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TODAY Friday 8 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Monsters from 12,000 BC

About 14,000 years ago, at least two big things happened. In Mesopotamia, humans first domesticated a wild cereal and thereby invented agriculture. And in North America, Europe, and Asia, the ice sheets finally stopped marching south; they had reached their limit.

Archaeologists and historians disagree colorfully on the exact time, place, and grasses involved with the beginning of farming, but the general outlines are clear. Thanks to the warm climate, rich grasslands and reliable rivers of their region, pastoralists in western Asia were able to breed variants of perennial plants that exchanged their ability to reproduce for an ability to produce an abundance of edible seeds. Thus were born annuals, which both allowed and required people to stay put. Fewer people could produce more calories more reliably than were obtainable in the hunter/gatherer era. Populations grew, buildings were built, and surplus labor was made available for theology, science, war, and management. You can have art and beauty and high forms of cerebration and insight within the hunter/gatherer context -- you can have culture, in other words -- but you can't have the mixed blessings of civilization. The city is a creature of the farm. The development of reliable surpluses of food is the precondition of both the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century and the Global Economy of today; New York City is unimaginable without cheap carbohydrates.

As those clever Mesopotamians were inventing agriculture, the glaciers at last were meeting their match. The amount of snow that melted each year in what is now the northeastern United States finally exceeded the amount of snow that fell. The glaciers ground (literally) to a halt, and then they retreated, like the Germans after Stalingrad. At their farthest point of advance, the glaciers dumped lots of soil and rocks that they had scraped off the surfaces of Quebec and New England and carried it with them on their voyages south. Those deposits now constitute the north shore of Long Island and the western tricep of Cape Cod; they, in their turn, formed the "outwash plains" that now constitute the bulk of Long Island, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. It is one of nature's curiosity's that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts includes in its territory some of the oldest rocks on the planet (700 million years old in the Berkshires) and some of its youngest major formations (the Cape Cod forearm is about 10,000 years old, and changing still). Look at a map and you will see a more-or-less straight line of barrier beaches from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Chatham in Massachusetts. Stressed by development, encircled by highways, loved to near-death, this young, long necklace of duned beaches remains today one of the great gifts of our natural history.

Anyway, so I'm leaving the Manhattan office early this morning and heading out to somebody's house (I can't tell you because I don't know) near one of the beach towns of Eastern Long Island (ditto). See you on Monday.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Notice our new Contents page? We've put it on a diet and changed its wardrobe. Net result is fewer words, less scrolling, faster download time. As you read this, we'll also have changed some of the Index pages for each section (Newsroom; On The Web; In The Trenches; Hypermaterialism; Campus). Same overall purpose of cleaner looks and faster downloads, so images are getting a little smaller and we've bid adieu to the psychedelic frame on the left-hand margins. That's it for our Summer of Love look.

Next we take on the Cover page (the first thing you see when you log on, the page with the postcard on it). That too needs quicker downloading, but we also want to use the Cover page to offer hints of the tastes available within. Liberty Tree now has almost 100 contributors tackling a buffet table of subjects, and we want Web surfers to get a glimpse of the spread. How to do that without losing punch or costing time is a challenge we hope to have licked before the end of next week.

Finally, a word or two on the man who does the art around here. About 90% of Liberty Tree's graphics are produced by John Leamy. John lives on the West Side of Manhattan, to and from which he travels on bicycle. He is a true ecologist. John is not the variety of bicycling ecologist one commonly encounters in, say, Davis, California. John is a big muscley Irish guy who violates many vehicular laws on his way to the kind of bar where fights break out over issues of maternal lineage. We can't pay him enough, so he moonlights as an illustrator for Marvel Comics and as a drummer for a neo-pop band called Satellite. He also plays guitar and does background vocals. He was the drummer for the late lamented Surgery when that group was in its glory. References available upon request.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization
8/04: More Crime, Please
8/01: Wise Use, Smart Use
7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf
7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening

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