Reflections: Humans modifying the environment is nothing new

There’s an ongoing to-do these days about whether we should continue to modify the world’s environment.

Humans are unique in that we tend to make our circumstances fit our needs rather than attempting to fit into nature’s scheme of things. This has led to some fairly unpleasant happenings in recent decades.

Here in the U.S., the last stands of old-growth timber in the Northwest were in danger of being cut down before the environmental movement stepped in. Down in South America, rapacious idiots continue to destroy thousands of acres of rain forest each week. And in the old Soviet Union, whole regions are now radioactive and an entire inland sea was drained as the result of years of government-sanctioned environmental madness.

We like to think that such problems are relatively new, the results of modern technology, but environmental modification has been going on here ever since the first humans arrived, the last group of indigenous people coming to North America via the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age.

The first humans arrived in the Kendall County area 10,000 – give or take a few thousand – years ago. They came because they were following their food supply, the great Ice Age herd mammals. Those first residents gathered edible wild plants and hunted the big game that thrived on the land recently vacated by the retreating ice sheets.

Using their ability to coordinate hunting groups, these Paleo-hunters of 10 millennia ago used their efficient flint-tipped spears to good effect on mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and other food animals. Today, artifact hunters still find remnants of the beautifully made stone weapons used by those long-ago hunters, sometimes in conjunction with the fossilized remains of their prey.

The Native American descendants of those Paleo hunter-gatherers settled down into a sort of equilibrium with their environment, although they continued to modify it to suit their needs. They burned the dried prairies in the autumn to increase grazing lands for the bison and deer that thrived and the fish weirs they fashioned in the area’s streams created islands and otherwise modified water flows.

A large grass was imported from Mexico because of the superior food value of its seeds. Soon, Native Americans all over North America were planting the new food crop called maze. And it grew magnificently here on the Illinois prairies because, although it had been modified by centuries of cross-breeding, maze, or corn, was still a grass at heart, and grass grew well on our rolling tallgrass prairies.

Mother Nature conspired with Indian hunters to wipe out the eastern woodland bison about the time the first American settlers were pushing into southern Illinois. And as fur traders supplied newer technology, local Indian groups began to modify their environment even more. Firearms allowed more efficient hunting, and steel traps meant more fur-bearing animals harvested.

It was a cycle that had begun in the early 1600s, and by the late 1600s, beaver and other prime fur-bearing animals had been hunted almost to extinction around the eastern Great Lakes. The Iroquois Confederacy, in an effort to stop furs traveling to market from western tribes without their approval, interdicted the Great Lakes trade routes. As part of their all-out economic war, they eliminated whole tribes and decimated others, including the Illiniwek Confederacy here in Illinois.

Then when White American settlers began arriving in the Fox Valley in the early 1800s they began modifying the very land itself. As soon as they arrived, the settlers began clearing wooded land, using the logs for homes, farm buildings, fences and fuel. They built dams on most area streams, including the Fox River, Morgan Creek, Waubonsie Creek, Big and Little Rock creeks, Blackberry Creek and the AuSable, to provide power for the mills settlers relied on for sawn lumber and flour ground from the grain they grew. The region’s extensive wetlands were gradually drained, mostly to provide more arable farmland. But the drainage also had a positive impact on area residents’ health as populations of harmful insects were decreased. Animal life, too, was drastically changed, as the major predatory species, such as wolves, bobcats and cougars, were hunted to regional extinction.

The effect of this flurry of modification was dramatic. The mill dams stopped the natural migration of many species of fish. Silt build-ups behind the dams covered gravel spawning beds, further reducing the number of aquatic species.

Drainage of wetlands removed the area’s major stormwater “banks,” resulting in more destructive “freshets” or floods following hard rainfalls and spring ice break-up. The elimination of wetlands meant water quickly rushed into area streams and was drained away instead of being slowly released by the wetlands’ natural actions. The water table dropped, and the streams themselves began to suffer through extreme flood-drought stages.

Here in Kendall County’s Bristol Township alone, 3,200 acres of wetlands were drained between 1905 and 1910. The practical effect of this, according to Paul Baumann’s The Fox River: A Bicentennial History (Kendall County Historical Society, 1975), was to reduce the Fox River’s flow during its period of lowest levels by 50%.

Of course, Kendall County residents weren’t the only ones modifying their environment. Similar actions on much greater scales were used on the Mississippi River. We saw the negative results of those actions over the years when floodwaters had no place to go, creating regional destruction. Over the decades, the Mississippi’s channel had been channeled, diked and dammed to keep it from its historic wetland backwaters. Not surprisingly, the river goes wild occasionally, and always reclaims those backwaters no matter how badly engineers wish it wouldn’t.

It’s been a long learning curve. Fortunately humans are capable of learning – at least sometimes. For instance, many of the Fox River’s dams are set to be removed during the next several years. But unfortunately, we keep demonstrating how rare learning from mistakes really is. Because we know the right things to do nowadays when it comes to our environment. The challenge is actually doing them.

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