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============ PLANET OF WEEDS by David Quammen, part 2 of 2 =============

Add to that vision the extra, incendiary aggravation of poverty.
According to a recent World Bank estimate, about 30 percent of the total
population of less-developed countries lives in poverty. Alan Durning,
in his 1992 book *How Much Is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Fate
of the Earth*, puts it in a broader perspective when he says that the
world's human population is divided among three "ecological classes":
the consumers, the middle-income, and the poor. His consumer class
includes those 1.1 billion fortunate people whose annual income per
family member is more than $7,500. At the other extreme, the world's
poor also number about 1.1 billion people--all from households with less
than $700 annually per member. "They are mostly rural Africans, Indians,
and other South Asians," Durning writes. "They eat almost exclusively
grains, root crops, beans, and other legumes, and they drink mostly
unclean water. They live in huts and shanties, they travel by foot, and
most of their possessions are constructed of stone, wood, and other
substances available from the local environment." He calls them the
"absolute poor." It's only reasonable to assume that another billion
people will be added to that class, mostly in what are now the
less-developed countries, before population growth stabilizes. How will
those additional billion, deprived of education and other advantages,
interact with the tropical landscape? Not likely by entering
information-intensive jobs in the service sector of the new global
economy. Julian Simon argued that human ingenuity--and by extension,
human population itself--is "the ultimate resource" for solving Earth's
problems, transcending Earth's limits, and turning scarcity into
abundance. But if all the bright ideas generated by a human population
of 5.9 billion haven't yet relieved the desperate needfulness of 1.1
billion absolute poor, why should we expect that human ingenuity will do
any better for roughly 2 billion poor in the future?

Other writers besides Durning have warned about this deepening class
rift. Tom Athanasiou, in *Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor*,
sees population growth only exacerbating the division, and notes that
governments often promote destructive schemes of transmigration and
rain-forest colonization as safety valves for the pressures of land
hunger and discontent. A young Canadian policy analyst named Thomas F.
Homer-Dixon, author of several calm-voiced but frightening articles on
the linkage between what he terms "environmental scarcity" and global
sociopolitical instability, reports that the amount of cropland
available per person is falling in the less-developed countries because
of population growth and because millions of hectares "are being lost
each year to a combination of problems, including encroachment by
cities, erosion, depletion of nutrients, acidification, compacting and
salinization and waterlogging from overirrigation." In the cropland
pinch and other forms of environmental scarcity, Homer-Dixon foresees
potential for "a widening gap" of two sorts--between demands on the
state and its ability to deliver, and more basically between rich and
poor. In conversation with the journalist Robert D. Kaplan, as quoted in
Kaplan's book *The Ends of the Earth*, Homer-Dixon said it more vividly:
"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where
homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned
post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the merging Pacific
Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and
computer information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in
a completely different direction."

That direction, necessarily, will be toward ever more desperate
exploitation of landscape. When you think of Homer-Dixon's stretch limo
on those potholed urban streets, don't assume there will be room inside
for tropical forests. Even Noah's ark only managed to rescue paired
animals, not large parcels of habitat. The jeopardy of the ecological
fragments that we presently cherish as parks, refuges, and reserves is
already severe, due to both internal and external forces: internal,
because insularity itself leads to ecological unraveling; and external,
because those areas are still under siege by needy and covetous people.
Projected forward into a future of 10.8 billion humans, of which perhaps
2 billion are starving at the periphery of those areas, while another 2
billion are living in a fool's paradise maintained by unremitting
exploitation of whatever resources remain, that jeopardy increases to
the point of impossibility. In addition, any form of climate change in
the mid-term future, whether caused by greenhouse gases or by a natural
flip-flop of climatic forces, is liable to change habitat conditions
within a given protected area beyond the tolerance range for many
species. If such creatures can't migrate beyond the park or reserve
boundaries in order to chase their habitat needs, they may be
"protected" from guns and chainsaws within their little island, but
they'll still die.

