gene meme

GENE MEME

2010-05-28T13:17:00.002+01:00

It started sixty thousand years ago.

A small tribe of humans began to work together to hunt, knapping flint into arrowheads. Over time, their numbers increased. These were your ancestors.

Tribes moved out of Africa and new generations went in search of herds to follow. This is how the slow expansion of humans began. Over the millennia they colonised every continent, becoming the world’s dominant species.

Your genetic code adapted down those generations. Through natural selection, certain traits survived, others did not, creating subtle shifts in the gene pool, making you the person you are today.

But over and over again, your ancestors’ success caused problems. As populations rose, damage to local environments increased. Too many trees were felled, depleting the soils. Nature’s balance was disrupted and creatures seemingly infinite in number were driven to extinction.

Over and over again, cultures collapsed as they exhausted their resources. Each failure was all too predictable, all too preventable, a simple repetition of what went before; yet your ancestors did not learn, did not choose to remember.

Humanity’s growth continues. The world’s population increases by two hundred and thirty five thousand every day. You are one of almost seven billion people alive, a number set to rise to over nine billion by 2050.

The pleistocene extinctions

2010-05-14T08:41:00.001+01:00

With flint-headed weapons, your strong hunters could bring down any animal, no matter how big. Your women and elders protected your young, tending fire pits for cooking. You used fire to open up the landscape too, making it easier to track big prey.

Your success made your numbers grow. You followed the herds. Where they rested, your shamans painted mystical scenes deep in caves, idolising their energy and power.

But your hunting prowess made their numbers dwindle. As food grew scarce you set out to find new lands. Your people gradually moved out of Africa, hunting the creatures they found on the way. These animals had not evolved with humans. Some found it impossible to adapt to altered ecosystems, others were already stressed by a changing climate.

When your tribes crossed to Australia fifty thousand years ago, fifteen of the sixteen large mammal species on the island were wiped out.

Just over ten thousand years ago, your descendents arrived in North America, driving fifteen large mammal species to extinction within one and a half thousand years.

As humanity expanded to fill every continent on the planet, the impact of your tribes’ combined with a warming climate to wipe out the majority of creatures heavier than forty kilograms.

The Florida Everglades

2010-05-12T16:23:00.003+01:00

They began to drain the Everglades in 1882 when you were seven and Miami was a town of five thousand, with streets of dust.

Your father’s passionate opposition did no good. Over two thousand kilometres of canals were created. Advertisers sold a dream of a tropical paradise to New Yorkers, stimulating a land boom. More and more people arrived. Sugar cane was planted, and animals hunted in the marshes; in one trip, a hunter killed two hundred and fifty alligators and one hundred and seventy otters. Wading birds were prized for their feathers, with five million killed in 1886 alone.

The disruption of the watershed caused sea water to fill the marshes. Lake Okeechobee lost oxygen, killing most of its wildlife, including ninety percent of its wading birds. And as the land dried out, it subsided by a third of a metre a year, causing problems to housing; it was not the paradise people were promised.

Your book “Everglades: River of Grass” finally made people see Florida’s marshland for what it was; a fragile ecosystem to be protected. You were seventy nine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and tiny and frail, but you instigated the most expensive environmental repair attempt in history on a stretch of land now home to five million people.

Minimata

2010-05-11T12:02:00.001+01:00

Today, 4 July 1970, they call you as a witness. You wonder if this new generation will ever understand the struggle it was creating the prosperous Japan that is theirs; the sacrifice it took.

But what happened at Minimata sits heavily on your soul. From your hospital bed, you speak the truth after all these years. You are dying of cancer, the Chisso Company can do nothing to you now.

You tell the court how Japan needed to industrialise. With such little farmable land and a growing population, it had to increase productivity. The Chisso Factory opened in 1908 making fertilisers, bringing prosperity to Minimata. When acetaldehyde production began no one knew the toxic waste would slowly build up in the bay. After you became director of the factory hospital, fish began to die, cats went mad. You analysed them and found mercury poisoning, but the factory forced your silence.

