other ideas and inventions were yours.

But for more than two thousand years your existence was forgotten, until, in the 1850s, a farm worker discovered a colossal carved head. Archaeologists went on to unearth the splendour of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán with its elaborate structures and complex water systems. They tracked how you used more and more land to feed your growing populace, until soil erosion caused the River Coatzacoalcos to silt up, forcing you to abandon your first great city.

Undaunted, you built magnificent La Venta with its great pyramid. For a thousand years you prospered, until your civilisation suddenly collapsed. Archaeologists think deforestation and overgrazing were to blame, they say your local environment was so depleted that when an earthquake hit you had no reserves and your people starved. Archaeologists call you ‘Olmecs’, but even today no one knows your true name.

The collapse of the Nasca civilisation

You confided your fears in your father but he refused to listen.

‘Of course we must cut down trees. My father farmed this land, and his father before him for sixteen generations. Look at the pottery I give you, the fine woven cloth. Do we not prosper? It is progress. It is what we have always done. We need more land.’

You went out past vast fields in the lower Ica Valley where crops of maize and cotton and squash thrived, watered by underground aqueducts. Your father must be right. The Nasca were blessed by the gods. You climbed up to the high plateau and walked the ritual pathways. The giant figures you had created would keep you safe.

But when the El Niňo hit, your land had no protection. The hurarango trees with their deep roots were gone. The fragile soil was swept away, along with your irrigation systems. You tried to start again but the harvests failed. War raged until the very last of your people died.

For one-and-a-half thousand years the Nasca were forgotten, until the day the first passenger flight crossed the desert, and people looked down in wonder at the mysterious figures you had left in the still, empty desert.

North Korea’s ‘Arduous March’

You aren’t at school today. You follow your parents up the path into the mountains, looking for grasses and plants with edible roots. You have coupons but there’s no food. Your parents are thinner than you; in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea children are always fed first.

Your country is crossed by many mountain ranges. It’s hard to find the land to grow food, and the season is short. Your teacher told you how between 1961 and 1988 your country doubled the food it could produce by using marginal slopes, irrigating them by pumping water from reservoirs connected by thousands of kilometres of waterways. Your people were proud to be self-reliant.

But everything took energy. It took electricity to pump the water and manufacture fertilisers. It took oil to run the power stations. When the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1991 cheap oil imports ended and power cuts stopped farming. The land dried out. Heavy storms caused floods that destroyed the power stations. When the drought hit the reservoirs were dry.

You call the famine that killed two million people ‘The Arduous March’, but it hasn’t stopped. Today thirty seven percent of North Korean children are severely malnourished and your leaders rely on food aid from China, Japan, South Korea and the United States.

China’s Great Leap Forward

You would make the People’s Republic of China great. Your campaign would transform the vast population of farmers into an industrialised country.

The pressure of numbers on the land was not a new problem. Past leaders had increased food production by cutting down forests, and later by introducing New World crops like corn which would grow on marginal lands. Now there was no more new land to use. New ideas were needed to feed the growing population.

If you controlled agriculture you could establish a monopoly over grain production. You could export it and raise capital to industrialise and pay off your country’s debts. You held meetings to force the peasants to give their land to the government. The grain stores filled and your officials announced bumper harvests, ignoring the widespread famine they were causing. If quotas dropped, you punished the desperate, starving villagers.

‘Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward is the way to the future,’ you told them. ‘Loyalty is essential.’ Those who spoke out were purged. Half a million disappeared in your Anti-Rightist Campaign.

You caused the worst famine ever recorded. Thirty million died. In 1959 you stepped down, feeling you had become a ‘dead ancestor’ still respected, but no longer consulted in matters of state.