We shouldn't take comfort in assuming that at least Yellowstone National
Park will still harbor grizzly bears in the year 2150, that at least
Royal Chitwan in Nepal will still harbor tigers, that at least Serengeti
in Tanzania and Gir in India will still harbor lions. Those predator
populations, and other species down the cascade, are likely to
disappear. "Wildness" will be a word applicable only to urban turmoil.
Lions, tigers, and bears will exist in zoos, period. Nature won't come
to and end, but it will look very different.
The most obvious differences will be those I've already mentioned:
tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems will be drastically
reduced in area, and the fragmented remnants will stand tiny and
isolated. Because of those two factors, plus the cascading secondary
effects, plus an additional dire factor I'll mention in a moment, much
of Earth's biological diversity will be gone. How much? That's
impossible to predict confidently, but the careful guesses of Robert
May, Stuart Pimm, and other biologists suggest losses reaching half to
two thirds of all species. In the oceans, deepwater fish and shellfish
populations will be drastically depleted by overharvesting, if not to
the point of extinction then at least enough to cause more cascading
consequences. Coral reefs and other shallow-water ecosystems will be
badly stressed, if not devastated, by erosion and chemical runoff from
the land. The additional dire factor is invasive species, fifth of the
five factors contributing to our current experiment in mass extinction.

That factor, even more than habitat destruction and fragmentation, is a
symptom of modernity. Maybe you haven't heard much about invasive
species, but in coming years you will. The ecologist Daniel Simberloff
takes it so seriously that he recently committed himself to founding an
institute on invasive biology at the University of Tennessee, and
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sounded the alarm last April in a
speech to a weed-management symposium in Denver. The spectacle of a
cabinet secretary denouncing an alien plant called purple loosestrife
struck some observers as droll, but it wasn't as silly as it seemed.
Forty years ago, the British ecologist Charles Elton warned
prophetically in a little book titled *The Ecology of Invasions by
Animals and Plants* that "we are living in a period of the world's
history when the mingling of thousands of kinds of organisms from
different parts of the world is setting up terrific dislocations in
nature." Elton's word "dislocations" was nicely chosen to ring with a
double meaning: species are being moved from one location to another,
and as a result ecosystems are being thrown into disorder.

The problem dates back to when people began using ingenious new modes of
conveyance (the horse, the camel, the canoe) to travel quickly across
mountains, deserts and oceans, bringing with them rats, lice, disease
microbes, burrs, dogs, pigs, goats, cats, cows, and other forms of
parasitic, commensal, or domesticated creature. One immediate result of
those travels was a wave of island-bird extinctions, claiming more than
a thousand species, that followed oceangoing canoes across the Pacific
and elsewhere. Having evolved in insular ecosystems free of predators,
many of those species where flightless, unequipped to defend themselves
or their eggs against ravenous mammals. *Raphus cucullatus*, a giant
cousin of the pigeon lineage, endemic to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean
and better known as the dodo, was only the most easily caricatured
representative of this much larger pattern. Dutch sailors killed and ate
dodos during the seventeenth century, but probably what guaranteed the
extinction of *Raphus cucullatus* is that the European ships put ashore
rats, pigs, and *Macaca fascicularis*, an opportunistic species of Asian
monkey. Although commonly known as the crab-eating macaque, *M.
fascicularis* will eat almost anything. The monkeys are still
pestilential on Mauritius, hungry and daring and always ready to grab
what they can, including raw eggs. But the dodo hasn't been seen since
1662.

The european age of discovery and conquest was also the great age of
biogeography--that is the study of what creatures live where, a branch
of biology practiced by attentive travelers such as Carolus Linnaeus,
Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin and Wallace even made biogeography the basis of their discovery
that species, rather that being created and plopped onto Earth by divine
magic, evolve in particular locales by the process of natural selection.
Ironically, the same trend of far-flung human travel that gave
biogeographers their data also began to muddle and nullify those data,
by transplanting the most ready and roguish species to new places and
thereby delivering misery unto death for many other species. Rats and
cats went everywhere, causing havoc in what for millions of years had
been sheltered, less competitive ecosystems. The Asiatic chestnut blight
and the European starling came to America; the American muskrat and the
Chinese mitten crab got to Europe. Sometimes these human-mediated
transfers were unintentional, sometimes merely shortsighted. Nostalgic
sportsmen in New Zealand imported British red deer; European brown trout
and Coastal rainbows were planted in disregard of the native cutthroats
of Rocky Mountain rivers. Prickly-pear cactus, rabbits, and cane toads
were inadvisedly welcomed to Australia. Goats went wild in the
Galapagos. The bacterium that causes bubonic plague journeyed from China
to California by way of a flea, a rat, and a ship. The Atlantic sea
lamprey found its own way up into Lake Erie, but only after the Welland
Canal gave it a bypass around Niagara Falls. Unintentional or otherwise,
all these transfers had unforseen consequences, which in many cases
included the extinction of less competitive, less opportunistic native
species. The rosy wolfsnail, a small creature introduced onto Oahu for
the purpose of controlling a larger and more obviously noxious species
of snail, which was itself invasive, proved to be medicine worse than
the disease; it became a fearsome predator upon native snails, of which
twenty species are now gone. The Nile perch, a big predatory fish
introduced into Lake Victoria in 1962 because it promised good eating,
seems to have exterminated at least eighty species of smaller cichlid
fishes that were native to the lake's Mwanza Gulf.

