The below is my record of a book and not a real review, as it is neither comprehensive nor do I care if you ever pick up the book yourself. My records provide snapshots of the text and are concerned and interested with areas of the book that I found concerning and interesting.
— — — — —
E. C. Pielou’s 1991 After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America is a book about how our not-to-distant past has not only formed our current ecological and social norms, but how these insightful truths may impact our future—as we progress ourselves into a new epoch of a changing climate.
History is the art of trying not to repeat itself, we are told, but the climate’s history is a cycle like anything else that is living, animate that is, and so it seems that history must inevitably go along in this merry-go-round. But even cycles are not mirror images of themselves, for they spin and rotate in time and time is never what it once was.
Pielou’s book is quick to demonstrate that climatic change is, for some reason or another, never ending. But it happens in many scales from “large variations” that occur over millions of years, “lesser variations” that occur over a handful of thousands of years, and so on in successional and decreasing magnitudes, until we modern humans hold a nested series of change in our hands like pebbles of different sizes and colors.
But even here, it seems to me, our nested story of change is still quite complex. When we think of ice ages, that is, abnormally cold periods of time, we tend to think that it was consistently cold, like a stream is wet. Arguing for ever more complexity, Pielou writes that, unlike a stream's “wetness,” ice ages occupy “different ranks” of cold and each rank occupies different times and periods and are intermixed between periods of lesser colds. For instance, in our current glacial age (we are still in the last ice age), there have been 19 or 20 individual glaciations (intensely cold periods) that were buffered by mild respites of interglaciation events (less cold periods like today).
Take for instance the confused haptics and heterogeneous cauldron of the Younger Dryas, a mini-ice age (minor interglaciation event) that lasted from 12,700 to 11,500 years ago. During this time, temperatures dropped to an -5 to -25 °C annual mean, or 23 to -13 °F average.1 Climate change in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in what is now North America, incongruously mixed with the great extinction events of the megafauna and the continent-wide dismantling of the “Clovis culture”2 into regionally-developed and individual nations.3 The supposed and scientifically-accepted story goes something like this—we lost the megafauna when our populations increased, then the Ice Age’s glaciation receded into an interglaciation event and we turned to agriculture for security and its leisure, but, in the infant stages of that development, the world cooled again and life slowed down, but agriculture’s stable and stalwart hook was well set and it allowed life to carry on.
Another example of an ice age’s differing pedigrees of interglaciation events occurred around 8,500 years ago, when a post-glacial climate emergency settled as the Northern Hemisphere wobbled slightly closer to our sun and warmed for 3,700 years. It was called the Holocene Climatic Optimum, or the Altithermal period, where forty centuries of intense global warming threw some parts of North America into true desserts and came close to burning the rest. Animals and their peoples migrated both eastward and westward and they left their southern central homelands for climate reprieve. As the Altithermal cooled, like bathwater, these animals and their peoples returned home and, in some cases, even returned to the same homes they left thousands of years prior. The climate and its animals then seemingly remained happily in place for nearly 4,000 years in the cooling and comfortable bathwater. But change was again on the horizon. It is always just over the hill. About 1,000 years ago, severe droughts cast the central prairies again into a shriveled and decadent ecotone sandwiched between the moist east and west. The large herbivore numbers again plunged as they spread out and sought habitable lands. Once again, their numbers in the east rose slightly. A few hundred years later, they returned to their great homes in their great prairies and lived in their great halls of waving grasses and their ancient peoples. They then came together in a great, migrating thunder, as their ancestors did before the great drought and before the great warming and before the great cooling and life redeveloped once again. Then, as though a great, cruel joke, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the climate changed again, sending our world into a deep wet and cooled season and the bison and large herbivores once again returned east for safe harbor under its forested cathedrals.
We live in this great play, love affair, and battle between glacial and interglacial epochs.