Soon people became ill, you witnessed terrible suffering; thousands died. The community shunned victims, fearing for their jobs. The Chisso Company opened a purification plant, though they knew it would not work against mercury.

For twelve years, Hajime Hosokawa, you watched the agony unfold, until today. Your testimony will swing the case, triggering the largest settlements in Japanese history.

The Aral Sea

2010-04-15T09:16:00.001+01:00

Your experts reassured you. “The Aral Sea is nature’s error,” they said. “It should have evaporated long ago. Using its water will be far more advantageous than preserving it.”

You studied its immense expanse between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the fourth largest inland sea in the world, and imagined new desert plantations, and a drained, fertile lakebed. It would easily counterbalance the loss of forty thousand jobs in the fisheries. Planting and exporting the ‘white gold’ of cotton would bring such wealth it would secure the USSR’s transition to socialism and feed the growing nation.

You spent thirty million roubles diverting the two feeder-rivers, and even though the poorly-built canals wasted over fifty percent of their water, you were satisfied.

But as the Aral shrank, a polluted seabed was revealed. Toxic dust storms blew residues from weapons testing, pesticides and fertilisers across the land. Within a decade, human mortality rose fifteen times, and rates of cancer and lung disease rose thirty times. All the Aral’s fish, half its mammals and three-quarters of its birds became extinct. At the same time, the heavily-irrigated plantations raised the water table and turned the desert to salt.

Today the fishing boats lie beached in salt, out of sight of water, testament to the greatest irrigation disaster in history.

The Harappan Culture

2010-04-13T11:21:00.003+01:00

Your culture flourished four thousand six hundred years ago. Yours was India’s first great civilisation, the world’s third after Mesopotamia and pharaonic Egypt. Your lands stretched from Baluchistan in the west to New Delhi in the east.

You created over a thousand cities with impressive platforms, public baths and communal granaries, all built to a precise grid using uniformly-sized bricks. With access to fresh water, each house was connected to a sewerage system; the world’s first, and more advanced than many local neighbourhoods have today. Yours was an egalitarian culture with no monumental structures, yet what you believed remains a mystery because the code of your language has never been unlocked.

After just five hundred years, the impact of your people on the environment made itself felt. Your method of baking mud into bricks had consumed so much timber that your forests were gone and you had over-irrigated the land in an effort to feed your overcrowded cities. The salinity of the soil increased and yields fell.

Your culture went into decline. Your cities were no longer maintained and within a few generations you abandoned them. All that was left of your sophisticated culture were mud-brick ruins in an arid, empty landscape.

The Sahel

2010-03-31T15:11:00.000+01:00

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

2010-03-31T10:53:00.001+01:00

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

2010-03-30T08:19:00.001+01:00

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

2010-03-29T15:24:00.001+01:00

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

2010-03-18T11:57:00.001Z

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

2010-03-15T10:54:00.000Z

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

2010-03-15T10:47:00.000Z

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

2010-03-12T17:20:00.001Z

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

2010-03-01T13:16:00.002Z

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’

2010-03-01T13:11:00.002Z

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

2010-03-01T13:07:00.000Z

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.

The burial of Riez

2010-02-22T10:45:00.000Z

The pilgrims look up at the magnificent temple, full of hope. You tell them how to make sacrifices to Aesclepius, son of Apollo. Later you will let them bathe in the holy waters before spending the night in the temple where serpents move freely, bringing augural dreams.

Set in a wide valley in the southern alps at the junction of two rivers, Reii Appollinaires is known far and wide for its healing powers. Its reputation has made your town rich. But the uplands have been deforested to build the magnificent town and heat its baths, and soil has started to wash off the hills.

No one thought the holy waters might be the town’s undoing. But their steady tide of alluvial silt was lifting the level of the plane, burying the buildings. Your descendants built a cathedral ontop of the temple. Its bishops had great influence. But the tide from the hills was relentless. By the middle ages the town abandoned the site and tried to rebuild on higher ground it was too late, Riez’s glory days were done.

