How Aboriginal people made the most successful ecosystems

Humans are animals. It seems such an obvious thing to say but we don’t behave, think or talk as though we believe it. And this has a profound effect on the way we look after wildlife and our future survival on Earth. The success of our species and the history of what we commonly consider “civilisation” isn’t what we think it is. Aboriginal people made the most successful ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More.

I recently wrote a blog about anthropocentrism and how, at some point, I’ll be accused of putting humans at the centre of arguments rather than “nature”. In defence, I’ve explained why treating humans as non-animal entities separate from planet Earth’s processes, is far more anthropocentric. The animal tribe, of which we are part, share a common past, present and future with us. When we realise that, it changes our perspective on what we need to do, to secure our own survival. We become less self-focused.

I’ve since been reading Gammage’s excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. In large part, it tells the story of Aboriginal peoples’ use of fire to create the landscape that Australia was before European settlement in 1788. Its beauty is in describing how to read the natural history of the Australian landscape. I realise now, there are even parts of the Dandenong Ranges National Park (which I can see from my window), that retain characteristics of Aboriginal activity that could be several tens of thousands of years old. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu covers a similar story.

It reminds me of Oliver Rackham’s The Illustrated History of the Countryside which looks at the British landscape through the lens of human impact, dating back to prehistoric times. You can walk through the Oxfordshire countryside and see ancient barrows from the Neolithic, over 3,500 years old. Of all the animals on Earth, humans have one of the most observable impacts.

As an ecologist, I’ve learnt to look closely at landscapes and see the way animals interact with them and create the patterns that lead to biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More processes: clean water, fertile soils and food. It wasn’t until I moved to Australia that I saw the remnants of wilderness that had been manipulated for over 40,000 years by Homo sapien. For almost as long as there have been humans living in northern Europe, Australia has been occupied by a single civilisation. When you grow up in Europe, you’re seeing landscapes that have been intensively altered by many different civilisations of sapien. It’s harder to understand Australia’s landscape, because it’s relatively intact. It’s easier to spot blunt changes to landscapes we’ve made over a short time, like regrowth of a recently felled forest, than it is to spot an environment emerging from stasis after tens of thousands of years.

When Australia’s first nations people landed on the northern shores of Australia the country was blanketed with rainforest and roamed by herds of megafaunaThe largest animals that represent the top of the trophic pyramid. These are the final building blocks in ecosystem structures for maximum entropy production. Megafauna can be measured at any spatial scale. The largest animal that ever lived on Earth is the Blue Whale. In a grassland, spiders could be considered megafauna The term is generally reserved for animals larger More. Hippo-sized Diprotodon, Palorchestes (the marsupial Tapir), the three metre tall flightless bird, Dromornis, a giant tortoise, huge monitor lizards (bigger than today’s Komodo dragon) and the marsupial lion, Thylacoleo. Debate goes on about the cause of their extinction but it seems obvious enough, that pleistocene megafauna were lost world-wide, coincident with the spread of Homo sapien across the continents.

The time frame of their disappearance coincided with sustained regional changes in available water and vegetation, as well as increased fire frequency.

Scott Hucknall, The Conversation

Within about 20,000 years Aborigines massively altered the landscape with fire and farming, removing huge tracts of rainforest and creating extensive treed grassland. This combination of landscape-scale manipulation of ecosystems and undoubtedly, hunting pressure, meant all of the continent’s megafauna, apart from Red Kangaroos, Emus and Cassowaries, went extinct several tens of thousands of years ago.

Gammage repeatedly refers to Aboriginal fire management as “not natural”. I would dispute this and say that manipulation of land by Aboriginal people was as natural as any example of recent human civilisation, the difference being, the stability and longevity of the processes they created. First Nation Australians lived on the land long enough, uninterrupted by war, to develop an intelligence congruous with a stable environment of their own making, created in order to feed themselves and survive. Aboriginal humans did what any animal would have done, which is to change their environment – we call this ‘agriculture’. In animals we say cultivation grazing’.

People like us, like any animal, exist as a mechanism to stabilise ecosystems and this is why we desire to build and alter things. It is hard-coded into our DNA but it takes time and can’t be done without the involvement of countless other species.

Far from undermining Australia’s fertility and clean water, Aboriginal activities created synergy with the landscape, enough for early visiting colonialists to notice. Gammage quotes George Frankland where he observed “an instance of the beautiful decoration of some of our scenery, for that park like ground is entirely in a state of Nature” and John Oxley as “many hills and elevated flats were entirely clear of timber … the general quality of the soil excellent”.

Aboriginal people managed to build an environment with deep, fertile soil and vast biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More and diversity of animals. But at first it must have been brutal. To change an entire landscape means sacrificing huge numbers of your own species, throwing the entire system into chaos–rather like we are doing to the world today. This explains how the “sustained regional changes in available water and vegetation” caused the extinction of megafauna and would have had dire consequences for early Aboriginal settlers. Only the most likely cultures would have survived this traumatic period and it must have taken at least 25,000 years, before it restabilise, as this was the time it took for the megafauna to disappear altogether.

