“It has been suggested that nature is
hostile, violent and unpredictable, and that the Indians try to bring order
into this confusion by categorising it. This may be so in some cases and some
societies, but from what we have learned from the Indians, it is man and his
basic impulses: food, sex, power, security, which are chaotic and must be
controlled, while nature, far from being disordered offers many practical
models for human behaviour and adaptation.” -
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff[1]
Setting the Stage: A
Walk
“Ladies and Gentleman, I welcome you all to today’s cryptoforestry
walk. We have assembled here at a place on the edge of the city of Amsterdam. In the
vicinity are three large tower blocks, all offices, a hotel, there are mass-parking
facilities, tram and metro stations. There are also plenty of motorway
junctions. A place like this is the utility area of a city, it provides the
infrastructure that transport oxygen to the heart, i.e. the centre, of the city.
It is an the uncelebrated landscape but for cryptoforestry this place is not
just the essence of the city, its true grit, its face behind the mask, but it
is also the place where the dirt is swept under the magic carpet.
‘Crypto’ from Greek meaning hidden or secret, related to ‘cryptic’, of
unsure or obscure meaning. A cryptoforest incorporates both: they may be
forests that are hidden or it may refer to forests of unsure pedigree, because
no other words suffices. Cryptoforests are a feeble category within the psychogeographic
classification of landscapes. You do find cryptoforests in the centre but the
chance of finding one increases as you move outward and cracks will appear in
the urban armour as you move further and further in the perimeter. I invite you
to think of the cryptoforest not as a disturbance of urban hegemony, but as the
place where the division between city and nature becomes meaningless.
After a detour along the parapets of the motorway we will appear in
front of fence. We climb this and enter a terrain that formerly belonged to a
petrol distribution point but which has now been reclaimed by the spontaneous
vegetation of opportunistic weeds. Perhaps you are familiar with Richard
Jefferies late-romantic novel ‘After London, or Wild England’ first published
in 1885. In
the opening chapters Jefferies paints a picture of the great metropolis
conquered by wild plants after a sudden and unexplained removal of man[2].
But the catastrophe imaged by Jefferies only writes in Bold and Italics what is
happening all the time. Once the weeding stops the pavement will soon wobble.
Plants from all over the world have found a place in our city, what they share
is hardiness and a gung-ho ability to make-do. The city is vulnerable to this
constant floral attack. What killed the Martians in HG Wells’ War of the World?
The Bacteria. What is forever eating the city? Its phythosphere. The
cryptoforest is the forest-outsider from where floral takeover is commencing.
Now let’s walk and I will explain more as we continue.”[3]
The Vinland
Sagas
The anthropocene is the proposed name for the geological age that
began, according to provisional consensus, in 1776 when James Watt’s first steam
engine went into production. It is not at present a scientifically recognized
name but it is under consideration by the body that governs the naming table of
geological history, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of
London. That the anthropocene has been taken in consideration at all indicates
that many serious people find merit in the idea as the SCGSL is by necessity a
conservative organization whose line of work does not demand speedy decisions.
The history of the dinosaur, the history of the donkey, the history of the
mosquito, no matter how fascinating by themselves, never entered the story of
geology. But man has become a geologic force: by levelling mountains, digging
holes, sucking stuff from the ground and putting stuff in the air and the sheer
number of us has intertwined human history with the history of the earth. That
much seems self-evident but to make it scientific it needs to be shown that
also uninhabited places like the Sahara are amassing
enough anthropogenic change that it will show up in sediment a million years
from now.
The Vinland Sagas tell the tale of the Norse discovery of Greenland, Helluland
(Baffin Island), Markland (Labrador) and Vinland (Gulf of St. Lawrence/New
Foundland) around 1000AD. They are a record of a
people at drift trying to make a living in distant and isolated lands[4].
Limited population and absence of reliable communication with the motherland
allowed for seasonal presence in the Americas but not expansion. The Greenland colony petered out after approximately 450
years. Many reasons are given for the unsustainability of the Norse presence in
Greenland, from demographic factors to soil
degradation, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see that Norse presence
could only ever sustain itself within the conditions of the Medieval Warm Period.
