The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen Page A
Authors: Michael Tennesen
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years ago the Sumerians invented counting tokens inscribed with pictures that could be impressed in clay to document land, grain, or cattle ownership. Scribes began drawing them with styli made of reeds. The result was known as cuneiform, perhaps our first written language.
Around one hundred thousand years ago, the world had approximately half a million people—counting Homo sapiens , Neanderthals, and other hominids. There were about six million Homo sapiens twelve thousand years ago at the end of the Ice Age. But then along came agriculture, and from 10,000 BC to AD 1, populations exploded about a hundredfold.
Agriculture improved life because it decreased competition for hunter-gatherers for a while, but then population growth caught up with the increased food supply. Greater populations, confined living, and proximity to domestic animals increased human contact with disease. Our impact on the environment grew. Wild animal diversity shrunk.While we were nomadic, our effect on the land wasn’t too drastic, but once we settled down all hell broke loose.
THE POLLUTION PERIOD
Back at the Rothamsted Institute, I followed Kevin Coleman, a research scientist, into the institute’ssample archive, a focal point for visiting scientists. Housed in a warehouse on the Rothamsted grounds are rows upon rows of five-liter bottles, all dated and stacked on shelves sixteen feet high that hold harvest grain, stalks, seed, and soil from test plots going back 160 years. On one high shelf is a sample of Rothamsted’s first wheat field, dated 1843. To avoid mold, the bottles are all sealed with corks, paraffin, and lead. During World War II, samples were kept in discarded tins that once held powdered milk, coffee, syrup, and other wartime essentials.
The Rothamsted sample archive is a unique collection, since it comprises some three hundred thousand samples of crops and soils taken from agricultural field experiments for which the history is fully documented. “The samples are used by scientists worldwide to understand how changes in agricultural practices affect crop production, soil fertility, and biodiversity,” says Coleman.
But what these vessels also contain is something researchers are not so proud of: a chronicle of human pollution. Over two centuries of industrial growth, soils have recorded what we’ve put into the atmosphere as well as what we’ve poured onto the ground. The Rothamsted sample archive holds evidence of nuclear atmospheric testing in Nevada and on the Bikini Atoll during the 1950s and 1960s. It also has a record of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the manufacture of plastics and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from power plants, fresh asphalt, and the fumes of automobiles. There are dioxins, the primary ingredient in Agent Orange, used to defoliate Vietnam. And plenty of heavy metals like zinc and copper from animal feed, cadmium from artificial fertilizers, chromium from tanning, and lead from pipes, vehicle fuel, industrial exhaust, and coal-fired power plants.
Many of these pollutants are deathly persistent. PCBs, the fluids that keep on lubricating and causing cancers, as well as DDT, the pesticide that keeps on killing, continue to appear in nature. Though amounts have gone down significantly since the 1970s, when both these chemicals were banned from most nations, PCB residuals continue to show up in the breast milk of Inuit mothers, and DDT continues to appear in freshwater fish and the raptors that eat them. DDT is still used in India to control malaria.
But the toxic residuals in our soils are something we may just have to live with. Right now, we have to get planting or starve.
THE NEXT GREEN REVOLUTION
That afternoon, out in the fields, Paul Poulton, a Rothamsted scientist, led me down rows of wheat stalks that displayed the results of a momentous moment in the evolution of agricultural products, the “green revolution.” The seed heads were so thick that the plants appeared to
Around one hundred thousand years ago, the world had approximately half a million people—counting Homo sapiens , Neanderthals, and other hominids. There were about six million Homo sapiens twelve thousand years ago at the end of the Ice Age. But then along came agriculture, and from 10,000 BC to AD 1, populations exploded about a hundredfold.
Agriculture improved life because it decreased competition for hunter-gatherers for a while, but then population growth caught up with the increased food supply. Greater populations, confined living, and proximity to domestic animals increased human contact with disease. Our impact on the environment grew. Wild animal diversity shrunk.While we were nomadic, our effect on the land wasn’t too drastic, but once we settled down all hell broke loose.
THE POLLUTION PERIOD
Back at the Rothamsted Institute, I followed Kevin Coleman, a research scientist, into the institute’ssample archive, a focal point for visiting scientists. Housed in a warehouse on the Rothamsted grounds are rows upon rows of five-liter bottles, all dated and stacked on shelves sixteen feet high that hold harvest grain, stalks, seed, and soil from test plots going back 160 years. On one high shelf is a sample of Rothamsted’s first wheat field, dated 1843. To avoid mold, the bottles are all sealed with corks, paraffin, and lead. During World War II, samples were kept in discarded tins that once held powdered milk, coffee, syrup, and other wartime essentials.
The Rothamsted sample archive is a unique collection, since it comprises some three hundred thousand samples of crops and soils taken from agricultural field experiments for which the history is fully documented. “The samples are used by scientists worldwide to understand how changes in agricultural practices affect crop production, soil fertility, and biodiversity,” says Coleman.
But what these vessels also contain is something researchers are not so proud of: a chronicle of human pollution. Over two centuries of industrial growth, soils have recorded what we’ve put into the atmosphere as well as what we’ve poured onto the ground. The Rothamsted sample archive holds evidence of nuclear atmospheric testing in Nevada and on the Bikini Atoll during the 1950s and 1960s. It also has a record of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the manufacture of plastics and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from power plants, fresh asphalt, and the fumes of automobiles. There are dioxins, the primary ingredient in Agent Orange, used to defoliate Vietnam. And plenty of heavy metals like zinc and copper from animal feed, cadmium from artificial fertilizers, chromium from tanning, and lead from pipes, vehicle fuel, industrial exhaust, and coal-fired power plants.
Many of these pollutants are deathly persistent. PCBs, the fluids that keep on lubricating and causing cancers, as well as DDT, the pesticide that keeps on killing, continue to appear in nature. Though amounts have gone down significantly since the 1970s, when both these chemicals were banned from most nations, PCB residuals continue to show up in the breast milk of Inuit mothers, and DDT continues to appear in freshwater fish and the raptors that eat them. DDT is still used in India to control malaria.
But the toxic residuals in our soils are something we may just have to live with. Right now, we have to get planting or starve.
THE NEXT GREEN REVOLUTION
That afternoon, out in the fields, Paul Poulton, a Rothamsted scientist, led me down rows of wheat stalks that displayed the results of a momentous moment in the evolution of agricultural products, the “green revolution.” The seed heads were so thick that the plants appeared to
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