The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013, Page 3

  We know which of those two worldviews prevailed in the centuries that followed—a history that astounds us with the extinction or near-extinction of even the most superabundant creatures, from the great auk to the buffalo to the Atlantic cod, though these iconic species are best thought of only as reminders of a wholesale assault on animate life that left no species unscarred. In the midst of it all, a countercurrent emerged. A small minority of people still mark the beginnings of that turning with the 1864 book Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, a pioneer of ecological thought. With the exhausting thoroughness of autodidactic science-geekery, he presented an inventory of “the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit.” For the most part, however, Marsh is a footnote, massively overshadowed by his more lyrical, less empirical contemporaries. I don’t even need to use their first names: nature writing in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, has called on us to see the face of God in every trembling leaf ever since. To do otherwise is to fall into the cold rationalism so often said to have betrayed the wild world.

  This modern love of the Earth is ironic—it is a reaction against the destruction of nature but is also a product of that destruction. Witness Great Britain, once home to deep forests, bears, wolves, wild boars, wild oxen. We celebrate England’s Romantic poets for seeing divinity in a landscape that others found dark and threatening. Yet the Romantics were only opening their eyes to a new reality: almost every threat posed by that wild landscape had been vanquished. By the time of the Romantics, Britain was much as it is today—a deforested island, its fauna largely reduced to butterflies, birds, and hedgehogs.

  The pattern repeated itself on the American shore. Thoreau wrote from a forest that had lost its capacity to instill fear in a young man’s heart. (Marsh could have detailed this history for him; Marsh’s childhood home near Woodstock, Vermont, had in his lifetime lost its moose, wolves, and mountain lions, and seen its spruce and hemlock forests replaced with European trees.) Annie Dillard’s pilgrimage to Tinker Creek plays out in a denuded Virginia, and even Edward Abbey, that singular voice of wildest America, went to his deathbed never having seen a free-living grizzly bear. Such versions of nature still inspire wonder—I held a wild hedgehog in my hands last year and was speechless with the thrill of it. In fact, one might argue that the works that have brought us closest to nature have depended on a more welcoming wilderness. But another truth should be foremost in mind: that what we call nature today is a kinder, gentler, more depauperate world than at any time since at least the late Paleozoic, some 300 million years ago. Nature is not a temple but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.

  According to recent statistics, most people on Earth now live in cities, with few if any daily reminders of things ecological. There is considerable evidence that this disconnect costs us at a personal level. Among the most durable findings in the field of environmental psychology, for example, is that we prefer natural settings over the built environment. Among natural landscapes, we show the greatest preference for open spaces dotted with trees, with a little water nearby. (Picture the views from the apartments that border Central Park in Manhattan; as the biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, “To see most clearly the manifestations of human instinct, it is useful to start with the rich.”) These preferences have a consistency across cultures and generations that approaches evolutionary natural law.

  I want to call attention to two aspects of these discoveries. The first is that the salient feature of our most preferred environments—savanna-like spaces—is long sightlines, which would have helped us to survive the eons when our species was still a link in the wild food chain. In other words, we prefer nature when it is unthreatening, and on that count, we have had our wish. The second point is that we nonetheless have a deeply embedded psychological attachment to the living world. Having lost our daily communion with that world, our modern spiritualization of it can be seen as a kind of prosthetic—or, if you prefer, a way of turning up the volume on a signal that is increasingly faint. We have created an imaginary connection with nature because we lack a tangible one, and we carry that connection in spirit because we no longer follow it in body. The sense of the divine that many feel in wild places is less a bond with nature than another symptom of the absence of that bond.

  Ecologically speaking, this sanctified nature is not nearly enough. “We live more and more in an enchanted illusion of what nature is, which I think is counterproductive to conservation,” says the Cornell University biologist Harry Greene. It’s the back half of that statement—counterproductive to conservation—that contains surprises. At the time, Greene was responding to the movement that seeks, in effect, to protect feral mustang horses in the American West from natural life and death, permitting neither human culling nor wild predation nor starvation from drought or harsh winters, and instead using pharmaceutical contraceptives to control the population. This approach falls close to the farthest end of the spectrum of enchantment, where we find “end of suffering” activists who see a high moral calling in technocratic intervention against every cruelty that regulates natural systems: no more frogs swallowed alive by snakes, no more calf elk gored by grizzlies in front of their mothers’ eyes, no more exhausted hummingbirds drowned during their arduous migration across the Gulf of Mexico. “Let’s aim to be compassionate gods,” concludes one essay from the end-of-suffering sect, “and replace the cruelty of Darwinian life with something better.”