The end of which brought a colder climate and closed the window of opportunity
for Norse patterns of subsistence. The Norse presence left little physical impact.
It took a long time before actual archaeological evidence confirmed the
reliability of the Vinland sagas as a historic
account. The first hard archaeological evidence was the remains of a Norse long
house discovered in New Foundland (L'Anse aux Meadows, 1960). The migration of
the Inuit across the breath of the American-Arctic, from the Being Strait
to Eastern Canada, is attributed to the pull
of goods taken to the continent by the Norse. In their expansion East they
invaded the lands of their erstwhile trading partners, the Tuniit. These are a still
largely obscure people who also kept longstanding trade relations with the
Norse. The Tuniit (also knows as the Dorset Culture) couldn’t withstand the
pressure of the more aggressive newcomers and were either assimilated or eradicated[5].
Eirik the Red was driven onto the sea by events: ‘some killings’. We
too are driven into a new age: by extinctions at rates exceeding background
rates by 100 to 1000 times. For Eirik the Red the overbearing sentiment that
brought him to Vinland was one of loss. This
is no different for our journey into the anthropocene. Landscapes are forever altered,
plant and animal species are at drift causing problems at unforeseen places
(Nile perch in lake Victoria, Cane toads in Australia,
pythons in the Everglades, etc), new diseases
create global havoc when airborne. Forests are cleared, seas are acidified,
soils salinized, drink water reserves are shrinking and average temperatures
are up. A jeremiad of change that influences agricultural cycles and creates
freak weather patterns. It is a world at drift. But it is also a NEW world. The
chance to bear witness to a new geological age is extremely rare, they usually
last a while, but we are in that unique position. The anthropocene is our Vinland. And yes: the melting of the polar ice again
makes the Inuit the ghosts at the background of the story too.
The Vinland Sagas offer parallels to our own condition. There are differences
too. Eirik the Red travelled with a small group of family and clan from Norway to Iceland
and reached new shore in Greenland. We are not
travelling in isolation, we are legion. We have no solitude but crowds. The
anthropocene has no places of departure or arrival, it does not travel from A
to B, it’s global, it’s illogical, messy and is coming at us from all
directions. In that it is entirely suitable for an age that takes not the clock
or the grid but the network as its dominant model.
The Vinland Saga is a tale. The Anthropocene is a grand narrative.
The City in the Anthropocene
One of four authors of ‘The New World of the Anthropocene’ (2010) is Paul
Crutzen, the Nobel awarded atmospheric chemist who first suggested the term. In
this paper the authors reveal themselves as intuitive followers of Richard
Jefferies’ vision of the future. After noticing that the world’s great cities
are indeed capable of magnitudal increases in erosion and sedimentation they
notice that:
“If construction stops or slows, for whatever
reason, then natural geomorphologic processes will rapidly re-establish
themselves, as shown by the fate of ‘lost’ cities such as Angkor in Cambodia.”
The passage is illustrated by a photographic image of a gigantic Kapok
tree growing straight through the Kmer temple of Ta Prohm.
Published alongside it is a picture of Shanghai
skyscrapers: it is a coolly made observation that the inevitable cryptoforest
lurks behind the facades of empire like match-fixing in football.
The forest, not the metropolis, is the climax state. Nothing shows
this better than the excavated garden cities of the Xingu
in central Amazon and the many geoglyphs found across southwest Amazon. All reveal
the former presence of large scale urban populations organized in complex
societies. Even while evidence for the lost cities of the Amazon was available,
the overall picture was fragmented at best and deemed unreliable by most.
Gaspar de Carvahal’s account of Fransciso de Orellena’s Amazonian journey from
the Andes to the Atlantic in 1542 mentions encounters
with several busy, conflicting urban polities. Local myths like the Kuikuru
story of Viti-Viti as collected by the Boaz Brothers in the Xingu
explain the origin of large scale earthworks of unknown pedigree[6].
Colonel Fawcett’s search for the City of Z
was informed by evidence gathered during many years of dealing with local
inhabitants[7].
