Itseke

Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.

--  Ellen Basso on the Kalapalo, quoted by Robert Bellah

(photo: Fabio Colombini)

'The walking dead'

The Tree ocelot, the Hoary-throated spinetail, the White-cheeked spider monkey, the Rio Branco antbird, the Brazilian tapir and the Yellow-headed poison frog.

-- list, report, paper

Gomphotheres of the Rambunctious Garden

At an event titled Human Nature? Man and the Environment at Canning House in London yesterday, Yadvinder Malhi, one of the four excellent speakers, invited his listeners to consider human impacts on the Amazon basin over a longer time frame than many of us are accustomed to do. 

Malhi described the sense of sense of awe he felt at seeing this continent-sized forest on his first visit in 1995. Contemplating the huge trees, he experienced nature in the Amazon as essentially benign. The feeling has remained with him. You do have to watch out for the odd snake, but essentially there's nothing [natural] to worry about. Even the insects aren't too bad.

His more recent experience in the West African rainforest, by contrast, was a completely different. Walking with a guide in forest in Gabon for the first time, he learned to stop every few steps and listen for forest elephants: cow-sized animals which look cute but are extremely dangerous.

The contrast led him to ask himself, why were there no elephants in the South American rainforest?The answer is that, of course, there were. Gomphotheres were common across much of the continent until about 12 to 10,000 years ago when, along with some fifty other large mammals including the Stegomastodon, the Toxodon, the Giant Ground Sloth and the Glyptodont, they became extinct.

Few dispute that humans played an important role in many of these extinctions, as well those on other continents beyond Africa from about 60,000 to 10,000 years ago. Rapid climate change may also have played a part. Quite likely it was a combination of the two pressures that did it. (In Africa animals had co-evolved with humans, and learned to be wary of them much earlier [although see this].)

What impact did the South American extinctions have on the forest? Elephants and other large mammals have significant impact on African ecosystems, and there is every reason to suppose that the same was true for their counterparts in South America. In Africa, tree cover is often more patchy where elephants are present in large numbers. On the other hand, the large seeds of some tree species may need large animals such as elephants to spread them around, and the same would have been true in the New World.

In addition, it may be that (over a very long time) big animals played a major role in the transport of nutrients flowing down the rivers to the poor soils beyond. The animals would eat vegetation on the river banks and often pooh elsewhere. Other animals would later eat the vegetation so fertilized and carry nutrients further inland. The Amazon ecosystem could still be responding to the loss of these animals-as-nutrient-transport-systems 10,000 years later.

The Amazon, said Malhi, has only really become a part of the global social-economic system since around 1950, his favoured date for the start of the Anthropocene, or at least its startling acceleration. Malhi suggested four scenarios/ways of thinking about the future Amazon:

• 'Breadbasket' (made possible by huge inputs of fertilizers and fuel)
• (Inter)national conservation park
• Lungs of the world
• Rambunctious garden

The last scenario, from a phrase coined or popularized by Emma Marris, would, he suggested, represent compromise between the preceding visions -- one that recognizes that Amazonia was and is a human-altered system.

I wonder: what about a project to introduce and monitor the impact of a small herd of elephants on a designated and contained area of South America forest or savannah?

P.S. 26 April:  following the four speakers, some discussion focused on Brazil's land use law.

Hybrids and 'Nature 2.0'

Einstein's 'God' may not play dice, but Man certainly does:

Genetic mixing between eastern wolves and coyotes [in Canada] began more than a century ago after settlers cut down forests to plant crops. Coyotes, which like open spaces, arrived in traditional wolf territory just as wolf populations were plummeting thanks to gun-toting settlers and deforestation. With so few of their own kind left to mate with, eastern wolves turned to the next best thing - coyotes.

More recent human-induced change is sure to create new hybrids too, as species change their habits in attempts to adapt. Some wildlife experts, for example, suggest that warmer temperatures in northern Canada could be prompting grizzlies to spend less time hibernating and more time roaming outside their traditional range, so coming into contact with polar bears more often. In April 2006, an American sports hunter shot the first documented cross of a polar bear and a grizzly in the Northwest Territories. Though bear hybrids are not nearly as common as wolf/coyote crosses, the discovery of this "grizzlar" has prompted discussion among members of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, who have to come up with a recommendation for dealing with hybrids...Marco Festa-Bianchet, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, who heads the group, describes the task as "godawfully complicated". [Richard] Hobbs [a restoration ecologist in Western Australia] agrees, but adds: "To say you shouldn't think about it is like putting your head in the sand."

-- from Nature 2.0: Redefining Conservation by Sharon Oosthoek. It's a good article but can only go so far in the space available. What, for example, about the jack pines of the boreal forest, which are reported to lack the natural defences of the lodgepole pine?

The tropical forests, including Amazonia (see, for example Royal Society B: Climate change and the fate of the Amazon), probably present at least as large and complex a set of challenges as the boreal forests (and drylands) mentioned by Oosthoek.

In 1984, before ideas like 'Nature 2.0' or 'adaptive conservation' developed, things looked probably different. But it's unlikely that what E.O. Wilson wrote then is altogether irrelevant now:

The forest [in Suriname into which I had wandered] was a tangled bank tumbling down to the grassland's border. Inside it was like a living sea through which I moved like a diver groping across a littered floor. But I knew that all around me bit and pieces, the individual organisms and their populations, were working with extreme precision. A few of the species were locked together in forms of symbiosis so intricate that to pull out one would bring others spiraling to extinction. Such is the consequence of adaptation by coevolution, the reciprocal genetic change of species that interact with each other through many life cycles. Eliminate just one kind of tree out of hundreds in such a forest, and some of its pollinators, leaf eaters, and wood-borers will disappear with it, then various parasites and key predators, and perhaps a species of bat or bird that depends on its fruit -- and when will the reverberation end? Perhaps not until a large part of the diversity of the forest collapses like an arch crumbling as the keystone is pulled away. More likely the effect will remain local, ending with a minor shift in the overall pattern of abundance among the numerous living species. In either case the effects are beyond the power of present day ecologists to predict. It is enough to work on the assumption that all of the details matter in the end, in some unknown by vital way.