Earth Then & Now (PB) - Softcover

Introduction

Two years ago I stood on the promenade at Muynak, an old seaside resort on the shores of the Aral Sea in central Asia. Behind me was a fish-processing factory that had once sent canned fish across the Soviet Empire, from Warsaw to Vladivostok. No longer. Looking out to what should have been sea, I saw fishing boats abandoned on a beach that went on forever. The sea had disappeared more than 30 years ago, and its bed had turned into a new and entirely unexplored desert. Over the horizon, I was told, a remnant of what had once been the world's fourth-largest inland sea remained. But the shore was more than 60 miles (100 km) away now and nobody in the town had ever gone to see it. I spotted a fox trotting where fish had once swum. In the far distance, a dust storm was brewing.

The Aral Sea died because Soviet engineers removed all the water from the two great rivers that once kept it full. They took the water to irrigate vast expanses of cotton farms -- to grow the uniforms for the Red Army. The Russians have been gone for more than a decade now, of course, but the abstractions continue, and the fields are today growing cotton for shirts and jeans and underwear on sale in almost every high street in the world. We are to blame now, as the sea continues to evaporate in the heat of the desert sun. It will probably be entirely gone within a decade.

UN scientists call the emptying of the Aral Sea the greatest environmental disaster of the 20th century. But I only really understood the scale of what had happened when I returned home from Muynak and looked at the pair of satellite images that appear in this book. They show a whole sea reduced to a toxic sump by human action. It is an unprecedented humanmade change to the shape of the world. This book is full of such pairs of images, showing how our world has been changed. Most show bad things we have done, but by no means all. There are good stories here, too. This is the latest chapter in man's use and abuse of planet Earth. But all the images beg the question: What will happen next?

Humans have been making their mark on the landscape for a long time. Our hominid ancestors discovered how to make fire more than a million years ago, and they hunted animals across the plains of their first home, Africa. By the time of the last ice age our own species, Homo sapiens, had learned to combine these two skills to good effect, setting huge fires across the grasslands to drive animals toward their spears. It was the start of what has probably been mankind's biggest and most destructive impact on the land surface: deforestation. But we soon ceased to be hunters and gatherers alone. For at least 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, we have been farming. To make way for the crops needed to feed a fast-growing human population, we chopped and burned down ever-greater areas of forests, plowed the great roaming grounds of wild animals and drained huge areas of marshes. Nature was on the retreat.

But, thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of many human settlements, nature has demonstrated a remarkable ability to recover. Many apparently natural forests contain evidence that ancient human civilizations, of which we know virtually nothing, cleared them thousands of years ago. Afterward, nature returned. Modern explorers have rediscovered the great Mayan ruins, for instance, buried in thick jungle in Central America. And those ruins are far from unique. Six hundred years ago there were cities with substantial populations in the Amazon jungle. Go back 1,500 years and the forests of central Africa were being turned into charcoal for metal smelting.

So, the good news is that nature can recover from the impact of human activity. But the bad news is that nature has never experienced anything like the intensity of our current interventions. Today there are almost seven billion humans on the planet, a thousand times more than 10,000 years ago. And we now have advanced technology at our disposal. Once, we damaged small areas and then moved on; now very little of our planet is untouched by human occupation, and often the damage looks terminal.

Photographs can not document those early footprints of humanity, but they do cover the past 150 or so years, during which our population and our impact has soared. In these pages you will see some of the consequences. In that time we have chopped down half the world's forests, doubled the area of land under the plow, all but eliminated large mammals, drained the majority of the world's marshes, and reduced most of the oceans' fish stocks and whale species by more than 90 percent. We have paved huge areas of the planet and broken much of the rest of the natural environment into tiny fragments by our extensive road-building. We have replumbed the rivers, plugging most of them with dams so that many no longer deliver water to the sea, and we have diverted their water instead through thousands of canals to irrigate fields. The demise of the Aral is only one albeit the worst -- outcome of that hydrological plunder.

We have dug deep into the bowels of the Earth. Look at the pictures of what we have done to Bingham Canyon in the U.S. and to Chile's Atacama Desert -- all in the pursuit of copper. And consider the way in which we have mined the South Pacific paradise of Nauru until there is, more or less literally, nothing left. Meanwhile, by releasing chemicals into the air we have burned a hole in the ozone layer and fundamentally altered nature's methods of recycling key elements such as sulfur, nitrogen, and -- perhaps most dangerously for the future habitability of our planet -- carbon.

Even seen from space, our handiwork is glaringly obvious. It is visible in huge reservoirs and megacities, in land drained from the sea, in whole coastlines that shift under our hidden hand, in dust storms that circle the globe, and in disintegrating ice sheets.

And yet there are things we can be hopeful about. Who can fail to be moved by the architectural magnificence of the Millau Viaduct in southern France, or by some of the dazzling modern cityscapes, or even, for its sheer joie de vivre, by the Paris beach? The construction of the Panama Canal killed thousands, but it remains an extraordinary monument to entrepreneurial and engineering endeavor. We should marvel, too, at the civil determination behind the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, the war-damaged Frauenkirche in Dresden, and the new Mostar Bridge in Bosnia.

Our creativity and inventiveness may have got us into our current environmental mess, but we must hope that they can get us out of it too. And there is evidence that they can. Look at some of the environmental rehabilitation projects undertaken after the closure of old mines. And think how the bleak, smog-filled industrial heartland of Bilbao has been transformed by an imaginative cultural vision. Scars can be healed.

Despite this, there is no denying that these chapters also contain evidence of tragedy, stupidity, venality, and short-term thinking in abundance. And, sadly, it is these misdemeanours that, for the time being at least, hold sway over the various examples of rehabilitation. Why, for example, care about coastal mangroves when they can be turned into toilet paper and the land annexed for prawn farms? Why worry about drying up the Aral Sea when there is cotton to be grown? Such human willfulness has, of course, been immensely compounded by advancing technology. We have shovels that can lift a hundred tons of ore in one scoop and dig holes up to a kilometer (3,300 ft) deep. We plug rivers with concrete barriers hundreds of feet high, and drain marshes and defoliate rainforests because we can. Sometimes the scale of our endeavours is overwhelming. In Tokyo, for example, we have paved an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 sq m).

But we don't just inflict damage on nature. We do it to each other, out of fear and hate. The wars of the 20th century, I sincerely hope, will be looked back on by future generations as outbre