All that remains of your magnificent town today are four slender temple columns and a sleepy village surrounded by fields of lavender.

Madagascar

2010-02-09T10:39:00.003Z

It is 1896. You keep watch while your father hunts. If you see the French coming through the forest you are to make the special call. You hold your breath, listening.

Deep thuds make a bass note to the usual forest sounds. It is the steady pounding of axes as the French clear the forest.

Your father has heard their plans. In the Central Highlands they will grow rice; in the north cloves, vanilla and sugar; and in the west rice, maize and cattle. Here, where you live, they will clear the ancient forests to plant lucrative coffee, the crop that causes the most erosion because it leaves the soil unprotected.

This is how they will harness Madagascar’s precious land, the complex ecosystems which evolved in isolation over one hundred and sixty five million years to produce unique plants and animals. Rare orchids and lemurs, spiny forests and hundreds of species of frogs; all of Madagascar’s riches will give way to the needs of Europe’s hungry population.

Families like yours will be forced onto marginal lands, causing yet more damage to the island. In just over a century, two thirds of your people will live in abject poverty as Madagascar’s red soil bleeds out into the sea.

The decline of Bruges

2010-02-08T13:26:00.000Z

‘Things will work out. Don’t worry.’

What would she have you do, run to England like her brothers? Give up this life you’ve worked so hard to build?

The cloth you weave is renowned around the world. Traders come from as far as Russia and the Middle East. Your Flemish tradition of craftsmanship started in Roman times. The population was high, even then, and farmers had to supplement their income with weaving. That’s how you Flemish are; you solve problems.

When silt first started to block the Zwin estuary, you built out-ports nearer the sea. In the thirteenth century, when local timber ran out, you organised imports. Look at Bruges now, this city of 200,000 is amongst the richest in the world; home to the royal court, famous artists, even that Englishman Caxton, printing his books.

It’s true; the out-ports are silted now, and farmers have moved their cattle off the exhausted land onto the coastal dunes, defying the ancient charters.

Rumours circulate that Antwerp will take your trade. ‘Our days are numbered,’ they say, but you ignore them. You cannot imagine that in a few generations your city will be the poorest in Belgium. Abandoned, practically deserted. It seems impossible; Bruges always pulls through.

Fatehpur Sikri

2010-01-27T08:36:00.000Z

No one could imagine your pain when the twins died. How could you fulfil your destiny as a great Mughal emperor if you had no heir? You travelled to Sikri, the remote village west of Agra, to consult the Sufi hermit Chishti.

‘You must have faith,’ he said. Soon after, Jodha Bai, your Hindu Queen, gave birth to a son. Your joy knew no bounds; you would honour Chishti; you would build a great city; you would make auspicious Sikri your capital.

You oversaw the planning personally, creating a delightful arrangement of squares and bazaars around a silver lake. In just five years Fatehpur Sikri was complete. You invited representatives from all religions to debate in your city, and made great advances in administration, creating fairer laws.

The city swelled and prospered. It was a golden age. The caravanserais were so packed that visiting Portuguese priests complained about the noise.

But in just fifteen years the land around the city was exhausted and the lake became dry. In 1585 you moved your capital to Delhi, leaving Fatehpur Sikri to decay. All that remains is your crumbling palace and the Great Mosque, the silent home of the reclusive Chishti’s tomb.

Ephesus

2010-01-21T08:22:00.000Z

A plume of dust showed their journey along the coast. You told your family to take the goats into the hills and hide.

But the scouts who came were no bandits. Their armour shone through the dust. They bowed in thanks at the water you offered. You had heard of these Christian crusaders travelling to the holy land.

‘Our king seeks the great port.’
‘This is Ayasalouk, my village.’
They laughed.
‘But where is Ephesus?’
You shrugged. The men showed you a map and you stared at the end of the Cayster River.
‘This is mistaken; it is fields here, land, there is no water, no harbour like this.’

