THE GREEN GREEN GRASS OF HOME
On the occasion of Columbus Day 2019, I thought I’d offer an essay I wrote five years ago, and published on the website of my late, lamented friend Dan Wilson, who was kind enough to guest-author a few posts. This one was called Ecological Imperialism: Our Grass Can Beat Your Grass.
How humans came to populate the so-called “new world” – the North and South American continents – is still a mystery. There are competing theories, resulting from ambiguous evidence and a few sites where evidence of human presence appears to be thousands of years older than conventional wisdom would allow.
But when the first Europeans showed up 500 years ago, there were millions of “Indians” already distributed throughout the length and breadth of the two continents. Some were hunter-gatherers. Others lived in great urban empires. There may have been as many as 100 million of them.
The only thing we know for sure is that a century later, there were a lot fewer of them. Like 90% fewer. Some indigenous populations were wiped out completely, while others who survived have taken five hundred years to build their populations back up to 15th century levels.
When I was a kid in school in the mid-50s, the death toll was minimized and the conquest was ascribed to superior European technology. Now it’s pretty generally acknowledged that the Conquistadors launched a holocaust, albeit not entirely on purpose. As Randy Newman put it in “The Great Nations of Europe,”
The Grand Canary Islands
First land to which they came
They slaughtered all the canaries
Which gave the land its name
There were natives there called Guanches
Guanches by the score
Bullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren't there anymore
Here’s a YouTube link if you’d care to listen to Newman himself perform the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0pR06pevU
Jared Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997. But eleven years earlier, Alfred W. Crosby had published Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Crosby anticipated some of Diamond’s conclusions, but his main interest lay elsewhere.
OK, Crosby said, it’s not hard to understand why a handful of Spaniards were able to decimate the Inca and Aztec empires. Turn smallpox, measles, and influenza loose on a population with no immunity whatsoever, and the survivors won’t be able to put up much of a fight. Guns and steel came in handy for individual skirmishes, but germs really decided the outcome of the campaign.
If you’re like me, you might wonder why indigenous Americas hadn’t developed some nasty diseases of their own to plague Europeans. In his 1972 book, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Crosby identified one or two of those.
Syphilis was present in the Americas before Columbus, but unknown in the Old World until an outbreak in Naples in 1494. That doesn’t prove that Columbus’ crew brought it back with them, but the Columbian hypothesis is more widely accepted than any other theory of the origin of syphilis. And in a more indirect way, we might consider lung cancer, emphysema, and other tobacco-related maladies part of the karmic payback for the European decimation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
But Crosby poses a more interesting question. Leave humans out of it. Why did European grasses, introduced unintentionally through seeds embedded in the Conquistadors’ boots, spread throughout the two continents at the expense of native grasses?
There were no horses in the Americas in 1491. And yet somehow, a tiny initial population of Spanish horses – those that both survived the Atlantic crossing and then escaped their corrals and went feral – managed to multiply at such a rate that the Conquistadors encountered huge herds of wild horses as they moved north into Mexico and the rest of North America.
European flora out-competed American flora occupying similar ecological niches. European animals out-competed American fauna. Guns, germs, and steel weren’t factors in those “conquests,” but the outcome was the same.
And not just in the Americas. Similar scenarios were repeated wherever Europeans went during the Age of Discovery. From the nearby Canary Islands to distant Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, when Europeans arrived in places that had been isolated from the Old World for thousands of years, the native populations – human and otherwise – collapsed.
Ecological Imperialism is a much richer book than I have space to describe. Why did Native Americans domesticate so few animals compared to people in Europe and Asia? Why was the wheel unknown in the Americas before Columbus, even in the great urban empires of the Aztecs and Incas? Or more precisely, why were there pre-Columbian wheeled toys, but nothing like a cart or a wagon? If these questions intrigue you, I urge you to read Crosby.
I’ll plug a couple of Crosby’s other books while at it. He wrote America’s Forgotten Pandemic about the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed over 50 million people worldwide in two years, and has largely been forgotten today. I’ve just started Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History, and it’s hooked me already.
What is distinctive about our homo sapiens species? Intelligence? Nope. Language? Nope. Laughter, grief, or shame? Nope, nope, and nope. Crosby says it’s a combination of three factors – bipedalism plus our ability to throw things (by hand or aided by technology) and our fascination with and ability to control fire. Those factors, Crosby claims, have made us efficient explorers and efficient killers. Ecological imperialists, you might say.