The problem is vastly amplified by modern shipping and air transport,
which are quick and capacious enough to allow many more kinds of
organism to get themselves transplanted into zones of habitat they never
could have reached on their own. The brown tree snake, having hitchhiked
aboard military planes from the New Guinea region near the end of World
War II, has eaten most of the native forest birds of Guam. Hanta virus,
first identified in Korea, burbles quietly in the deer mice of Arizona.
Ebola will next appear who knows where. Apart from the frightening
epidemiological possibilities, agricultural damages are the most
conspicuous form of impact. One study, by the congressional Office of
Technology Assessment, reports that in the United States 4,500 nonnative
species have established free-living populations, of which about 15
percent cause severe harm; looking at just 79 of those species, the OTA
documented $97 billion in damages. The lost value in Hawaiian snail
species or cichlid diversity is harder to measure. But another report,
from the U.N. Environmental Program, declares that almost 20 percent of
the world's endangered vertebrates suffer from pressures (competition,
predation, habitat transformation) created by exotic interlopers.
Michael Soule, a biologist much respected for his work on landscape
conversion and extinction, has said that invasive species may soon
surpass habitat loss and fragmentation as the major cause of "ecological
disintegration." Having exterminated Guam's avifauna, the brown tree
snake has lately been spotted in Hawaii.

Is there a larger pattern to these invasions? What do fire ants, zebra
mussels, Asian gypsy moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu,
Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in
common with crab-eating macaques or Nile perch? Answer: They're *weedy*
species, in the sense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What
that implies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce
quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad
range of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed
especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're
established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They tend to
thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways they resemble
*Homo sapiens:* aggressive, versatile, prolific, and ready to travel.
The city pigeon, a cosmopolitan creature derived from wild ancestry as a
Eurasian rock dove (*Columba livia*) by way of centuries of pigeon
fanciers whose coop-bred birds occasionally went AWOL, is a weed. So are
those species that, benefiting from human impacts upon landscape, have
increased grossly in abundance or expanded in their geographical scope
without having to cross an ocean by plane or by boat--for instance, the
coyote in New York, the raccoon in Montana, the white-tailed deer in
northern Wisconsin or western Connecticut. The brown-headed cowbird,
also weedy, has enlarged its range from the eastern United States into
the agricultural Midwest at the expense of migratory songbirds. In
gardening usage the word "weed" may be utterly subjective, indicating
any plant you don't happen to like, but in ecological usage it has these
firmer meanings. Biologists frequently talk of weedy species, meaning
animals as well as plants.

Paleontologists, too, embrace the idea and even the term. Jablonski
himself, in a 1991 paper published in Science, extrapolated from past
mass extinctions to our current one and suggested that human activities
are likely to take their heaviest toll on narrowly endemic species,
while causing fewer extinctions among those species that are broadly
adapted and broadly distributed. "In the face of ongoing habitat
alteration and fragmentation," he wrote, "this implies a biota
increasingly enriched in widespread, weedy species--rats, ragweed, and
cockroaches--relative to the larger number of species that are more
vulnerable and potentially more useful to humans as food, medicines, and
genetic resources." Now, as we sit in his office, he repeats: "It's just
a question of how much the world becomes enriched in these weedy
species." Both in print and in talk he uses "enriched" somewhat
caustically, knowing that the actual direction of the trend is toward
impoverishment.


