The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man (37 page)

Another example of a great change of attitude is the rise of women. As the Civil War raged in the US to free the slaves, women were also denied essential rights. In both the North and the South, few women could attend college, hold public office, run a business, or vote. Men dominated women in every society. Voting rights for women were not extended until the first half of the twentieth century in most nations. In the United States, women’s suffrage was achieved gradually, reaching nationwide status in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Today women in the US comprise
the majority of the workers and the majority of the voters. And this is the same in many countries all over the world.

Something similar is now happening with gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Major legislative and legal changes are being made, and an attitude of acceptance is growing.

Enormous tidal waves of change are still possible for the human species.

Stopping man from killing himself will take more than behavioral modification. Like a world of dieters fending off hunger, we would have to push back from the table of reproduction, renounce growth, and limit our use of natural resources in order not to hit that fatal inflection curve—to avoid the catastrophe of nature making those selections for us.

According to Peter Ward, the University of Washington professor and paleontologist, earth is presently in what he calls the habitable zone, the ideal distance from the sun. Astronomers looking for habitable planets in the galaxy look for those that are similarly distant from their stars. If a planet is too close to the sun, it gets too hot. The surface of Venus is hot enough to cook dinner. If it ever had water, it has evaporated into space. On Mars, all the water is frozen. Both Mars and Venus are outside the habitable zone. The trouble is the habitable zone moves outward with time. This is because our sun grows hotter with age. Under these circumstances, the earth will move outside of the habitable zone in 500 million to one billion years.
Life may exist on earth, but it will be microscopic. Mars might be a good bet then. If one can wait. If we last that long.

Ward thinks that man will survive the distance, “but the animals and plants along for the ride on this planet that we cockily co-opted will not be so fortunate.” The future of the planet may be permeated with episodes in which mankind is every once in a while knocked back to the Stone Age.

Bill Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem
Studies, says, “The conditions of our planet are largely determined by the biosphere—the collective action of all the species on earth. These species control the composition of our atmosphere and oceans, the climate, and the total amount of plant production on land and in the sea, upon which we all depend for food, fuel, and fiber. It’s hard to believe we could make it without them.”

No single cause will take humans out. But multiple causes have a chance. In the end it may be as Douglas Erwin describes the end of the Permian—his so-called
Murder on the Orient Express
theory—in which a multiplicity of causes created the Permian extinction. Such a multiplicity of causes may have provoked the Cretaceous extinction as well:
large reptile herbivores mired in a long-term decline, plus the effects of the Deccan Traps, one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world, about half the size of India. Vincent Courtillot from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris says, “It released ten times more climate-altering gases into the atmosphere than the nearly concurrent Chicxulub meteor impact.”

The sixth mass extinction may also be multicausal, arriving on various tracks, including overpopulation, runaway climate change, unbridled disease, and a planet that runs out of modern man’s necessities.

Might we live on with nature as robots after uploading our minds? Perhaps. But that’s not as sure a bet as one placed on nature. Nature will survive. Life will continue, though in different forms, different species. Ecosystems will recover and thrive one day as they did before us, with different sets of players, perhaps different sets of rules.

With the heavy cloak of humankind laid to rest, nature may take one enormous sigh of relief, and then press on, to recover its former
glory.

I
HAD A LOT
of patient, eloquent, and informed help with this book for which I am truly grateful:

Tom Schulenberg at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Louise Emmons at the Smithsonian let me accompany them and their magnificent crew—Lawrence López, Mónica Romo, Brad Boyle, and Lily Rodríguez—on my first visit to the cloud forests of the eastern Andes. Miles Silman at Wake Forest University let me visit that place again.

Anthony Barnosky at the University of California, Berkeley, first warned me of the possibility of our own mass extinction, though I would hear others such as the famed anthropologist Richard Leakey say the same.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park geologist Jonena Hearst led me up a West Texas trail to the Capitan Reef and showed me the fossils from the Permian mass extinction. Harvard’s Andy Knoll and MIT’s Sam Bowring gave it an atmospheric and geological perspective.

William Schlesinger at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies told me about early life on earth and what part chemistry played in its appearance. Rick Ostfeld, also at Cary, told me how the loss of forest and animal species was a setup for disease. Rob Jackson at Stanford took me down into Powell’s Cave in Central Texas to show how juniper, an invasive plant, was stealing water from the Edwards Plateau.

Stuart Findlay at Cary helped me understand New York’s Catskill/Delaware Watershed. Dalia Amor Conde of the Max-Planck Odense Center showed me how jaguars and rain forest are vital to human life
in Central America. Stan Smith at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Greg Okin at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed me how desert crusts are vital to the longevity of the American desert. The paleontologist Charles Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley, gave me an Australian perspective of US species loss.

