A big buzz kill, yes. History’s worst oil spill is bad, but it is exponentially more depressing to know that the disaster is taking place — one is tempted to say mercifully — in a region so degraded by human actions that it was already home to one of the world’s largest marine dead zones, an area that sometimes approaches the size of the state of Massachusetts and is so polluted by runoff from the Mississippi River that almost nothing can survive there. Yet as the observations of those inner-city kids in Houston suggest, this kind of knowledge is essential — and in it resides the “pending revolution.” See the world for what it is, and we may set a higher bar for the “normal” state of nature. The idea of a 10 Percent World is not mere diminishment, but rather hope in paradox: a glimpse of a lesser world that expands vision by an order of magnitude.
magination is not a game best played between columns of data. What is the taste, smell, and feel of a wilder world? I live where the Fraser River meets the North Pacific, a place that even in recent history has been abundant to a surreal degree. A 1902 sketch shows a fisher spearing rock cod from a boat — a method that demands a sea so jim-jammed with life that it beggars belief. I could scour the temperate regions of the globe for a coastal marine ecosystem in something close to this state, the problem being not a single one remains unscathed.Once, though, in an estuary a fraction as large, among the most isolated fjords of British Columbia, I witnessed such teeming abundance that it left me unnerved as much as elevated. Salmon were bursting up the river, and the whole vocabulary of venery could be called into play: a sloth of bears, a route of wolves, a convocation of eagles, a pod of seals, a romp of otters, an unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a siege of herons, a richness of martens, a flock of seagulls. All were there. To say that the place had ten times the force of life of less remote rivers I have known strikes me as exaggeration only in the form of understatement.
Even that river, of course, is in no way unshackled from history. Old pioneer diaries and sea captains’ logbooks would seem more accurate places to seek portraits of past nature in high definition, but the documentation is less evocative than you might suppose. In part this can be explained, again, by those Houston kids. On the one hand, a richer natural world struck our forebears as normal and thus unremarkable. (Would today’s urban diarist mention all those pigeons and raccoons?) On the other, the written record in many cases does not reach back far enough; it describes landscapes depleted in still more ancient times.
There are exceptions, though, and the history of Buenos Aires happens to be one of them. When I left that buoyant city, its emptiness wouldn’t leave me, and in the strange way that obsession transforms into coincidence, I later found myself in the rare books section of a library with a title catching my eye: An Account of a Voyage Up the River de la Plata, and Thence Over Land to Peru. The author was the French traveller Acarete du Biscay, who disembarked at Buenos Aires in the late 1650s, more than three centuries ahead of my visit. In his “Description of Buenos Ayres,” du Biscay gives over his second line to the frogsong that follows the rain in sultry weather. The natural world had not yet been cleaved from the town, and the Frenchman spoke of its breadth in tones of astonishment:
The River is full of Fish… there are abundance of those whales call’d Gibars, and Sea-dogs who commonly bring forth their young ashore, and whose Skin is fit for several uses… there are likewise a great many Otters, with whose Skins the Savages Cloath themselves… most of the little Islands that lie all along the River, and the Shore sides are cover’d with Woods full of Wild Boars… there are likewise a great many Stags.
The landscape du Biscay witnessed could hardly be considered untouched. As he planted his feet in the mud streets of Buenos Aires, some two dozen Dutch tall ships swung at anchor offshore. The town’s population had yet to reach 5,000, but much of its surrounding land had been cleared for corn, sugar cane, tobacco, yerba mate, beans, squash, millet. Oak and pine were piled in shipbuilders’ log sorts, and shops sold beef, mutton, venison, wild fowl, turtle flesh. One-pound eggs were collected on the vast plains known as the pampas from herds of rhea, flightless birds as tall as a man. The European conquest was well under way, yet human hands had already transformed the place. The native Querandí, at that moment withdrawing into the holocaust of imported diseases, had lived in the area in measures of thousands, and were only one of dozens of tribes — tens of thousands of people — living in succession up the river system to headwaters 2,500 kilometres to the north. The earliest Spanish explorers, too, had come and gone, leaving behind livestock that discovered the pampas, radically changing those grasslands even before later visitors could set eyes upon them. What the pampas looked and smelled and sounded like before is not recorded. It will never truly be known.