One of the most interesting aspects (to me) of Pielou’s book is his discussion on what he terms, “Ecological Inertia.” While Quaternary paleoecologist, H. E. Wright, Jr. argues that “vegetation and climate are” in “equilibrium,” Pielou presents an alternative thesis. Before we dive into Pielou’s argument, I think it is important to realize that Wright’s argument is the great assumption of our own age. Nature is balanced; she is universally harmonious; her living world is marvelously and delicately attuned; her purpose here or her purpose there is wonderfully resonant with the consensus of our earth. We see this argument being made in the “regenerative agriculture” and even the “save the climate” spaces.
In my upcoming book, I write about this “ecological inertia” through a tale of what I call the “Damsel in Distress Climate Model.” Wherein, we perceive the climate as this inanimate but lovely object that bends and twists to our wills that, if we just try hard enough, we can get back in balance. Open up a news app on your phone or read Regenesis by George Monbiot or turn on the TV and you will see, read, or watch people arguing that “if we can just get x, y, or z down to pre-industrial levels, our climate will such and such” or “our climate will cool to x, y, or z if we can convert to renewable energy sources by such and such a time.” In all these narratives, the assumption is that the climate is not a living force and is comparable to a mythical sleeping beauty who needs her prince charming to ride in and save the day.
Pielou challenges these thoughts in his own, scientific way. He writes,
“There is a wealth of evidence, however, showing that climatic change is never ending. Even if major climatic “steps” are comparatively quick, it is almost certain that the climate in the intervals between steps undergoes continual lesser changes.”
These continual, lesser changes in the climate forever exist in front of vegetative evolutionary change. Pielou writes, “Because vegetation is slow to respond to climatic change, a short-lived [climatic] change may not have time to produce a response.” This is easily witnessed in areas where the vegetation’s evolution was steady within an area that cycled erratically between dwindling ice sheets and increasing glaciation—cold to warm and then warm to cold again.
“For example, the gradual disappearance of the Laurentide ice sheet was interrupted by a number of major readvances of the ice front in the southern part of the Great Lakes region, but there seems to have been no corresponding vegetation retreats.”
What this means is that life’s evolution occurs at a lesser pace than the climate’s ever changing nature. That is, life’s evolution always lags behind. Therefore, Pielou argues, “disequilibrium” in ecological communities is the streamline, not “equilibrium.”
“It should lead, in time, to a much needed change in popular thought. The notion [of equilibrium] espoused by so many nonprofessional ecologists is not so much a scientifically reasonable theory as a mystically satisfying dogma.”4
This seems to me to speak to importance of emergence and the role of co-creation through intense kinship and relationship—between living species and between those species and our sister, the climate.
Life exists in the ever-intense and seemingly never-ending journey of finding balance, equilibrium, but it does not exist or sojourn in equilibrium. Balance is a journey, a migration between yesterday and today and the idea of tomorrow. But balance is also something that requires co-creation—species coming together in kinship to generate adapted phenotypes that more-quickly meet the calls of our wonderfully changing and loving climate.
What do you think? What does Pielou’s disequilibrium mean to our co-creative energies?
Renssen, Hans. 2020. "Comparison of Climate Model Simulations of the Younger Dryas Cold Event" Quaternary 3, no. 4: 29. https://doi.org/10.3390/quat3040029
This term I use incredibly hesitantly. In my writing for a new book, i have a chapter entirely dedicated to the dismantling of the idea of a continent-wide culture of indigenous peoples at this time or really any time. It is purely another form of academic colonialism that prostrates the ancient man of the western hemisphere as singular, primitive, and “savage.” I utilize this narrative here for that is how Pielou crafts the narrative and this is not, necessarily, my peice. What is true, however, was that during this time (Younger Dryas) there was a great diversification of peoples, nations, and ways of life as the climate shifted exponentially.
Anderson, David G. Climate and Culture Change in Prehistoric and Early Historic Eastern North America. Archeology of eastern North America, Vol 29, 2001. Pp 143-186.
Block quotes derived from pages 99-101 in the University of Chicago Press, 1991 paperback.