Regarding impoverishment, let's note another dark, interesting irony:
that the two converse trends I've described--partitioning the world's
landscape by habitat fragmentation, and unifying the world's landscape
by global transport of weedy species--produce not converse results but
one redoubled result, the further loss of biological diversity.
Immersing myself in the literature of extinctions, and making
dilettantish excursions across India, Madagascar, New Guinea, Indonesia,
Brazil, Guam, Australia, New Zealand, Wyoming, the hills of Burbank, and
other semi-wild places over the past decade, I've seen those redoubling
trends everywhere, portending a near-term future in which Earth's
landscape is threadbare, leached of diversity, heavy with humans, and
"enriched" in weedy species. That's an ugly vision, but I find it vivid.
Wildlife will consist of the pigeons and the coyotes and the
white-tails, the black rats (*Rattus rattus*) and the brown rats
(*Rattus norvegicus*) and a few other species of worldly rodent, the
crab-eating macaques and the cockroaches (though, as with the rats, not
*every* species--some are narrowly endemic, like the giant Madagascar
hissing cockroach) and the mongooses, the house sparrows and the house
geckos and the houseflies and the barn cats and the skinny brown feral
dogs and a short list of additional species that play by our rules.
Forests will be tiny insular patches existing on bare sufferance, much
of their biological diversity (the big predators, the migratory birds,
the shy creatures that can't tolerate edges, and many other species
linked inextricably with those) long since decayed away. They'll
essentially be tall woody gardens, not forests in the richer sense.
Elsewhere the landscape will have its strips and swatches of green, but
except on much-poisoned lawns and golf courses the foliage will be
infested with cheatgrass and European buckthorn and spotted knapweed and
Russian thistle and leafy spurge and salt meadow cordgrass and Bruce
Babbitt's purple loosestrife. Having recently passed the great age of
biogeography, we will have entered the age *after* biogeography, in that
virtually everything will live virtually everywhere, though the list of
species that constitute "everything" will be small. I see this world
implicitly foretold in the U.N. population projections, the FAO reports
on deforestation, the northward advance into Texas of Africanized
honeybees, the rhesus monkeys that haunt the parapets of public
buildings in New Delhi, and every fat gray squirrel on a bird feeder in
England. Earth will be a different sort of place--soon, in just five or
six human generations. My label for that place, that time, that
apparently unavoidable prospect, is the Planet of Weeds. Its main
consoling felicity, as far as I can imagine, is that there will be no
shortage of crows.

Now we come to the question of human survival, a matter of some interest
to many. We come to a certain fretful leap of logic that otherwise
thoughtful observers seem willing, even eager to make: that the ultimate
consequence will be the extinction of us. By seizing such a huge share
of Earth's landscape, by imposing so wantonly on its providence and
presuming so recklessly on its forgivingness, by killing off so many
species, they say, we will doom our own species to extinction. This is a
commonplace among the environmentally exercised. My quibbles with the
idea are that it seems ecologically improbable and too optimistic. But
it bears examining, because it's frequently offered as the ultimate
argument against proceeding as we are.

Jablonski also has his doubts. Do you see *Homo sapiens* as a likely
survivor, I ask him or as a casualty? "Oh, we've got to be one of the
most bomb-proof species on the planet," he says. "We're geographically
widespread, we have a pretty remarkable reproductive rate, we're
incredibly good at co-opting and monopolizing resources. I think it
would take really serious, concerted effort to wipe out the human
species." The point he's making is one that has probably already dawned
on you: *Homo sapiens* itself is the consummate weed. Why shouldn't we
survive, then, on the Planet of Weeds? But there's a wide range of
possible circumstances, Jablonski reminds me, between the extinction of
our species and the continued growth of human population, consumption,
and comfort. "I think we'll be one of the survivors," he says, "sort of
picking through the rubble." Besides losing all the pharmaceutical and
genetic resources that lay hidden within those extinguished species, and
all the spiritual and aesthetic values they offered, he foresees
unpredictable levels of loss in many physical and biochemical functions
that ordinarily come as benefits from diverse, robust
ecosystems--functions such as cleaning and recirculating air and water,
mitigating droughts and floods, decomposing wastes, controlling erosion,
creating new soil, pollinating crops, capturing and transporting
nutrients, damping short-term temperature extremes and longer-term
fluctuations of climate, restraining outbreaks of pestiferous species,
and shielding Earth's surface from the full brunt of ultraviolet
radiation. Strip away the ecosystems that perform those services,
Jablonski says, and you can expect grievous detriment to the reality we
inhabit. "A lot of things are going to happen that will make this a
crummier place to live--a more stressful place to live, a more difficult
place to live, a less resilient place to live--before the human species
is at any risk at all." And maybe some of the new difficulties, he adds
will serve as incentive for major changes in the trajectory along which
we pursue our aggregate self-interests. Maybe we'll pull back before our
current episode matches the Triassic extinction or the K-T event. Maybe
it will turn out to be no worse than the Eocene extinction, with a 35
percent loss of species. "Are you hopeful?" I ask. Given that hope is a
duty from which paleontologists are exempt, I'm surprised when he
answers, "Yes, I am."

