Climate change, population pressure led to exodus from Chaco: another cautionary tale

Global warming has been accelerating since humans began setting fires to clear habitat, as a weapon or just for amusement. Evidence that we humans have eaten or burned ourselves out of habitats creating catastrophes behind us is strewn throughout the North American continent. 

 

The Mesa Verdean ancients who occupied the Green Table for nearly a millennium grew to a population of about five thousand creating spectacular architecture and art-of-fact but ultimately consumed every living thing atop Chapin and Wetherill Mesas. Matrilineal and matrilocal, their resulting exodus took them east over the Continental Divide (possibly not for the first time considering their hunter-gatherer past) into the Rio Grande valley and settled Santa Fe where their descendants were all but wiped out by the invading Spanish forces. Puebloans in New Mexico accept their stations as members of the Fourth World.

Theirs is a cautionary tale of ecological destruction followed by extirpation: a trophic cascade where human is the apex predator and decimates a landscape. Rangers at Mesa Verde National Park drive home a narrative of preserving ecosystems to visitors. There are specimens of Rocky Mountain juniper that date to the time of the departure of the puebloans: about eight hundred years old. The bark was used in most of the ways northwest Indigenous cultures used (and still use) it. 

Chaco Wash is about seventy miles south of the Green Table and as with Acoma Pueblo it's key to clan herstory.

Amid the shift from people hunting and gathering to undertaking agriculture, the researchers noted measurable changes – such as juniper trees decimated for building needs, food resources and firewood for cooking. “This is a very arid area,” he said. “In arid woodlands, the trees are essential for holding the soil in place. When the puebloan inhabitants removed those woodlands, the result was eventually severe erosion and the deterioration of croplands.” The study by the University of Cincinnati team noted that the landscape modifications by Chaco residents triggered serious environmental ramifications. [Study details environmental impacts of early Chaco residents]

"Modern society" is a product of the forbidden fruit--agriculture. Cain, the farmer, slew Abel, the hunter-gatherer and, yes, humans' collective knowledge is pushing us home to the stars whose dust make us who we are. Reproduction is the reason, food is the fuel. Humans are merely Terran tools to go forth and find more...unless or until we kill the Earth before she kills us for taking more than our share.

ip photo.

Saving Us by Katharine Hayhoe review – across the climate crisis divide https://t.co/1ghy2spKGH

— The Guardian (@guardian) October 31, 2021