Phytoplankton captures as much CO2 as terrestrial plants, seeds clouds which reflect sunlight, and provides half our oxygen. Take, for instance, the sperm whale, who defecates 50 tons of iron fertilizer each year in the upper layer of the ocean where plants grow. We could fell forests, straighten rivers, or stop them entirely. They provided the meat, milk, fur, leather, wool, fertilizer, pulling power, and then horsepower. But without them we wouldn’t have gotten very far. This relationship has shaped our minds, our lives, our land, our civilization, and will shape our future too. We had dominion over the beasts with orders to subdue them and multiply ourselves. Thus, we became separated from the interrelated community of which we are part. We were not a branch on the evolutionary tree-we were the pinnacle. We ordered the natural world into a hierarchy, a narrowing ladder that climbed, getting warmer and better all the way up to man (and woman one rung below). The way we thought about animals informed how we treated them. But these would need safekeeping, and here are the seeds of our 12,000-year war against nature. Or corralled it into warm, living larders. No need to chase after food anymore: we grew it. Without the mammoth grazing and dispersing seeds and nutrients, grassland became dominated by tundra vegetation which, uneaten, became waterlogged and frozen, turning to acid peat where grasses struggled to regrow. We could never have imagined this loss, let alone the impacts it would have to the whole ecosystem. Large mammals with long pregnancies and few offspring could not reproduce in number or in time to replace themselves. As herds dwindled, our skills only improved. One adult mammoth could consume over 400 pounds of herbage a day and scatter a vast tonnage of fertilizer ensuring a continuous cycle of nutrients. The soils were fertile, and the foraging rich. We went where the meat went, following herd migrations of animals like mammoth to the vast frigid grasslands of the steppe that stretched across the northern hemisphere from central France to Alaska, the largest terrestrial biome on the planet. Yet, it is our relationship with animals that has changed the face of the planet, as far back as our mammoth-hunting days 30,000 years ago. History is all too human-busy with battles, emperors, and land grabs.
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