  But such extreme examples aren’t necessary. We might instead simply reflect upon the ecological consequences of our having created a wild world that has, for the most part, liberated us from fang and claw and distanced us from unseemly reality. Writing in the 2010 book Trophic Cascades, editors John Terborgh and James Estes, both prominent ecologists, describe the simplification of nature’s architecture by human actions as a crisis “every bit as serious, universal, and urgent as climate change.” When fishermen’s nets fill not with fish but jellyfish; when pestilent tsetse flies spread with the scrublands once held in check by browsing elephants; when overpopulating deer eat the flower gardens of suburban America—all of these bear the markings of the ecological cascade. Of greatest concern is that most of what has changed, and how, and at what cost, has not even been calculated. Here’s one example that hints at the scale of the losses: the best available estimate suggests that whales before whaling ate up nearly 65 percent of the energy—as transformed into living things—produced yearly in the world’s oceans. Paradoxically, however, the same seas that teemed with ravenous whales also brimmed with other creatures great and small, from swordfish to shad to oysters. “We know very little about the direct and indirect effects of reducing whale populations by more than 90 percent, but they must be substantial,” note Terborgh and Estes, with the typical restraint of lifelong scientists. It’s knowledge that could be of some use to us right now. By conservative estimates, a single animal—us—now consumes at least a quarter of the annual productivity of the planet, with the critical difference that our myriad hungers are satisfied only at enormous expense to the abundance and variety of species.

  Are we to blame a global society’s accumulating insults against the biosphere on people who meditate in the desert or find divinity beneath the redwoods? No. But the way you see the world determines much about the world you are willing to live in, and the spiritual lens has failed us as a tool for seeing clearly. Here are Terborgh and Estes again: “There is little public awareness of impending biotic impoverishment because the drivers of collapse are the absence of essentially invisible processes . . . and because the ensuing transformations are slow and often subtle, involving gradual compositional changes that are beyond the powers of observation of most lay observers.” Our collective response to these shifts in our surroundings, as Michael Soulé, a founding figure in conservation biology, puts it, is to “excuse, permit, and adapt.” The romanticization of a denatured living world is one such adaptatio
n. We have turned a fierce and ambiguous nature into a place of comfort, and if we embrace the result as a sanctuary of the soul, to be visited every second or third long weekend, then we may ultimately see little purpose in returning to a deeper and more risky engagement. We’ll end up with the twin faces of Janus both looking the same direction, having found all the wildness we need in the tamed.

  Every year, I try to return to that cabin where the bears roam and the salmon spawn and die, and the baby bats risk their new lives in fragile flight. There is no road; the access is by train, or by boat across a river of terrifying cold and current. I once told people that I went there for the peace and quiet, to escape into the sublime, and that was not entirely a lie. But I have to admit that I often feel a growing dread as the moment of entry into that wilderness approaches. It’s not the solace of mountain and forest that keeps drawing me back. It is something more demanding.

  Every day in that wild place is an opportunity to pass time with eagles, ravens, toads, snakes, moose, grouse, salmon, and the year’s local black bear, which somehow always seems to be everywhere at all times. I often find myself filled with wonder, but the challenge of living nearer to nature will never be having to cope with more beauty, or that our hearts may explode from so much swelling. Instead, the challenge comes from the wilderness’s countless mortal shocks, from maggots teeming in the brainpan of a dead deer, to the steady watchfulness required of life among large predators, to weirdly disturbing realizations such as that adult mayflies have no mouths, no digestive tracts, no anuses. Yet another memory from this past year’s visit leaps to mind: a strange preponderance of bleeding-tooth fungus, Hydnellum peckii, which weeps transparent beads of red liquid across the white pulp of its mushroom cap. If the bleeding-tooth fungus is the answer to any question, that question could only be “Why?”

  If the modern spiritualization of nature is the product of distance and diminishment, observations such as these are the opposite, the outcome of muddy hands and scratched skin, of having time to waste in places where our species is a curiosity and a potential source of protein. Slowly, haltingly, I am coming to see the community of species around my cabin with the same eyes with which I have come to see other communities—to the extent that even that word, “community,” sounds clinical and precious to my ears. Think instead of your friendships, or your neighborhood, those fragile constructions of toleration and embrace, of the heartwarming and the bleak. We understand our friends and neighbors as imperfect, even essentially tragic, and yet, at our best, we know that they are a part of us—that we are enriched when they are enriched, impoverished when they are impoverished. I am still new to the neighborhood of salmon, cedar, and raven, and I won’t claim any insight into their world that is more profound than this: I feel their absence when I leave, and it’s their presence that always draws me back again.

  It hasn’t been my experience that full-force nature directs the mind toward thoughts of positive vibrations or divine master plans. Nature itself is enough, its stories written in blood and shit and electrons and birdsong, and in this we may ultimately find all the sacredness we seem to need.

  One final story: Several years ago, I interviewed a woman named Sally Mueller, who had moved with her family from New Mexico to the remote Tatlayoko Valley of British Columbia. She had, in effect, made the decision that I have never found myself quite ready to make—to seek a life in the wilderness. There, many happy years later, she was charged by a sow grizzly protecting her cubs. The animal stopped only inches away and, roaring, swiped with a paw, slicing through two layers of clothing and the flesh of Mueller’s thumb. Only then did the mother bear’s fury drain away. The grizzly retreated; the scales of life and death tilted back into balance; the crawl of time returned to its regularly scheduled programming.