Fawcett already gauged what Levi-Strauss and Clastres would later deduce from fieldwork:
the small, ‘primitive’ semi-sedentary structures we associate with human
presence in the Amazon today are the methods developed after the crash by
traumatized survivors. So successful was the forest’s reclamation that numerous
ditches and fences were kept hidden underneath the canopy until deforestation
and aerial reconnaissance made them impossible to deny. Academic persistence
that environmental conditions made swidden agriculture the only viable practise
within the constraints of tropical environmental conditions, the counterfeit
paradise as Betty Meggers had it, did not help either[8].
But you should not second-guess the natives. The discovery of the extant of
Terra Preta (dark earth), anthropogenic soils enriched with charcoal, bone and
manure added was the first hard evidence that the forest had once been busier
and much more humanized. Estimates vary but it is reckoned that 10% of soil in
the Amazon is anthropogenic, an area the size of France[9].
Ample evidence that the city is transient but that the ground retains the
memory, exactly as the paper of Crutzen et al suggests.
Globalization creates
Forest
Pioneer vegetation, secondary forest, climax-adverting processes.
Feral vegetations find a place where the urban centres unravels and the centrifugal
powers fail to put asphalt. This is as true locally and it is true globally.
With young people leaving their native villages for the city and with
agro-industry and supermarket standards undercutting prices and desirability of
vernacular, small farm produce, the forest is allowed to overrun uneconomic agricultural
lands. Political ecologist Susanna Hecht writes about El Salvadorian farmers receiving
enough money from siblings working in the US to minimize their farming. Land
with at least 30% forest coverage went up with 22% between 1990-2000.[10]
Afforestation is also happening in East and Central Europe
with remarkable consequences. The returning forest has allowed the wolf
population to boom. In Germany
the wolf re-established itself in 2000 after an absence of a century. The
forest is returning, even in some of world’s most populous areas but it is not
‘native’, it will never become ‘pristine’ and it certainly isn’t a ‘wilderness’
in any meaningful sense of that often too loosely applied word. They are
gardens left to themselves.
The potentially available species that may take root on fallowed lands
are coming from across the world. Disturbance of soil often suits migrant plants
and there is a pleasant irony to it. In answering the question why the
Europeans settled in America,
Australia, New Zealand and not in the Amazon
and Tropical Africa, Alfred W. Crosby pointed to climatic and biotic similarities.
Disturbances to the land created the opportunities for European fodder plants
(grasses and plants like dandelion, sorrel and plantain) to prosper in
unfamiliar lands[11].
Their presence in turn created grazing fields with exactly the plants European animals
like pigs, sheep and horses needed for food. This spread was possible also because
North-America offers roughly the same environmental conditions as found in
Atlantic Europe, and the list of plants partaking in a reverse colonization is
impressive. For instance plants like Yellow Primrose, Canadian horseweed and
Virginia pepperweed have become stable presences across the old world.
The Norse presence in America
and Greenland shows the same pattern. Field
weeds like sorrel, plantains and flax were introduced. As Stephen J. Pyne
writes: “Half of the beetles on Iceland
and Greenland are introduced species, probably
from early Norse times”.[12]
Ecological orthodoxy usually has little patience for what Crosby called ‘port-manteau biotas’. Also in this respect
the cryptoforest hides its beauty behind a poker-face. But a coalition of
ecologists, biologists and geographers are working to reassess the “trash-ecosystems”
orthodoxy associated with the anthropogenic landscapes. They instead point to
the viability, species richness, ecosystems services and sheer resilience of
these ‘novel ecosystems’. There are precedents but the publication ‘Novel
ecosystems: theoretical and management aspects of the new ecological world
order’ (2006) is the closest thing available to a manifesto creating a starting
point for a concentrated effort to rewrite ecological understanding[13].
It cites human impact on biogeographical distribution, abiotic environments,
decrease of species pools and the existence of predominantly urban, cultivated
or degraded landscapes creating dispersal barriers for many species as the prominent
reasons for the existence of novel or emergent ecosystems. It states that:
“These types of
ecosystem can be thought of as occupying a zone somewhere in the middle of the
gradient between ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ ecosystems, on one hand, and intensively
managed systems on the other hand”.