I'm not. My own guess about the mid-term future, excused by no
exemption, is that our Planet of Weeds will indeed be a crummier place,
a lonelier and uglier place, and a particularly wretched place for the 2
billion people comprising Alan Durning's absolute poor. What will
increase most dramatically as time proceeds, I suspect, won't be
generalized misery or futuristic modes of consumption but the gulf
between two global classes experiencing those extremes. Progressive
failure of ecosystem functions? Yes, but human resourcefulness of the
sort Julian Simon so admired will probably find stopgap technological
remedies, to be available for a price. So the world's privileged
class--that's your class and my class--will probably still manage to
maintain themselves inside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, drinking bottled
water and breathing bottled air and eating reasonably healthy food that
has become incredibly precious, while the potholes on the road outside
grow ever deeper. Eventually the limo will look more like a lunar rover.
Ragtag mobs of desperate souls will cling to its bumpers, like groupies
on Elvis's final Cadillac. The absolute poor will suffer their lack of
ecological privilege in the form of lowered life expectancy, bad health,
absence of education, corrosive want, and anger. Maybe in time they'll
find ways to gather themselves in localized revolt against the affluent
class. Not likely, though, as long as affluence buys guns. In any case,
well before that they will have burned the last stick of Bornean
dipterocarp for firewood and roasted the last lemur, the last grizzly
bear, the last elephant left unprotected outside a zoo.

Jablonski has a hundred things to do before leaving for Alaska, so after
two hours I clear out. The heat on the sidewalk is fierce, though not
nearly as fierce as this summer's heat in New Delhi or Dallas, where
people are dying. Since my flight doesn't leave until early evening, I
cab downtown and take refuge in a nouveau-Cajun restaurant near the
river. Over a beer and jambalaya, I glance again at Jablonski's
*Science* paper, titled "Extinctions: A Paleontological Perspective." I
also play back the tape of our conversation, pressing my ear against the
little recorder to hear it over the lunch-crowd noise.

Among the last questions I asked Jablonski was, What will happen *after*
this mass extinction, assuming it proceeds to a worst-case scenario? If
we destroy half or two thirds of all living species, how long will it
take for evolution to fill the planet back up? "I don't know the answer
to that," he said. "I'd rather not bottom out and see what happens
next." In the journal paper he had hazarded that, based on fossil
evidence in rock laid down atop the K-T event and others, the time
required for full recovery might be 5 or 10 million years. From a
paleontological perspective, that's fast. "Biotic recoveries after mass
extinctions are geologically rapid but immensely prolonged on human time
scales," he wrote. There was also the proviso, cited from another
expert, that recovery might not begin until *after* the
extinction-causing circumstances have disappeared. But in this case, of
course, the circumstances won't likely disappear until *we* do.

Still, evolution never rests. It's happening right now, in weed patches
all over the planet. I'm not presuming to alert you to the end of the
world, the end of evolution, or the end of nature. What I've tried to
describe here is not an absolute end but a very deep dip, a repeat point
within a long, violent cycle. Species die, species arise. The relative
pace of those two processes is what matters. Even rats and cockroaches
are capable--given the requisite conditions; namely, habitat diversity
and time--of speciation. And speciation brings new diversity. So we
might reasonably imagine an Earth upon which, 10 million years after the
extinction (or, alteratively, the drastic transformation) of *Homo
sapiens*, wondrous forests are again filled with wondrous beasts. That's
the good news.

============ PLANET OF WEEDS by David Quammen, part 2 of 2 =============

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