Forester McClatchey A Timeless Place Thirteen thousand years ago the first hominids arrived in Georgia, a primordial wild land that they had no pretense of owning. Gigantic sloths and mastodons roamed and grazed without fear of the new weak hairless creatures that at last reached the Atlantic and could expand no further. Awesome predators bereft of competition struck fear in the humans’ hearts: American lions fourteen feet long, carnivorous Short-Faced Bears fourteen feet tall, and the infamous Smilodon fatalis. The Georgian Piedmont had always been a wild, brutal, beautiful place, from when dinosaurs ruled and Georgia was connected to Africa to forty million years ago when the Appalachians had craggy peaks twice as tall as the Himilayas’. Now these seemingly insignificant creatures came, and the world changed in the blink of an eye. Clever, adaptive, and avaricious, humans overhunted the megafauna in North America with indiscriminate killing, crippling Georgia’s ecology. The giant herbivores no longer kept the plants in check and their disappearance bereaved the notorious Pleistocene hunters from a food source. American camels, horses, giant sloths, giant elk, mastodons, mammoths, and many other species were wiped out forever. Despite this, the new humans became “indigenous” and learned to coexist with the land in a delicate balance. For the next sixteen thousand years Natives became accustomed to the ebb and flow of nature. But then in the latter part of the second millennia, huge incursions of overconfident Europeans callously displaced and slaughtered the natives, pushing them ever westward in a new mindset of Locke’s philosophy, that humans owned the earth and everything in it was put there to serve us. They had the manpower and efficiency to clear cut forests, dam rivers, overhunt fauna, and overpopulate areas in a matter of centuries, geologically a minute sliver of time. I am interested in what the land was before it was ‘owned’, before benign educators existed to build a school, what stalked and lumbered and grew and lived where I am sitting. Humans are often shortsighted and superficial, and even those who care about history rarely look back past our history. We have been here barely a million years, and recorded history reaches back only to about 7,000 B.C. Dinosaurs were the dominant life form on earth for over 175 million years. Our history, though illustrious and enthralling, means little to an earth that has been here almost five billion years. This place is aware only of the river of time, an ever-oscillating embrace of life that will continue long after this school is gone. We can only enjoy here, now, and try to appreciate what came before us.
A Timeless Place
Thirteen thousand years ago the first hominids arrived in Georgia, a primordial wild land that they had no pretense of owning. Gigantic sloths and mastodons roamed and grazed without fear of the new weak hairless creatures that at last reached the Atlantic and could expand no further. Awesome predators bereft of competition struck fear in the humans’ hearts: American lions fourteen feet long, carnivorous Short-Faced Bears fourteen feet tall, and the infamous Smilodon fatalis. The Georgian Piedmont had always been a wild, brutal, beautiful place, from when dinosaurs ruled and Georgia was connected to Africa to forty million years ago when the Appalachians had craggy peaks twice as tall as the Himilayas’. Now these seemingly insignificant creatures came, and the world changed in the blink of an eye. Clever, adaptive, and avaricious, humans overhunted the megafauna in North America with indiscriminate killing, crippling Georgia’s ecology. The giant herbivores no longer kept the plants in check and their disappearance bereaved the notorious Pleistocene hunters from a food source. American camels, horses, giant sloths, giant elk, mastodons, mammoths, and many other species were wiped out forever. Despite this, the new humans became “indigenous” and learned to coexist with the land in a delicate balance. For the next sixteen thousand years Natives became accustomed to the ebb and flow of nature. But then in the latter part of the second millennia, huge incursions of overconfident Europeans callously displaced and slaughtered the natives, pushing them ever westward in a new mindset of Locke’s philosophy, that humans owned the earth and everything in it was put there to serve us. They had the manpower and efficiency to clear cut forests, dam rivers, overhunt fauna, and overpopulate areas in a matter of centuries, geologically a minute sliver of time. I am interested in what the land was before it was ‘owned’, before benign educators existed to build a school, what stalked and lumbered and grew and lived where I am sitting. Humans are often shortsighted and superficial, and even those who care about history rarely look back past our history. We have been here barely a million years, and recorded history reaches back only to about 7,000 B.C. Dinosaurs were the dominant life form on earth for over 175 million years. Our history, though illustrious and enthralling, means little to an earth that has been here almost five billion years. This place is aware only of the river of time, an ever-oscillating embrace of life that will continue long after this school is gone. We can only enjoy here, now, and try to appreciate what came before us.