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Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

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A plague of Rocky Mountain Locusts around Nebraska in 1875 was estimated to cover 198,000 square miles, over twice that of the UK. Despite the largest ever single species swarm determined in history, the locust was soon extinct. It is just one of several examples covered here, cataloguing abundance in nature in the North American continent and its demise following Columbus, half a millennium ago: "Columbus didn't discover America; he simply ran into a continent already occupied by countless nations as varied in their lives as the ecology of the land they occupied." Here the author is swift to dismiss America as a pristine wilderness unchanged by man, rather it was wilderness in relatively stable balance with human communities, who had already modified or continued to manage nature to their ends.

British wildlife film maker Steve Nicholls is at pains to tease out why collapse in natural abundance is so poorly regulated by science and politicians, given the skewed nature of our baselines as to actual abundance: we estimate abundance based on a limited perception long out of date. Copious records exist from European contact, to gain a relatively complete picture as to what happened when a mercantile capitalist civilization was unleashed on paradise found; a chain of events repeated elsewhere but scarcely revealed in such vastness of scale: "The hugely abundant natural world of North America provided the raw capital to fuel the birth of new nations. Those same historical documents that allow us to build up a picture of past natural abundance also provide a stark and sobering illustration of the last five hundred years of our relationship with nature."

Far from an unfurling tragedy, Nicholls is a canvas strewn with bounty and grandeur incorporating native communities like the Calusa who never farmed. They lived off an incredible marine productivity. Combining history and personal narrative, there is a pointed lack of illustrations or maps. Depictions work through our imaginations as we glimpse the late Great plains as Lewis and Clark convey from 1803: "this scenery already rich pleasing and beautiful was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe, deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compreed at one view ...(sic) "

Of twenty chapters, over a third is given over to aquatic habitats including the oceans and their exploitation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are complimentary, referenced sources as with oyster harvesting off Chesapeake bay: "the Lord put them there so we could get them ... Get it today! To hell with tamar. Leave it till tamar, and somebody else'll get it." As is now dawning and highlighted, ocean abundance has probably fared worse than terrestrially, hidden in invisibility and subject to assumptions of infinity: "These animals are found at all times of the year everywhere around this island in vast numbers ... could [yield] plentifully from them with both fat and meat." - concerning Steller's sea cow that became extinct a record 27 years after discovery.

Despite examples of dramatic recovery in certain species, (beavers, elephant seals and the cahow, from Bermuda that was restored from presumed extinction by a determined governor) this is more a witness narrative than a call for change given wildlife literature and warnings about collapse are nothing new. As Nicholls observes "Almost as soon as the New World was discovered, it was connected to an enormous market ... These markets sucked up American resources at extraordinary rates." starkly illustrating a carnage disguised along our supermarket aisles. The further we are separated from the source and nature of exploitation as with fishing on the high seas, the more we consume in ignorance, with profligacy. Historical natural abundance is now unimaginable. Suggestions to reform globalised capitalism are indicated.

Leaving a litany of extinctions, Nicholls attempts to grapple honestly with infinite abundance that greeted Europeans to the new world, not just in the beginning but through several waves of exploration and spread following history from East to West. He tries to pin it down and bring us face to face with it. There is an exposure to the value systems the Europeans brought with them, so ill suited to the preservation of biodiversity: primarily a strong belief in a self serving God and that all the abundance discerned was the Lord's great gift for the new pilgrims to pillage as they wished; that the wolf and its ilk was the devil incarnate and worst of all, a rapine capitalism where everything was potentially available to kill and destroy on the cheap and sell dear - money money money. We meet crystal clear waters carpeted in oysters, mussels and abalones. Seas and rivers aplenty with whales, seals, turtles, sirenians, otters, birds, walruses and fish. We move from the Atlantic through the Eastern USA and then south, north ... from the Caribbean to the Mississippi, from the wastes of Canada to the warmth of Florida. From giant forests to the great plains. From sea to sea, coast to coast and from the Vikings to the 21st century. What has been lost is not simply species, but abundance and richly evolved ecosystems, in many ways lost for ever - like vast cities of prairie dogs up to five billion strong ...

"I offer this book as a time machine." Nicholls "time machine" is warmly inviting - a detailed and lavish expose in an unfinished (his)story.

This well documented book traces American natural history from the time of Jamestown (sometimes regressing to earlier times) into the present. If you would like to read history from the perspective of the American Indian, Jesuit priest explorers and all the fauna and flora riches surrounding them without any weepy eyed attempt to bemoan their destruction - Read "paradise found". Until I did, I had no real concept of how far we have fallen. Even though in my short life of 61 years I recall dramatic destruction of our natural environment (seems almost anyone older than 30 might likewise attest).

Steve Nicholls' excellent monograph goes much beyond my own extrapolations of "the way it was" and it exceeded my expectation of reading enjoyment. Would you have thought that Native Americans were boreal forest managers? Did you know that European diseases all but wiped out Native Americans as it almost did native Hawaiians (I just returned from Kauai)? Did you know that the Passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet existed in the millions, nay billions and are extinct today? The inexhaustible cod fish population has collapsed from trillions to millions just recently (1992), and seems unable to recover. However be assured, Nicholl's prose is not a whining harp about paradise lost but an education of how the principle of the "last oyster" has fouled coastal waterways, inter alia, Chesapeake Bay... and all else. This gregarious account caused me to flash back to the first time I viewed "Seven Lakes Basin" in the Olympic National Park; from that ridgetop vista I saw paradise.

