The World Without Us

“The ones we see are substantially larger than western coyotes. Their skulls and jaws are bigger,” says Foster, his long hands describing an impressive canine cranium. “They take larger prey than coyotes in the West, like deer. This probably isn’t sudden adaptation. There’s genetic evidence that western coyotes are migrating through Minnesota and up across Canada, interbreeding with wolves, then roaming here.”

It’s fortunate, he adds, that New England’s farmers left before nonnative plants flooded America. Before exotic trees could spread across the land, native vegetation again had a roothold on their former farmlands. No chemicals had been spaded into their soils; no weeds, insects, or fungi here had ever been poisoned to help other things grow. It’s the nearest thing to a baseline of how nature might reclaim cultivated land—against which to measure, for example, old England.

2. The Farm

Like most British trunk roads, the Ml motorway that runs north from London was built by Romans. In Hertfordshire, a jog at Hempstead leads to St. Alban’s, once a substantial Roman town, and beyond that, to the village of Harpenden. From Roman times until the 20th century, when they became bedroom commutes to London, 30 miles away, St. Alban’s was a center for rural commerce, and Harpenden was flat farmland, the conformity of its grain fields disrupted only by hedgerows.

Long before the Romans appeared in the first century AD, the dense forests of the British Isles began coming down. Humans first arrived 700,000 years ago, likely following herds of aurochs, the now-extinct wild Eurasian cattle, during glacial epochs when the English Channel was a land bridge, but their settlements were fleeting. According to the great British forest botanist Oliver Rackham, after the last ice age, southeastern England was dominated by vast stands of lindens mixed with oaks, and by abundant hazels that probably reflect the appetites of Stone Age gatherers.

The landscape changed around 4,500 BC, because whoever crossed the water that by then separated England from the Continent brought crops and domestic animals. These immigrants, Rackham laments, “set about converting Britain and Ireland to an imitation of the dry open steppes of the Near East, in which agriculture had begun.”

Today, less than 1/100 of Britain is original forest, and essentially none of Ireland. Most woodlands are clearly defined tracts, bearing evidence of centuries of careful human extraction by coppicing, which allowed stumps to regenerate for building supplies and fuel. They remained that way after Roman rule gave way to Saxon peasantry and serfdom, and into the Middle Ages.

At Harpenden, near a low stone circle and adjacent stem wall that are the remains of a Roman shrine, an estate was founded in the early 13th century. Rothamsted Manor, built of bricks and timbers and surrounded by a moat and 300 acres, changed hands five times over as many centuries, accruing more rooms until an eight-year-old boy named John Bennet Lawes inherited it in 1814.

Lawes went to Eton and then to Oxford, where he studied geology and chemistry, grew luxuriant muttonchops, but never took a degree. Instead, he returned to Rothamsted to make something of the estate his late father had left to seed. What he did with it ended up changing the course of agriculture and much of the surface of the Earth. How long those changes will persist, even after we’re gone, is much debated by agro-industrialists and environmentalists. But with remarkable foresight, John Bennet Lawes himself has kindly left us many clues.

His story began with bones—although first, some would say, came chalk. Centuries of Hertfordshire farmers had dug the chalky remains of ancient sea creatures that underlie local clays to spread on their furrows, because it helped their turnips and grains. From Oxford lectures, Lawes knew that liming their fields didn’t nourish plants so much as soften the soil’s acidic resistance. But might anything actually feed crops?

A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, had recently noted that powdered bonemeal restored vigor to soil. Soaking it first in dilute sulfuric acid, he wrote, made it even more digestible. Lawes tried it on a turnip field. He was impressed.

Justus von Liebig is remembered as the father of the fertilizer industry, but he probably would have traded that honor for John Bennet Lawes’s enormous success. It hadn’t occurred to von Liebig to patent his process. After realizing what a bother it was for busy farmers to buy bones, boil them, grind them, then transport sulfuric acid from London gasworks to treat the crushed granules, and then mill the hardened result yet again, Lawes did so. Patent in hand, he built the world’s first artificial fertilizer factory at Rothamsted in 1841. Soon he was selling “superphosphate” to all his neighbors.