Yet, over thousands of generations, the population would have reached carrying capacityThe population of animals that a steady-state ecosystem can support. It’s the number that results when total mortality equals total birth-rate. Populations aren’t evenly-distributed to carrying capacity depends on there being both population sources and populations sinks that balance each other out. This is why it can never be said that “animals can move somewhere else”. Loss of critical habitat More and developed intensely landscape-influenced language, music and art. This was to enshrine their hard-won survival into a culture that would eventually persist in harmony with its surroundings for longer than almost any other civilisation (with the possible exception of the tribes of New Guinea).

It’s unlikely that indigenous people knew that what they were about to do would shape the continent for tens of thousands of years. They adapted to survive, on a discrete local level, so even languages diversified. Language is the basis for preserving the combined intelligence of bloodlines, protecting the cultural knowledge necessary for your mob’s survival. Even today, the tribes of New Guinea and Australia, have some of the most diverse dialects of any nations on Earth. Natural selection prefers diversity because it allows populations to adapt and persist. It’s one of the reasons Aboriginal culture did so well.

Aboriginal Australians were, up until 1788, among the most successful and perhaps most likely to surviveDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More, of all races of humans on Earth. Mostly because they had been unencumbered with the ravages of war and the disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More, starvation and cultural disintegration that had affected Europe for so long.

So, what can we learn from all this?

It took our indigenous cousins at least 25,000 years to learn how to survive, to develop culture and land-use sustainable-enough to maintain fertile soil and clean water–the basic elements for any animal to exist. The incidental consequence was to rebuild the incredibly biodiverse animal-driven ecological structures needed to support and sustain this new existence. Human animals cannot singularly create and maintain an ecosystem. That takes an entire enclave of wildlife. This is why it’s so tragic that wildlife has suffered such severe decline and how, even today, is strangely persecuted despite the essential role they will have to play in recreating a habitable Earth.

Modern colonialism only began about 500 years ago and soon after, the intelligence needed to survive in landscapes like Australia’s was lost, along with its cultures and civilisation.

We are now essentially repeating what Australian Aboriginal settlers did 65,000 years ago. We’ve hit the restart button. The biggest change of all, however, came with industrialisation, which happened about the same time Europeans settled in Australia.

Far from creating a liveable paradise, industrialised agriculture, the replacement of animals with machines, the creation of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, has stripped bare our essential life support systems and left us with little soil with which to grow food and anoxic, fish-less rivers and wetlands, running thick with mud. Two hundred and fifty years ago, rivers would have been crystal clear, overflowing with native fish life, grasslands brimming with dozens of marsupials, small and large, forests and skies filled with birds.

Today’s humans face a very different challenge to first nations settlers. In little more than 50 years, we have killed over 68% of individual wild animals on Earth.

The first nations people of Australia entered a country with bountiful natural capital, a wealth they could afford to draw down and reinvest over thousands of years, to create the conditions for their own survival–but they did this slowly, without machines and chemicals. The rate at which they could afford to change things was limited by their own mortality. The megafauna that came before, may have been the source of the opportunity. The remaining wildlife that coexisted with Aboriginal people for 40,000 years or more, was a foundation for the continents’ ongoing life support and couldn’t be killed en masse, without taking human beings with them.

An ecologist studying in the UK will look at patchwork mosaics of ancient woodland and heathland, some of the richest habitat left in England. In western Europe, some of the fertile flower-rich grasslands of the Picos de Europa in Spain are still hand-scythed. The actions of indigenous Europeans, doing small-scale farming, created gorgeously rich environments adorned with colour, bird song and even mammals like Wolves and Brown Bears. These are the habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More that are the template for ecosystem restoration but the animal responsible for driving this adaptation–human–has long since left the land and fashioned a new ecosystem and new behaviours.

We are 50 years into a new era of global environmental alteration by human animals, a process that took indigenous cultures thousands of years of trial and error, to perfect. Science can only give us so much guidance, as we tend to study only what has happened in the past. Changes in the future are unknown. Animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More is about an alignment of intelligence and landscape function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More, where the two components are manipulated by the animal itself–just like the way Aboriginal people changed the Australian landscape and developed the culture to live sustainably inside.

This is a very natural process. Humans are animals. The questions we have to ask ourselves now, are: is there enough natural capital left in the Earth to allow us to start all over again?

And, are there enough animals left, to maintain our life support through a period of immense chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More, while we make the same mistakes as our ancestors but on a global scale and over just a few decades, rather than thousands of years?

Cover Image: Charles Mountford (1890 – 1976), The Rock, c Jul 1938. From Gammage, B. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen & Unwin, 2011.

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