  “It was really a highly spiritual experience for me,” Mueller said. She shared that revelation cautiously, aware that it would be difficult to understand. But in those terrible instants, she said, she knew that the bear was only doing what it must, and so was she, and so, too, were even the meadow grasses and the trees, the earth and the sky, and all of it was blurred into a pattern too infinite and ancient to explain. At last, Mueller found the words for the feeling: “It was just like coming home.”

  BENJAMIN HALE

  The Last Distinction?

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  HUMAN BEINGS HAVE long sought a definite marker between themselves and “the animals.” In the 1960s, toolmaking was considered such a uniquely human behavior that when Jane Goodall witnessed chimpanzees modifying twigs to root for termites, the naturalist Louis Leakey responded, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” Since then, other animals—crows, most recently—have been seen making and using tools. Ethological observation has similarly eroded other distinctions humans have claimed for themselves. But there remains a tradition—in literature and philosophy as much as in science—of treating language as the Rubicon that only humanity has crossed. In Paradise Lost, when Satan, disguised as the serpent, begins talking to Eve, she says in astonishment, “What may this mean? Language of man pronounced/By tongue of brute, and human sense expressed?” Animals do not talk. The idea is unnatural, satanic.

  Speculation on the origin of human language was long discouraged among linguists; inquiry into the subject was formally banned by the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866, and the taboo thereby established persisted for nearly a century. The moratorium, a famous incident in the history of linguistics, began in the earliest days of Darwin’s influence, after the publication of On the Origin of Species but a few years before the publication of The Descent of Man, in which Darwin first explicitly discussed human evolution—including the evolution of language.

  Of modern history’s important thinkers, Darwin may be the most chronically oversimplified. Distortions of his thinking began not long after his death. He treated humanity as a part of nature rather than over and above it, upsetting Europe’s philosophical tradition of the Great Chain of Being: the hierarchical ordering of all creation, rising in increments toward man’s perfection. This model of life was so firmly accepted that it survived even among those who accepted Darwin’s work, leading to a widespread misunderstanding illustrated by a graphic so elegant (and so reductive) that it’s become a pop-semiotic stand-in for the theory of evolution: the left-to-right single-file march of an ape morphing into a man, with its implication that evolution is a teleological progression and Homo sapiens sapiens the goal. The illustration does less to explain evolution than to reinforce the inaccurate (and specifically Western) idea of a radical break between humans and other animals.

  Descartes, who wrote extensively on the philosophical problem of animal consciousness, argued that all nonhuman animals are instinctual automata, whereas humans alone think—cogitant ergo sunt—and therefore possess souls. The impulse to draw a circle around humanity underlies the question “What makes us human?” The way we phrase the question—which presupposes that the answer must be a definite thing we possess—tends to make language the most satisfactory answer.

  Hence our fascination with feral children—the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Kaspar Hauser, Genie, and so on—cases of human beings isolated and deprived of language during the crucial early-acquisition period. What would it be like to have a consciousness but be unable to think in articulate language? For most people, to imagine the experience of inhabiting such a consciousness is close to impossible. The animal scientist Temple Grandin has written much on this subject, asserting that her autism lends her a unique insight into the way animals—cows, in her line of work—experience the world: wordlessly. “I think in pictures,” she writes in the opening pages of her memoir.

  Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find t
his phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.

  It would be absurd to suggest that because Grandin does not think primarily in language she isn’t conscious, but the importance of language as a distinct marker between the human and “the animal” mind is still lodged in the Western models of consciousness.

  In the thirties, the psychologists Winthrop Kellogg and Luella Kellogg briefly raised a chimpanzee named Gua alongside their own infant son, Donald. They aborted the project after nine months because Donald seemed to be picking up more behaviors from the chimp than vice versa. In a longer and more involved experiment that began in 1947, another psychologist couple, Keith and Cathy Hayes, attempted to raise a newborn female chimp named Viki as a human child. After seven years of home rearing and intensive vocal training (including speech-therapy techniques such as physical manipulation of the mouth), Viki could articulate, in a breathy and almost inaudible voice, four words: “mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up.”

  These early experiments focused on language production over comprehension. But ape anatomy does not readily allow articulations of the kind necessary to speak. The human vocal apparatus consists of the larynx, the throat, the nasal cavity, the tongue, and the lips—all of which are shaped differently in nonhuman apes. Chimps’ vocal tracts are shorter and straighter than ours, with higher larynges. When humans speak, moreover, we accomplish what’s called a velopharyngeal closure by briefly blocking off air to the nasal cavity with the soft palate, allowing us to articulate hard consonants. Apes do not have this capability.