In July 2024, all eyes will turn to Paris for the Summer Olympic Games. Spectators from around the globe will converge on the City of Light to watch athletes compete and to soak in the culture, romance and history of one of the world’s most recognisable cities.
But an iconic Paris landmark, the Notre Dame cathedral, will still be under renovation after a devastating fire that ignited in the cathedral and burned for 12 hours on April 14, 2019.
When the last embers were extinguished, most of Notre Dame’s wood and metal roof was destroyed, and its majestic spire had vanished, consumed by flames.
Notre Dame is nearly 1,000 years old and has been damaged and repaired many times. Its last major renovation was in the mid-1800s. The massive beams that framed the structure were fashioned from European oak trees harvested 300 to 400 years ago.
Today, these trees are common throughout north-central Europe, but few are tall enough to replace Notre Dame’s roof lattice and spire, thanks to centuries of deforestation. Planners had to search nationwide for enough suitably large oaks for the restoration.
Many people assume that the devastating impacts humans have wrought on our planet came about with the industrial era, which began in the mid-1700s. But people have been transforming conditions on Earth for millennia. Looking backward can inform our journey forward.
From deforestation to reforestation, to see how this works, let’s consider the shortage of tall trees for Notre Dame from a wider perspective.
Deforestation in Europe dates back at least 10,000 years to a time when early farmers swept across the continent, felling forests and creating agricultural and pastoral lands to form the landscapes of today.
Today, European nations are working to restore forests across the continent in order to slow climate change and species loss. With historical information about past forests, modern scientists can make better choices about which tree species to plant, select the best locations and project how the trees may respond to future climate change.
Understanding what’s possible in the past 50 years, the rate and scale of human impacts on Earth have intensified. In what scholars have dubbed “the Great Acceleration,” human activities such as clearing forests, converting lands for farming and development, overharvesting wildlife and fisheries, and warming the atmosphere through widespread use of fossil fuels have altered conditions for life.
For people born during this era of dizzying change, it can be hard to picture life on Earth before humans remade it. Scientists have pointed out the danger of so-called “shifting baselines”— the widespread tendency to assume that the current depleted state of nature is how things have always been. Knowing how ecosystems used to look and function, and how human actions have changed them, makes the scale of conservation tasks more clear.
Informing a resilient future the past can help modern societies confront today’s environmental challenges in innumerable ways. Understanding how to take careful historical detective work and scientific creativity.
Understanding the history of deforestation and land conversion patterns can help health experts anticipate future pandemics. Many infectious diseases move from wildlife to humans, and human activities such as deforestation and urbanisation are increasingly bringing humans and wildlife into closer contact. This heightens the risk of zoonotic disease transmission.
Humans can slow and, perhaps, reverse the ecological harms that they have caused, but Earth will never return to some past pristine state.
Nonetheless, one believes that history can help humans save Earth’s remaining wild, natural places that, along with cultural icons like Notre Dame, tell the stories of who we are.
The goal is not to go backward, but to create a more resilient, sustainable and biodiverse planet.
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