23 September 2010

Cilantro, Rhodos endive, Lincoln leeks, Lettuce, Red onion, Peppers, Numex hot pepper, Romanze potatoes, Tomatoes, Acorn and Delicata, winter squash

Somewhere around 8,00 years ago the last Irish Elk expired. Nobody knows why this huge Eurasian deer died out then. It might have had something to do with the up and coming homo sapiens, a species that towards the end of the last ice age seems to have worked up both a serious appetite and some nifty new hunting techniques. This combination of skill and desire certainly appears to have had a devastating effect on the megafauna of the time. The ground sloth, the mastodon, the wooly rhinoceros, the cave bear, the giant wombat, they all disappeared as man extended his range and his reach across the planet.

Not that we deserve all the blame. Hardly anyone ever deserves all the blame. Being chased around by cavemen with ever sharper and more accurate projectiles was probably just one of several serious problems the megafauna faced as the ice sheets retreated. Climate change and disease may have played as large a part in their extinction as we did.

As for the Irish Elk, it may have faced a special problem. Irish Elk were large, perhaps the largest deer ever, but it was the size of their antlers more than their bodies that was truly remarkable. Male Irish Elk carried around antlers so huge and ornate they would make the most impressive Bull Moose weep with shame over his own pathetic display. And that, in effect, was the point. Irish Elk stags wore their antlers sticking straight out from the sides of their heads—as much as six feet in either direction—a position that made the antlers more or less useless for combat and defense, but much easier to admire. The were meant to impress potential mates and to cow rivals.

History has not recorded precisely what led female Irish Elk to believe that a guy with absurdly large bony protuberances jutting from his brow would make a better catch, but if that was indeed the commonly held view it would have placed evolutionary pressure on the stags to have ever larger antlers. Unfortunately, growing antlers that size each year places a serious strain on even the stoutest elk. It is entirely possible that in this case evolution, which we tend to think of as a process leading to ever more sophisticated and useful adaptation, led the Irish Elk astray.

I wonder if some day after we too have died out another species will look back and wonder if perhaps evolution played the same trick on us. Learning to work with stone and bone to fashion killing points and to work cooperatively with the guys in the nearby caves to bring down a ground sloth gave us a huge advantage. Just ask the ground sloths. We have thrived because of our remarkable ability to take what we want from our environment, something we have gotten stunningly good at. We can literally move mountains to get at whatever lies beneath. But what has looked like an asset for so long is starting to seem like something of a liability as rapaciousness empties the seas, levels the forests, paves over the plains, sucks the rivers dry and fills the air with a heat-trapping haze. And we continue on our merry way, convinced that the intelligence that got us in this mess will get us out of it—convinced that when things get bad enough we will simply change our ways.

Given our history, though, it is not clear that we have another way. We evolved to exploit nature in every way we can think of, and just because that might be a bad idea in the long run does not necessarily mean that we can simply switch to some more sustainable lifestyle to save ourselves any more than the Irish Elk could suddenly have decided to go anterless and try flowers and poetry instead.

Sure, we are more self-aware than the elk probably were. I don’t suppose any Al Gore elk offered urgent warnings in An Inconvenient Antler. But just because we are smart enough to know what is happening (and smart enough too, it must be pointed out, to come up with clever denials) does not mean that we can easily overcome 100,000-year-old habits. At the very least, we need to come to terms with our nature—with the way we have been shaped by the world and its processes. Simply recognizing that we are just another species on this planet would be a good way to start thinking seriously about how we plan to stick around on it for much longer.

Switching to a diet that contains a lot more fresh, local produce would probably be another small step in the right direction. No matter how we go about it, feeding all six billion of ourselves will places strains on vital resources (water in particular). But we don’t need to clear the rain forests for ever more space on which to graze carrots, and unlike a can of soda a simple tomato salad contains all sorts of thing that are actually good for us. At the very least, a diet heavy on vegetables would give us something healthy to chew on while we contemplate our fate. There’s nothing like a good salad to help you through an existential crisis. Well except maybe salsa or a nice bowl of leek and potato soup or baked squash.