Their map showed fertile land with forests around a magnificent city. ‘Ephesus was the biggest city in the world after Rome. Have you never heard of it? The Temple of Artemis; with its columns encrusted in jewels? It is one of the seven wonders of the world.’

You thought of telling them that sometimes you found carved stones buried in dense layers of silt. But that was five kilometres inland, nowhere near the sea.

The men rode on and your thoughts turned to finding pasture for your goats in your barren, treeless land.

Hispaniola

2010-01-21T08:20:00.001Z

How could things come to this? What happened to your paradise island with its white-sand beaches and staggering mountains, with its fertile valleys and rich forests?

In 1492 the Taínos welcomed Columbus with gold, but the diseases he brought wiped them out. When the mines failed on ‘La Isla Espaňola’, Spain turned to other lands to plunder.

In the 1640s, the French took over the eastern side of Hispaniola, bringing your people from Africa in chains. You cleared the land of trees and planted sugar. Your sweat made St-Dominique the richest colony in the world.

You gained independence and called your new country Haiti, ‘mountainous land’. But Haiti had grown barren. You needed farmland to feed your growing nation, timber to make charcoal for fuel. In 1923 Haiti’s forests covered sixty percent of the land; now they cover less than two. The soils are thin and the rains don’t come.

The Spanish side of the island, the Dominican Republic, had been poorer, less populous. But a dictator protected their forests and subsidised imported gas so the poorest did not have to rely on charcoal. Today its forests remain, its lands are still rich, whilst Haiti is one of the poorest and most densely-populated nations in the world.

Bodmin Moor

2010-01-15T17:37:00.001Z

It was spring 1300. Your husband had set out early to begin work. You bent over the fire, raking the glowing turf ‘coals’, adding dampened turves to keep it going through the day, crying a little in the acrid-sweet smoke. Hard weeks lay ahead; cutting, transporting and drying the ten thousand turves your farm would need in the coming year.

Your house was near a Bronze Age settlement. The field boundaries and paths you used were the same. Bodmin Moor had been shaped and changed over hundreds of generations, each careless of the impact they might have. The earliest hunter-gatherers burned swathes of the dense oak and hazel woodland to make hunting easier. Bronze Age farmers thrived, creating more than two hundred settlements. Those who came next cut down more and more trees until, by 1300, you had nothing but the turf to use as fuel. But turf seemed inexhaustible. Moor industries relied on it; streamworking, quarrying and clay-working. In 1305 alone, smelting stream tin used 250 tonnes of turf charcoal. Did you ever think it might run out?

All that remains today is an acid grassland able to support a few sheep and ponies. People revere it for its loneliness; thinking its windswept, barren hills one of the last untouched places in Britain.

Sugar

2010-01-15T16:11:00.000Z

You saw three ships heading for port. You thought nothing of it until the captain came to your palace. The dashing Italian kissed your hand and said you were beautiful. He said one day the world would know his name. You laughed and took him to your bed.
The four days Christopher Columbus planned in the Canary Islands stretched to a month, you wanted him to stay but always his eyes turned to the sea. You hid your pain. To prove your sweetness, you gave him sugarcane cuttings to take on his voyage. Only when he had gone did you give vent to the true malice of your feelings. Those around you knew your cruelty.

Your legacy would span the world, Beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio. Those few stems you gave him would leave entire countries in poverty. Vast lands would be deforested to make way for sugar plantations and the hungry crop would exhaust the soil. Millions of Africans would be enslaved and shipped around the world. And the global society which would emerge five hundred years later would be smitten with an insatiable desire for sweetness in spite of the obesity and global diabetes epidemic it would cause. All this from a single gesture from a gracious, cruel hand.

St Matthew Island

2010-01-11T13:35:00.000Z

You had heard of St Matthew Island, the narrow strip of arctic tundra far out in the Bering Sea. You had heard how in 1944 the US Coast Guard had shipped in twenty nine reindeer as food for the navigation station personnel, and how in the rush of the end of the war they had been left behind.

