Combat Landscapes and the Long Haul

Easter Island—Rapanui—was deforested a few centuries after wayfarers from islands to the east arrived. The rather dense palm forest (the palm was endemic and now assumed extinct) was cut to the last tree. The timber was put to many uses, and the newly opened spaces may have been used for agricultural. However, armed conflict played an enormous role in the disposition of the Rapanui landscape. The inhabitants divided themselves among a suite of clans, primarily for the purpose of carving, transporting and erecting the giant stone figures—Moai—that still dot the island and watch over visitors. The clans came into rivalry, competed for manufacturing the biggest Moai, and went to war with each other. The palms were instrumental in Moai production (providing, among other things, leverage for moving and erecting the stones), and when Moai competition was intense, it is likely the palm harvest was correspondingly so. In addition, they likely provided weaponry, and did provide raw material for canoes and dwellings, along with food (the endemic palm had a nutritious edible fruit). Ramped-up human activity meant a ramped-down palm population.


Eventually, after canoes were no longer available due to loss of palms, the now stuck-in-place islanders came to accord and substituted a sporting-style competition among champions for deciding annual leadership of the whole human population. Not long after, westerners arrived in sailing ships and the population crashed under the weight of disease and other artifacts of contact. But the impact of the loss of the palms was irreversible. The post-palm landscape remains in place—herbaceous, grassy, and shrubby vegetation on thin soils over the rock substrate, which emerges over large land areas. The original fauna and flora were drastically and permanently altered. All but one of the known bird species found on the island are extinct. The vegetation is less diverse, lacking sources of propagules to rebuild biodiversity. But the habitats in place do, of course, support an ecosystem that reflects current conditions. Life on Rapanui goes on, different from what it was, but flourishing in its own way.


Which poses an interesting challenge. Ecosystems develop and function in landscapes impacted by warfare. The ecology has certainly been altered, but is there any reason for us to value it less than the original? I think in the short term—while the landscape is being impacted and while the ecosystem reorganizes and restructures—that we can say the system is negatively affected relative to what was there before. Once the ecosystem has pulled itself together, though, it is simply the ecosystem in place. If the inhabitants of Rapanui had wiped themselves out and the archaeological clues to their history lost, we would accept the present ecosystem as “valid”. Which, in the sense of providing the breadth and depth of ecosystem services possible in the landscape-as-it-is, is a rational perspective.


We don’t know how much of a role armed conflict played in the denuding of Rapanui palm forests. But it was clearly one factor.


Another place where modern landscapes have been posited to be an outcome of human use, with at least an assist from armed conflict, is in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. R.V. O’Neill built a case for the alpine environment’s present spotty tree cover, thin soils, exposed rock, and eroded condition being due to non-sustainable use by human occupation from the bronze age forward. O’Neill’s exposition makes sense. However, other investigators like Arthur Rackham (the botanist, not the illustrator) take issue, and believe these montane ecosystems represent the outcome of hydrology, geology, and biology unique to the region.


On Guam, I had the opportunity to observe the aftermath of war in the landscape. The western half of Guam has a central massif that rises from sea level in a huge escarpment (and, in the other direction, drops into the Marianas Trench). Much of these hills is covered with hard, mineral soils, bare in places and occupied by coarse grasses in near monoculture in others. These steep slopes were subject to horrific bombardment in the runup to the allied invasion to retake the island from the Japanese. There was considerable post-landing combat here as well. The original ecosystem of these heights supported high plant diversity on organic soils formed over millennia. When the vegetation was damaged by war, the soils eroded, and the present landscape is the result. It didn’t help that in the postwar period several enormous typhoons (? Word?) flooded the island with intense precipitation [5]. This is also where the last Japanese soldier walked out of the hills to a seaside bar and surrendered in the 1970s. He said he would have kept to himself except his teeth deteriorated to the point that he could no longer eat the freshwater prawns that kept him alive all those years.


A few years ago in the Maas River valley, I spent a day hiking through suburban Maastricht from the Netherlands into Belgium and up the slope of a hill rising out of the muddy floodplain. This hill turned out to be the residual outer ring of an enormous quarry, which had taken the mass out of hill’s center and replaced it with exposed bedrock. The Sint Pietersberg hill is networked with tunnels, which played several roles in World War Two. When I got there via pure serendipity on my hike, I was delighted to find a nice café at the summit, where I could get free wi fi, frites with mayonnaise, and a couple of pints of ice cold cherry kriek. After refreshment, I did a little brush busting hoping to turn up a viper or ringelnatter. What I wandered into instead was a network of trenches and shell holes going back to both World Wars. The forest had recovered and grown over the earthworks, but slopes in the shell holes were very steep and many had bare side walls. At the bottom of one, I found an oddly smoothed chunk of rock that fit almost preternaturally into my hand. The rock had been broken, and the worn hand fitting piece is all there is. I couldn’t help but think that in this landscape, I could possibly retrieve artifacts from World War Two, or stone age tools exposed by the explosive excavations.


In China, near Nanjing, I visited a village inside a massive fortification from the early Ming dynasty. The village was inside the fort wall, which occupied an enormous acreage. The present wall is just a part of the landscape. Locals have built houses and shops into it, and the ancient gates are now busy gravel roads. But the footprint of this fortress is enormous, and the area still reflects the earthworks from the 1300s. The entire area inside the huge fort, now mostly planted in wheat, is clearly disturbed ground. Many hectares outside the walls are also transformed, probably to provide mass for the walls and outside positions to anticipate attack. 


In general, it appears that intense combat modifies landscapes for a long time. Even when the ecosystem has recovered to function however it can in the residual environment (in Belgium, the forest recovered just fine from the shell holes and excavations, on Guam, not so much). Given the extent of war in the course of human history, this is a nontrivial aspect of our relationship to the biosphere!


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