The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond

Author:Jared Diamond [Diamond, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Civilization, World, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781101606001
Google: VP1JS2eWGbUC
Amazon: B008EKOO46
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Just a stick in the ground

The most recent of the three episodes related in this chapter unfolded many years after my canoe accident had convinced me of the virtues of constructive paranoia. Out of New Guinea’s lowlands rise many separate isolated mountain ranges, which are interesting to biologists because they resemble “islands” of montane habitats surrounded by a “sea” of lowlands, as far as the distributions of species confined to montane habitats are concerned. The higher elevations of most of the isolated mountain ranges are uninhabited by people. There are two possible means to reach those high elevations in order to survey their birds and other animals and plants. One is to be flown directly by helicopter to high elevations, but it is difficult to obtain a helicopter for charter in New Guinea, and even harder to locate a clear area for landing a helicopter on a forest-covered New Guinea mountain. The other method is to find a village close enough to the mountain that one can bring one’s gear to the village by plane, helicopter, or boat, and then walk from the village to climb the mountain. The difficulties of New Guinea terrain are such that it is impractical to carry one’s gear to a mountain camp more distant than about five miles from a village. A further practical problem is that, for many of the isolated peaks, available maps don’t show the location and elevation of the highest peak or the nearest village; one instead has to obtain that geographic information by a survey flight.

One particular mountain range interested me because, although it was reported to be not especially high, it was isolated. Hence at the end of one of my trips to New Guinea, while I was starting to plan the next year’s trip, I chartered a small plane to fly a survey along the entire length of that mountain range, and I identified its highest peak. There was no village within at least 25 miles of the peak in any direction, and no garden clearing or any other signs of human presence nearby. That ruled out reaching the peak from the village and required instead a helicopter-based operation, which in turn required finding a natural clearing at which to land a helicopter. (Some helicopters can hover over the forest canopy while passengers and cargo are being lowered by winch through the canopy to the ground, but that requires special helicopters and training.) While one’s first impression of New Guinea forests is of an unbroken expanse of green trees, one does encounter occasional natural clearings at landslides where an earthquake has shaken down a patch of forest, or at a marsh, a dried-up pond, the bank of a river or pond, or a dry mud volcano. On this survey flight I was delighted to spot a huge landslide clearing, about two and a half miles from the peak and several thousand feet lower in elevation. By New Guinea standards, that’s much too far to establish a camp at the landslide and to be able to walk daily to the peak to observe birds.

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