You were curious about what would have happened to a herd with abundant food and no predators, and in 1957 you got a chance to visit. You found 1,350 fat reindeer. It seemed ideal; the herd density matched the capacity of the land. But small patches of overgrazing made you wonder.

Six years later you went back to find innumerable tracks and droppings and bent-over willows. The reindeer numbers had exploded to 6,000, but they were thinner now, stressed.

The winter of 1965 was too severe to return. A plane flew over but saw no deer. The pilot refused to fly lower. Did you miss them? In July 1966 you found an island littered with skeletons and only forty two reindeer. There were no active males. Soon the herd would be extinct. The unintended experiment had come full circle; arctic foxes would again be the largest mammal on this windswept island.

The American dustbowl

2010-01-09T09:10:00.001Z

On Sunday April 14 1935, after four years of drought, your family was at church. ‘Give us back our lush green land,’ you prayed, but that afternoon the worst of the black blizzards hit.

The house shook. Dust squeezed past the wet rags at the windows, filling the air. Anxiously you listened. Your father had gone into the biting blackness to settle the cattle. Finally he returned, choking, spitting up mud.

The pioneers had called your tree-less land the ‘Great American Desert’. Experts had warned the lack of crop rotation and deep ploughing would leave soil exposed to the wind. But the farmers hadn't listened.

People died from the dust, the rest began to starve. Proud, your father refused handouts, but soon he had no choice: seven failed harvests out of eight. He sold the cattle, watched them slaughtered. You packed your meagre belongings and left, not even bothering to close the door.

By 1940 2.5 million people had left, and in the next seven years another 5 million would leave, ending single-family farming in the American Great Plains.

The Vikings in Greenland

2009-12-21T11:41:00.001Z

Eric the Red was back from exile, he had found a new land. ‘Pasture enough for anyone who chooses to come,’ he said. You joined him, what choice did you have? All Iceland’s good land was taken.

In 986AD five hundred settlers started to build Europe’s most remote outpost. You worked hard and you flourished, growing to five thousand strong. When Christianity came you embraced it. You built a cathedral, exporting vast amounts of walrus ivory, not for iron or tools, but in church tithes and for windows and communion wine.

You scorned the Inuit who came to your hunting grounds. What could pagan ‘wretches’ teach you? If you noticed their kayaks and toggle harpoons, you did not copy them. Nor their skill in hunting ringed seal, the only food available in Greenland’s deepest winter; you had stores.

But slowly, as the weather changed, the impact of your community began to show; you had cut too much turf and the soils had thinned, too many animals had grazed on fragile new shoots. When the spring came the ice did not melt and the animals you hunted did not come. There were too many of you to feed. You ate your last stores before slowly starving, leaving Greenland to the Inuit, who hunt there still.

The sacred city of Angkor

2009-11-11T12:26:00.001Z

You watched the procession; the trooping army’s fluttering banners; horses draped in gold; ministers with red umbrellas; and behind them all, the king standing on an elephant with shining tusks of gold.

It was 1297 and your diplomatic trip to Angkor was over, but you were reluctant to leave this bustling city of 750,000 people at the heart of the Khmer Empire.

It was so vast, so beautiful and ordered, how could you describe it to your Chinese Emperor? Angkor Wat was the most magnificent temple you had ever seen. It evoked Mount Meru, font of the cosmos, with its five gilded towers rising like peaks, and its vast artificial lakes symbolising the oceans. Its sacred reservoirs were practical too, storing monsoon rains to guarantee harvests; they were the source of the city’s six centuries of success.

But the system had become too ambitious, too reliant on a stable climate. When the first drought hit the empire lost its outlying lands. When the next drought hit the city failed. Angkor fell to invaders. They in turn tried to use its finely-balanced infrastructure, but it was beyond repair. The largest city in the pre-industrial world was abandoned, reclaimed by the jungle, and the wonders of the Khmer Empire were forgotten by all.

