The future eaters Book

Everyone I've mentioned this book to over the last week has made the same comment: The Future Eaters is brilliant, but'Tim Flannery cherrypicks the evidence about megafaunal extinction, or he's bit out of date now, or he's too harsh or too easy on Aboriginal people/white settlers/more recent immigrants. It is both remarkable and utterly predictable that The Future Eaters inspires such nitpickery. It is a vast book, and any book encompassing so many thousands of years of history and so many different disciplines'biology, climatology, anthropology, history, litearture'is bound to make little errors of fact. It is also a controversial book. Anyone who claims, as Flannery does, that 'multiculturalism' and 'immigration' are actually unrelated, for example, is bound to raise hackles.

However predictable the nitpickery, it isn't warranted. Flannery is one of the most circumspect historians I've ever read. His chapter on megafaunal extinction, for instance, is scrupulously evenhanded. He believes that humans wiped out the giant kangaroos and diprotodons that once grazed in Australia's primeval rainforests, and the large carnivorous lizards and marsupials that once preyed on them. But before he explains his own point of view, he carefully considers the opposing hypothesis, that these presumably once graceful creatures were eliminated by climate change. He also quite willingly admits where his own evidence is weak: 'at present we have no clear evidence about the nature of interaction between humans and megafauna, for we have no kill sites and very few sites where there is possible evidence for human and megafauna coexisting.' If he really is so prone to cherrypick his evidence, it is remarkable that he should pick this particular piece.

As for his controversial statements, he admits they are often provocations:
I have introduced some radical and provocative views principally because I believe that, given our present understanding, they are the right way to begin. Even if they are eventually discarded, the knowledge gained in investigating them would be invaluable as a base from which to make a beginning.
Flannery is one of Australia's greatest historians. His training is actually in zoology and paleontology. He spent his PhD years trekking all over Australia and PNG discovering extinct species of kangaroo, and describing the evolution of the genus macropodidae. He is a great historian because he thrusts beyond this (admittedly already broad) disciplinary boundary. The Future Eaters is full of references to great writers, explorers, economists, artists and war heroes as well as scientists. He is a bold thinker. He spends much of the book describing events long in the past'30, 40, 50 or 60 thousand years in the past'and has to fill in many of the gaps with theories. But his theories are always rooted in a sane and personal and detailed view of nature's ways.

Nature, Flannery shows, is frighteningly and beautifully plastic, and we humans have an extraordinary power to meddle with it. His main thesis is that the human settlers of the Pacific were the first 'Future Eaters', the first humans to enter a truly vulnerable environment and subdue it to our will. Like the Israelites in Canaan, Future Eaters find themselves in a land of milk and honey. But they glut themselves, and in a few short decades that the bounty of the earth reveals its finitude. Some Future Eaters, like the Australian Aborigines or the Papua New Guineans, then embark on a millenia-long quest for adaptation and balance, and can develop new and beautiful forms of life in a new and revitalised environment. Others, like the Māori, or the Easter Islanders, are never given the chance.

It is no wonder this story struck such a chord with Australians when it was published in 1992. This was the very experience of early white settlers. For the first decades, they pitilessly exploited the land. They ringbarked whole forests for a scrap of roof-bark. They felled vast woodlands. They butchered the seals and whales. They neglected to burn the undergrowth. They killed or drove away or seduced the traditional managers of the land. They hardly bothered to cultivate local flora and fauna'indeed, their descendants, me among them, still fail to do so. They tried to recreate English gardens and English households and English fashions in a hot dry land ruled by the El Niño Southern Oscillation.

The tragic thing is, this kind of exploitation can seem to work. Australians were taller, stronger, fitter, longer-lived and more fertile than their English and Irish counterparts for basically the whole nineteenth century. As they observed the Future Eaters of North America rampage across the continent and transform themselves into the world's most powerful society, they thought they might have a crack themselves. But then the droughts came, and the duststorms, and the rotting carcasses of sheep. Then the bandicoots and pademelons and rock wallabies started to die. Then the forests thickened and roared into flame. Then the rabbit warrens tore the soil to pieces. Then the mice broke out, then the prickly pears, then the cane toads. Then the rivers belched poisonous algae. Then the Great Barrier Reef started to perish and petrify.

Luckily, people like Tim Flannery are not alone in Australia today. There is a growing consciousness of our dependance on the land. More people are becoming more aware of just how little we know. And more people are coming to recognise a salient fact that Flannery demonstrates beyond rebuttal in his book:
[Aboriginal] cultures are the result of over 40 000 years of coadaptation with Australian ecosystems. The experience and knowledge encompassed therein is perhaps the single greatest resource that Australians living today possess, for without it we have no precedence; no guide as to how humans can survive long-term in our strange land.
This is the hope Flannery holds out to us: it has been done before. Humans have made made peace with their environment. We can never quite go back, it is true. An industrial society of millions cannot live in the rainforest, and even if we could, the soft-footed herbivores that once maintained the understory are long gone. Likewise an industrial society of millions cannot forage on the grasslands, and even if we could, probably too much of the soil has been ruined to support the stupendously biodiverse garden-like environments the Europeans encountered in 1788. We must make a new treaty with the land. To do that, we have to finish making our treaty with the first people of it.