The paper gained much credence by in-depth coverage in Nature[14].
Emma Harris, writer for Nature and author of the first book on the novel
ecosystem debate for a general audience calls the world of the anthropocene a ‘rambunctious
garden’[15].
To make explicit what was implicit: nature is no longer the nature we knew. All
nature is now directly (logged rainforests) or indirectly (shrinking icecaps) manmade.
It is still natural, we are part of nature too after all, it can still be wild but
it will never again be wilderness. If the new world of the Anthropocene is a good
or bad thing overall is, under debate, to put it mildly. However nobody can
really argue with the statement geographer Erle Ellis made in his New York
Timed Op-Ed (2013):
“The planet will never
be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face:
the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement”.[16]
Researchers arguing for fair, fact-base appraisal of novel ecosystems
instead of outright condemnation are opening themselves to the risk of being accidentally
or intentionally misunderstood. It’s a position that can easily be read as
fatalist: ‘science says that nothing can be done against loss of biodiversity,
so why bother?’. It is also a position easily misused: ‘if biodiversity of a
second growth forest is not quantitatively different from an old growth forest it
is no problem to log the last remaining forests of Indonesia for the paper industry’. This
is not what the novel ecosystems says. It does call for the need to take care
of intact ecosystems with the meticulousness that is also used to conserve art
and irreplaceable artefacts. In those places that are changed, globalized,
invaded, anthropogenic and near impossible to restore to original conditions it
wants to look at it as a new permanent reality.
The Cryptoforest is
the City
Nature conservation reflects the civilization doing the conserving. The
stand-of between city and forest, the balance between urbanization and forestry
is a judo-match where strength, strategy and patience are all equally important
while the referee (agriculture) is biased but even in that untrustworthy. The
city may think that it can control the forest, that its management is fully
explicit in codes and rules. But the forest is laying low, it knows that in the
long haul of attrition the city can’t win. The forest is the fate of all
cities. The distinction everybody (one shouldn’t generalize, but here it is
warranted) instinctively makes between nature and city is based on false,
outdated categorising. All forests are now part of the city, it is from the
city that orders for its management are coming. Even when it orders say to
leave it alone or when no orders are coming at all. But the other side of the
continuum is equally valid but in a separate timeframe: all cities are temporary
covers for a forest in disguise. The cryptoforest, the contemporary half-baked
self-willed forest of the city is what reveals it.
[1] Reichel-Dolmatoff,
Gerardo. The forest within:
The world-view of the tukano amazonian indians. Council Oaks Distribution,
1996.
[2] Online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13944
[3] Transcript from the introduction to a walk given by the author in
October 2013.
[4] M. Magnusson, H
Palsson, The Vinland Sagas, The Norse Discovery of America,
1971, Penguin Books, London.
[5] R. McGhee, The Last
Imaginary Place, A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1995.
[6] Bôas, Orlando Villas, and Claudio Villas Boas. Xingu:
the Indians, their myths. Souvenir Press, 1974.
[7] Fawcett, Percy. Exploration Fawcett:
Journey to the Lost City of Z. Penguin.
com, 2010.
[8] Meggers, Betty Jane. Amazonia:
man and culture in a counterfeit paradise. Aldine, Atherton, 1971.
[9] Mann, Charles C. 1491: New revelations
of the Americas before Columbus. Random
House Digital, Inc., 2005.
[10] http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_scientist_extols_the_value_of_forests_shaped_by_humans/2379/
[11] A.W. Crosby, Ecological
Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900. Cambridge University
Press, 1986
[12] Pyne, Stephen J. Vestal fire: an environmental history, told
through fire, of Europe and Europe's encounter
with the world. University
of Washington Press,
2012.
[13] Hobbs, Richard J., et al. "Novel ecosystems: theoretical and
management aspects of the new ecological world order." Global ecology
and biogeography 15.1 (2006): 1-7.
[14] http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090722/full/460450a.html
[15] Marris, Emma. Rambunctious garden: saving
nature in a post-wild world. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.
[16]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0