The fall of classical Greece

2009-10-20T18:18:00.000+01:00

‘It is essential we look after the land,’ you told them. ‘Our numbers are grown so great; we must manage the resources we have.’

They did not listen. ‘So much of our food must be imported,’ they said. ‘Our farmers must grow more. What if Greece should go to war?’

You tried to make them understand. You told them how in 5000BC the first settlers were wise, selecting only fertile areas; how time passed and through forgetfulness and necessity, the communities expanded onto the fragile slopes.

‘Look around,’ you said. ‘Like the skeleton of a sick man, the hills of Attica are stripped bare. All of Greece is like this. The trees are gone and the soil washes away. We must manage the land as Xenphon taught us.’

Solon, the great reformer, understood, passing laws to ban hillside ploughing. But when Peisistratus came to power he reversed the order, bringing more and more land into use.

It gave you no pleasure to have your predictions come true, to see productivity decline and Greece’s power wane. The Peloponnesian War marked the end of a great era, but the land continued to suffer. Now it is estimated nearly a third of the country is just one step from becoming desert.

The collapse of the Gambier trade triangle

2009-10-19T10:37:00.000+01:00

‘The traders have come!’ You prepared the feast, impatient for news.

They unloaded their sea-canoes: cutting stones from Pitcairn Island and oyster-shell fishhooks from Mangareva Island. Sometimes they brought women, and delicate marriage negotiations would unfold.

They came to Henderson Island for your abundant food, and your luxury goods: turtles and precious, royal-red feathers. This trading had linked the three habitable islands of Southeast Polynesia for centuries, each supplying the others with vital resources.

Like always, the men scoffed at how little workable land you had, how you could survive with no fresh water, but then they saw the feast and fell silent.

Eating greedily, they said, ‘There are too many of us on Mangareva. The soils have grown poor. Some are so hungry they threaten to eat their neighbours. The trees have all been felled; this is our very last canoe.’

It was 1450, the year for you to marry, but the seas stayed empty. Henderson had no tall trees to make canoes and Pitcairn was too far by raft. Your people lived on, struggling to hunt and fish without cutters from Pitcairn or fishhooks from Mangareva; beginning a century of toil until death took your very last one.

Pitcairn Island

2009-10-15T16:11:00.001+01:00

You heard of a small island named after a fifteen-year-old sailor, logged then lost in the Pacific. It was just what you needed. The British would be coming after the ship. It would be the gallows for all of you; mutineers faced no reprieve. It took four months to find Pitcairn, 350 km from its position in your charts.

You burned The Bounty and tried to settle, but fights broke out; unending cycles of murder and revenge over women and land, until there was just you, John Adams, with ten Tahitian women and their mutineers’ children.

You found God and the British pardoned you. As your numbers rose the island’s soils diminished. You petitioned for help. In 1829 a ship took you to Tahiti but their ways were different and the children lacked immunity. Ten died and you sailed for home.

By 1856 your numbers had risen to 194, and again you asked for help. You were offered Norfolk Island, larger and uninhabited, off the coast of Australia. Most managed to settle; this time only 43 came back.

Again the population rose. By the 1930s it reached 223. Then the war came and changed everything. Today many of the young leave, looking for an easier life.

Holodomor

2009-10-09T12:18:00.001+01:00

It was time to industrialise, to enter the world market. You made a five-year plan. Russia would expand its farming so it could feed its rapidly-growing cities. You would trade the rest of the grain on the world market to get the industrial tools and equipment you needed to build a modern nation.

You needed more grain. You sent 25,000 of your best men to every locality, each with secret police, to convince the people to join the cause. Collective farms were the only way forward, the only way to support the state. But the people were stubborn, wanted to keep hold of their own land, had to be ‘persuaded’ to agree.