Kevin Coleman and Paul Poulton at Rothamsted Research in the UK described how important our soil is to the future of agriculture. Dan Richter at Duke University took me to my first conference on soil. Eduardo Neves at the Universidade de São Paulo introduced me to
terra preta
, black earth, an earthy gift from ancient Amazonian Indians.

Leslea Hlusko at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jackson Njau at Indiana University let me share their field site at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Miriam Ollemoita took me to her Maasai village. And Tomos Proffitt entertained me by making Stone Age hand axes.

Hans-Dieter Sues at the Smithsonian explained how crocodiles were the real dominant predator during the Triassic. Rick Potts, also at the Smithsonian, talked of the role climate may have had in the development of early man. Kathy Weathers at Cary turned me on to the fog forests of eastern Chile.

Thanks to Jim Estes at UC Santa Cruz for helping me understand how killer whales could turn to sea otters for food; to William Gilly at Stanford for all the time he spent teaching me about Humboldt squid; to Gretchen Hofmann at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for her insight on ocean acidification; and to Frank Hurd for his tireless efforts to bring clean, sustainable aquaculture to the natives of Baja California to make up for the disappearing fish.

Felisa Smith at the University of New Mexico showed me how animals once got very big, and how they might get there again. Blaire Van Valkenburgh at UCLA showed me how vital and diverse nature once was four miles south of Hollywood.

Henry Harpending at the University of Utah convinced me that man is still evolving. And Oxford’s Nick Bostrom delighted me with his predictions of the future of man on earth.

Stephen W. Smith at Duke University, author of sixteen books, was my mentor throughout, encouraging me to write faster and encouraging me to go to Africa. Thanks to Jim, Julie, Noel, Eddie, Geary, and the other members of the Sky Valley hiking club with whom I spent many mornings and whose questions kept me thinking. Thanks to my other writer friends, Susan Squire, Stewart Weiner, and Susan Vreland, for all their sage advice.

I owe a lot to my family, Bill, Barbara, Sam, Ann, Marguerite, and my wife, Maggie, for putting up with me during this long process. Also to Mike LaJoie, Alex Wexler, Grace Murphy, and Gary Kott for their invaluable support.

Thanks to Jud Laghi for the fire and enthusiasm he displayed in representing me. Also to Hilary Redmon, who first saw the promise in it. Thanks also to Leah Miller, Webster Younce, and Karen Marcus for herding me through the early days, and Sydney Tanigawa, editor extraordinaire, who helped me wrangle a sometimes disjointed
manuscript into its present form.

Thank you all.

Prologue
 WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE’RE IN FOR

It was mid-morning, June, during the tropical dry season
: Michael Tennesen, “Expedition to the clouds,”
International Wildlife
(March/April 1998), 22–29.

the group of celebrated biologists
: L. E. Alonso, A. Alonso, T. S. Schulenberg, and F. Dallmeier, eds.,
Biological and Social Assessments of the Cordillera de Vilcabamba, Peru
(Washington, DC: Conservation International, Center for Applied Biodiversity Sciences, 2001).

the most biologically diverse
: Norman Myers, et al., “Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities,”
Nature
403 (February 24, 2000), 853–58.

during past ice ages
: Mark B. Bush, Miles R. Silman, and Dunia H. Urrego, “48,000 Years of Climate and Forest Change in a Biodiversity Hot Spot,”
Science
303, no. 5659 (February 6, 2004), 827–29.

“shoestring distributions”
: Michael Tennesen, “Uphill Battle,”
Smithsonian
37, no. 5 (August 2006), 78–83.

a sixth of the world’s plant life
: Author interview with Tom Schulenberg, July 2013.

The palpable haste of modern biologists
: Anthony D. Barnosky, et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?”
Nature
471 (March 2, 2011), 51–57; Norman Myers and Andrew Knoll, “The biotic crisis and the future of evolution,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
98, no. 10 (May 8, 2001), 5389–92.

It took
Homo sapiens
less than 200,000 years
:
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/numb-nf.html
.

history of earth as a twenty-four-hour
:
http://www.geology.wisc.edu/homepages/g100s2/public_html/history_of_life.htm
.

Recoveries followed all the mass extinctions
: Douglas Erwin,
Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–30; Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin,
The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind
(New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 39–58.

“From the wreckage of mass extinctions”
: Erwin,
Extinction
, 15.

“With them, Earth’s biodiversity remains”
: Barnosky, et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?”
Nature
471 (March 3, 2011), 51–57.

“Virtually 99.999 percent of all life”
: Author interview with Hans-Dieter Sues, April 16, 2012.

1
 A MASS EXTINCTION: THE CRIME SCENE

The Capitan Reef, though long dead
: National Park Service, Geology Field Notes, Guadalupe National Park, Texas,
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/parks/gumo
.

enormous depression known as the Delaware Basin
: Author interview with Jonena Hearst, November 6, 2012.