Still, du Biscay admitted his awe of the natural wealth to the people of Buenos Aires, and in return was told a story. From time to time, they said, the settlement was threatened by buccaneers or foreign armadas, and when these enemy ships made the horizon, the men on land would mount their horses and haze the pampas, driving forward the feral bulls and cows, the wild mules, asses, horses, and deer, the guanacos, the vicuñas with their wondrous wool, and all of these animals would soon be thundering toward the shore. Picture the scene: the air shuddering, dust ballooning, every living thing without a hole to hide in scrambling as if chased by brush fire — tortoises, snakes, lizards, voles and mice, armadillos, foxes, wild cats, ground birds, songbirds, even vultures, even locusts. All of these, too, would crush to the river’s edge, there to seethe and buck and blow, a storm lit from within by the flash of teeth and eye whites, and in that moment the stratagem was complete:
‘Tis utterly impossible for any number of Men, even tho’ they should not dread the fury of those Wild Creatures, to make their way through so great a drove of Beasts.
A wild abundance so overwhelming that it could be used as a military defence — this is the living world at something approaching full throttle. Today, the Environmental Atlas of Buenos Aires lists no creature larger than the rhea, found only “in captivity or partial freedom”; the maguary stork, which “appears occasionally” in wildlife refuges; and the capybara, the world’s largest rodent, which is “receding.” In the end, it didn’t prove impossible. We did indeed make our way through so great a drove of beasts.
10 percent world — we want to believe it isn’t so. The temptation to pardon our own is ever fresh. I felt the impulse rise with a recent paper about North Atlantic right whale genetics, which indicated that these animals, currently among the most endangered of the great whales, might not have been all that plentiful along North America’s east coast, even before the arrival of European whalers in the early sixteenth century. The study didn’t exactly reach the level of celebrity gossip, but it travelled farther than you’d expect for news about sea mammal dna. Headlines crowed that early Basque whalers, and by extension our ancestors as a whole, had been “exonerated” for the whales’ near-extinction. “Rare northern right whales were not hunted to the brink,” the bbc declared. The theme was picked up by a member of the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board to make the point that “it’s too easy to blame humans for environmental problems.”The whales’ genetic imprints hint at a decline sometime before the sixteenth century, though the study does not speculate on the cause of the drawdown in numbers. Humans are not yet free from culpability: archaeologists and historians have found evidence of indigenous whaling cultures from the Arctic to Florida, and these hunters would certainly have targeted right whales, so named for being the “right” whales to pursue because they swim slowly, are usually close to land, and float when they’re dead. The earliest recorded commercial whale hunts anywhere on earth pursued right whales; the hunters were the “exonerated” Basques, off their home coasts in Europe, about 1,000 years ago. They, along with other European whaling cultures, eventually wiped out that continent’s right whales.
Asked to explain why only about 350 North Atlantic right whales still survive, the lead dna researcher, Brenna McLeod, now based at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, replied, “The small numbers that we see today are directly a result of whaling activities.” And while her work suggests that the right whale population prior to the year 1500 may have been lower than previously thought, they might still have numbered as many as 10,000. Which would make today’s right whale population, you know, about 3.5 percent of what it was.
I’ve been using the 10 Percent World as narrative shorthand, a wormhole to a reimagined living earth, but it is also a statistic and must be defensible as such. I might have chosen a 5 percent world, after all, or 25 percent, but each would conjure a very different planet, and neither, I think, would be fair. My figure is a close fit with the 12 percent of lands now in protected areas worldwide, especially when you consider that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the ocean is fully protected. Or we might turn to the flagship species of wildness, the heavyweight land mammals: polar bears, elephants, kangaroos, wolves, and more than 250 others weighing in at twenty kilograms or more per beast. A surprising 21 percent of the planet’s landscape still houses all of the large mammal species that it did in 1500, and while that figure doubles my 10 percent call, it fails to capture the depth of the depletion. Consider the wolf. The great canine has been reduced to 5 percent of its range in the contiguous United States, though packs still roam fully 90 percent of their original territory in Canada and Alaska. The latter figure sounds impressive, yet recent genetic research suggests that the population of wolves North America–wide may be less than 5 percent of historical numbers. Once the planet’s most widespread carnivore, the wolf still holds on in 65 percent of its primeval habitat worldwide, but is categorized as “fully viable” in just five of sixty-three surveyed countries where packs once prowled. It is extinct in nine.