The 1931 harvest was poor. You took 42% of Ukraine’s grain, irritated when local officials said there’d be no seeds for planting. When people spoke of starvation you called them unpatriotic. Ukrainian farmers tried to hide grain from your collectors, and furious, you took everything: every bit of grain, every bit of food, killing anyone who resisted. You would crush Ukrainian insurrection, create loyalty by force. Your vision for Russia would not founder.

You sent some grain in that terrible winter, but not enough. 14.5 million people died, about half were executed or sent to gulags; the famine claimed the rest.

Rwanda

2009-10-05T13:50:00.001+01:00

You were proud of your growing numbers. Times were good. You drained marshes and cut down trees to make more land to farm. But then productivity began to fall. And then a drought began. It was hard to survive on so little land with a growing family.

‘It will get worse when they are ready to marry,’ your neighbours said. ‘Look at us; we do not have enough land to share out, our children stay at home and complain.’ Father and child, neighbour and friend, doctor and patient; everyone had reason to moan.

The day President Habyarimana was assassinated, Hutu radio screamed: ‘Kill the Tutsi cockroaches!’

You heard of terrible things; of travelling bands of men with machetes, of people settling scores. ‘Go to Marumbi Technical School,’ your neighbours said, ‘There you will be safe.’

Grateful, you and your family joined the 65,000 already hiding. The trap was set. They barricaded the school and began savage rounds of butchery and rape. You watched your family die; fell yourself when the bullet hit. But when they left, you managed to run to the woods.

The Rwandan genocide killed 800,000 in just six weeks. Some people say ‘You need war to bring the numbers down so there’s enough land’. Others say, ‘Never again’. Neither brings you peace.

The collapse of the Ancestral Pueblo culture

2009-09-30T14:37:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-24T11:18:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-17T08:19:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-07T11:57:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-01T14:45:00.000+01:00

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.

The Irish potato famine

2009-07-28T10:28:00.000+01:00

You looked in horror at the leaves. How could they have turned black overnight? With a deft hand you pulled up the plant, shaking the soil from its roots, holding up blighted potatoes, rotten on the stem.

It was too terrible to take in.

People had warned against relying on one source of food. When the blight had arrived in Europe the poor had other crops to rely on. But with the tiny amount of land you could rent, what choice did you have? Until now yields had been good; your population had risen rapidly, reaching eight million.

But now the blight had arrived. You would watch it devastate Ireland. For six years your potato crop would fail. Other crops would grow but you had no money to buy them. They would be loaded onto ships bound for England while you starved in the streets.

The British government would hesitate, send in bad grain, then stop the aid altogether, not wanting to make you dependent, deciding to let things run their course.

This was just six generations ago and yet the loss of a single crop killed more than a million people. Another million boarded ships for better lives, dying in their thousands on the way.

The introduction of smallpox into the New World

2009-07-03T10:50:00.001+01:00

You set out to conquer the New Worlds, small groups of adventurers seduced by the promise of gold beyond compare. You pictured those vast virgin territories laden with riches; you would claim them all. You had right on your side; you were Christians. You had might on your side; guns and horses and fighting dogs to charge into battle.

But it was another deadlier weapon that brought you victory in the end. The Old World diseases you carried were an invisible threat to these people who had lived less festering lives.

Mostly it was accidental. A slave took smallpox to Mexico. The disease killed up to half the inhabitants in the Aztec capital in a year, sweeping through the country. ‘The great dying’ reduced the population from twenty million to three million over the next fifty years.

But some of it was deliberate; you gave blankets from infected corpses to the Native Americans in 1763.

Mortality rates were high: Piegan, Huron, Catwaba, Cherokkee and Irquois - 50%, Omaha and Blackfeet - 66%, Mandan 90%, Taino 100%. Those who survived were more often than not maimed or blind or infertile.

If you ever looked back you would have seen your conquering dream realised in ways you could never have imagined.

The fall of the Mayan civilisation

2009-07-01T10:44:00.000+01:00

Deep in the inhospitable rainforest, your glittering Mayan cities reached high above the trees, magnificent stepped pyramids surrounded by vast and bustling settlements.