Would you have guessed feral (escaped) hogs have rooted and destroyed almost as much as the men who brung'em. "Nature in America at the Time of Discovery" causes revelation of how history has been driven by man's lust for natural resources. It was the motivation to move men ever westward to fulfill their divine destiny or "Manifest Destiny".

I'll sum it up by quoting the last sentence in this book, "I offer this book as that time machine." Yes, this book is a time machine which permitted me to walk creation as it was and might be, if only in my imagination.

If you have ever yearned to know what North America was like before we started stripping it down for our gain, this is the book for you. It is both exhilerating and and desperately poigniant. Carefully researched with wonderful extensive descriptions straight out of early explorer's logs, it sings with authenticity...and I am only half way through it.

Steve Nicholls reminds us that "in comparison to today, nature was vastly, almost unimaginably, more abundant." He seeks to address two questions: "why was it like this, and why isn't it now?"

Starting with the overfishing of the North Atlantic, with a history reaching back to the Vikings, Nicholls describes the effects of humans on American aquatic and terrestrial fauna and their habitats. He moves species by species, ecosystem by ecosystem, through American natural history. He contrasts the outlook and practices of Europeans and their descendants to those of Native Americans. Indian management increased the abundance of some species and reduced others, but whatever stresses the ecosystems were under prior to European arrival, they were able to bounce back, Nicholls claims.

Nicholls has scoured historical accounts of early explorers and settlers about the wildlife and landscapes they observed, and having done so he makes a valuable contribution to the natural history literature. He takes advantage, as well, of what modern science can tell us about historical animal populations, using mitochondrial DNA, for example.

"Paradise Found" consists of a great many stories of particular species and habitats, but only the general theme of diminished abundance unifies the total narrative. Typically each account covers just a few pages before moving on to another different animal, different place, or different ecological interaction. So there is a lot of detail to absorb. Fortunately, Nicholls is a good story teller (pleasantly surprising for someone whose profession is wildlife film making, not writing) -- his accounts of wolves are especially good examples. Although primarily about the time of discovery, the book moves back and forth between the past and the present, with Nicholls offering many contemporary reports of his own projects and observations. These chronological diversions add insights and enhance the book's readability.

Along the way Nicholls builds a catalog of extinctions, including great auks, Carolina parakeets, heath hens, Labrador ducks, passenger pigeons (nesting colonies were once as big as thirty to forty miles long and six miles wide), and (possibly) ivory-billed woodpeckers. Since 1900, 123 freshwater fish species are no longer found in North America. The variety of grizzly bear that appears on the California state flag is extinct. These are just some examples.

Nicholls covers so much geography and so many species that most readers are likely to learn much that is new to them. For instance, I was surprised to find out that "the aquatic fauna of the [American] Southeast is one of the richest in the world," notably in the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.

The author believes that solutions to preserve or restore populations must take an ecosystems approach. He contends that "... human influence hasn't just made a few species rarer, it has created deep-seated changes in ecology which will be much more difficult to reverse." He speaks of the "bewildering complexity of individual cases" and suggests that ecosystems cannot be managed from the top down. For example, one characteristic of ecosystems is the "trophic cascade," where as predatory species disappear, others multiply, causing changes further down the food chain. "We can't choose which plants and animals we want in our world and which we don't," Nicholls writes.

There are a few things the publisher could have done to make this a better book. There are no illustrations, when maps often would have been helpful (for instance, of the different grassland ecosystems through the Great Plains), as would drawings or photos of animals now unfamiliar to us. Nor is there a bibliography, just end notes, which I found cumbersome and insufficient as a guide to further reading on certain subjects that stimulated my interest.

Five-hundred years ago in North America (at about the time of Columbus' arrival) the flora and fauna was very different from today. Using reports from early European explorers and colonizers, Steve Nicholls has been able to piece together a picture of former wealth that is almost unbelievable in abundance. Maybe you've heard of stories of buffalo herds that stretch as far as the eye can see, pigeon flocks that blotted out the sun for hours, or cod fish schools so thick they stopped boats from sailing. These stories and many others Nicholls describes with cinematic quality. This vision of past natural abundance is both amazing and sad, sad because it's now mostly all gone. Whatever natural world that still exists in North America, seemingly rich and abundant, is really a mere scrap of a former paradise. Our perspective in time, limited by short lifespans, gives a false sense of abundance compared to actual historical levels. The United States once had great natural wealth, but most people don't even it's now mostly gone. Nicholls shows what is was once like. Paradise Found is a long book and I found it somewhat emotionally hard going at times, in the way holocaust books are difficult, but I am glad to have read it and now understand how things used to be.

Nichols adds a very lucid ecological overview of first European contact with North America. Common themes run through a series of environmental disasters, along with a few hopeful signs.