Your culture evolved over three thousand years. Your sense of occasion was second to none, elaborate rituals marked by incense and chocolate and blood.

Your night sky was a window onto all possible worlds. You tracked the stars making precise calendars which told when to make war, when to sacrifice to your gods. They showed nothing was permanent; what was right in one season might not come to pass in another; understanding the past was the key to the future.

What went wrong? You thought of everything. Your complex agricultural systems fed ten million. Raised fields and terracing, forest gardens and managed fallows; rainwater stored and released by hydraulic systems.

You did not see the precarious balance you had created. When the rains failed your systems would fail. You had stripped the forest and reduced humidity. In that prolonged drought what little rain fell did not fall on you. Without reserves most of your people starved. Your few remaining cities fought each other until the jungle reclaimed the magnificent Maya cities and the memory of all you had done.

The collapse of civilisation on Easter Island

2009-06-22T21:33:00.000+01:00

You were proud of what you had created. The statues of your ancestors watching over you, connecting you to the earth’s great power.

You worshipped them and remembered how the great ancestor Hotu Matu’a stepped ashore from his endless journey across the South Pacific to an island forested with giant palms for syrup and wine, and deep seas teaming with porpoise. You prospered. Each new family cleared more land and you began to carve the magnificent Moai with powerful jutting chins and magic coral eyes.

With rope and wood, you helped the Moai walk across the island to stand in line with the stars.

But you had felled so many trees the rains made the soil thin. You grew hungry. Your connection to the earth’s power was weakening. The only answer: bigger Maoi. Day and night you carved, but it was not enough. The last crop failed.

You looked across the blasted island; no tree remained; no boat to fish or to use to escape.

They found you by chance in 1722 on Easter Sunday, calling it a redemption. But Easter Island offered no second chance. Life had spiralled into violence and hunger and despair. That is how you came to topple each other’s Moai and eat your own kin.

The last passenger pigeon

2009-06-22T21:31:00.000+01:00

You were fourteen, used to helping on the farm. Seeing a strange bird in the corn, you took the family gun and brought it down in a single shot. You were proud of that. How could you have known the blue-grey bird in your hands was the last wild passenger pigeon?

Your parents remembered the migrating flocks that took days to pass, blackening the skies, drowning out all sound in the thunder of wings. Such graceful birds; separating in a whirl of powerful wings round a predator, making a moving shadow rounds its talons. Safety in numbers was how they survived, how they lived.

Man was a different kind of predator; tracking them to their breeding grounds, culling them in their thousands, loading their carcasses onto the newly-opened railroads to the towns. When their numbers started to fall, conservationists called for limits, but legislators saw no need; it would be like protecting ants.

Seasons passed. The forests thinned. Settlers cleared the land. The weakened flocks somehow couldn’t reform. By the time the bill came in 1897 it was too late.

There were five billion passenger pigeons, they were the most common bird in America, possibly on the planet; and in less than a century you were killing the very last one.

The burial of the city of Antioch

2009-06-05T17:13:00.000+01:00

You built a city renowned through history.

Its temples and palaces live on in the dusty chronicles; such carefully planned streets; aqueducts crossing mountains bringing water to every house. You made this city great: golden Antioch, a jewel, a wonder, fair crown of the Orient.

It was to you that St Paul first preached. Your cosmopolitan voice gave Christians their name. But you weren’t reverent; known for your sarcastic take on the world, you loved to fight and indulge in the delights of the flesh in Daphne’s Grove.

When you stood in the hill-top temples, did you ever worry how big the city had grown? How its sprawling metropolis filled the plain? How your insatiable need for more wood had stripped the hills of trees? Did you notice how the new farms quickly became barren? The rain running off their slopes heavy with mud? Perhaps you didn’t understand the fragile balance of root and tree, water and soil?

In the end you had no choice. The rains washed so much soil off the hills that the Orontes River silted up. You left in search of a better place, leaving behind the wondrous city you had built.

Today your ancient city of Antioch lies eleven metres under the plain