The Once and Future World

It’s possible, of course, to stumble through the wilderness while locked inside yourself, mentally racing over day-to-day worries, but that is not a good way to remain alive. It’s not that self-awareness is absent in animals—it has been tentatively revealed in experiments involving such species as apes, dolphins, magpies, even octopuses—but that it is a less useful tool than an outward mind: to endure among other species, you must experience the world as a place you share with them.

As a boy, I sometimes sat down from my wandering only to wake up an hour later, surprised to find I had fallen asleep in a warm patch of grass. That wouldn’t happen in bear country. When I walk in a place like Yellowstone, it’s always with a slight but solemn recognition of the slender possibility that I will die, that some wild animal will kill me. My senses come alive: I taste the air, listen for sounds beneath the wind. Suddenly, nature is not the backdrop to life, it is life itself, and I am no longer myself, but myself in nature. I note and classify even small changes: a shrew darting across the path, an updraft twisting a fern frond, a hummingbird gathering spiderweb for its nest. Light and form take on greater clarity, and given enough time to sink into these sensations, visual tricks will arise that are somewhere between vigilance and hallucination, such as seeing clearly every trembling leaf on a tree while in the same moment watching a bumblebee pass by in slow motion.

To live in a wilder world, we’ll have to find a way to weave nature into our identities, until guarding against harms to the natural world is as innate as watching out for ourselves, our families or our communities. Only this kind of person—we might call him or her the ecological human—can inhabit nature deeply enough to change our troubled relationship to non-human life, to observe carefully enough the changes we will continue to make, and to truly love the return of the wild as a formidable presence in our lives. For some, such a transformation is probably impossible; they have been away from nature too long and in too many ways to make their way back.

Rather than proclaim humans the pinnacle of nature’s progress, however, Hawaiian cosmogony holds that we are new arrivals among respected elders. For example, the taro plant, known as kalo on the islands, is specifically identified as the Hawaiians’ immediate older brother; humans are called upon to care for the taro, which has its own obligation to keep its younger sibling alive.

Twenty years ago, Ray Rogers, a Canadian environmental philosopher and one-time commercial fisherman, turned his thoughts to extinction and extirpation. In many cases, he realized, the loss of a plant or animal also marks the end of a human relationship to that species. As bears faded across Europe, for example, so did the festival of Chandelours—the word translates as “bearsong”—that celebrated the end of the animals’ winter hibernation in early February. Similarly, as wildlife populations vanished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so did the “market hunting” profession, along with such wild foods as brant goose, diamondback terrapin, bison tongue and Olympia oysters, each of which was once common on dinner tables and restaurant menus in North America. Rogers described each broken link between people and nature as a “double disappearance,” a form of environmental amnesia that went beyond mere memory to hollow out our sense of community with the rest of the living planet.* We were losing species from our social networks.

Another maxim: that which is old has proven itself, and that which is very old may contain wisdom.

The question of living with a wilder nature may have less to do with risks and challenges than with the degree to which people identify with the idea of wildness. Rewilding is a matter of nature, but also of culture. In Banff, people want bison; the presence of the animals fits with the locals’ understanding of themselves and the reasons they live where they do.

when we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return.

We don’t say that the rarity of gifted musicians represents the slow fade of rhythm and melody from human culture—the world is still home to a lot of church choirs and kitchen-party guitarists. But music is more accessible than ever, while our relationship to nature is increasingly distant and disconnected. Picture a world in which the history of music is largely forgotten, songs are heard less and less often and musical instruments are poorly understood by the vast majority of people.

Some 60 percent of the genes associated with the sense of smell are now inactive in most people, a loss that has likely taken place only since the dawn of agriculture some ten thousand years ago.

We have been looking at the natural world as something separate from humankind, using the common definition of nature as everything that is not us and is not made by us. It’s one useful way to see the world, but to gain a wider view, it is ultimately essential to bring our own species into the picture—just another living creature, after all, as miraculous as the rest. The question—which nature?—applies to human nature as well.

The common North American bird called the chickadee, for example, appears to grow a larger brain in autumn, when it needs to remember where it is caching seeds for the winter, then shrinks it again in the spring in order to conserve energy for mating.

We have changed the earth to such an extent that even if it was possible to suddenly lay down our tools, we would still end up with a world of our own creation. The choices going forward are our own, however squeamish we may be about human hubris, however unwilling we may be to shoulder responsibility for the rest of creation. We are, as one wildlife biologist put it, “condemned to art.”

“Sight is a faculty,” Marsh wrote. “Seeing is an art.”

Leopold writes, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained only by physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so many of us are drawn to nature as a counterpoint to the world of regulations and traditions, grids and networks, that we live in day to day.

The solution to these riddles appears to lie in the deep past. Both plants evolved at a time when huge, plant-eating animals still roamed the world. Hawthorn is not adapted to defend against deer, but against megafauna. Animals like ground sloths, which resembled giant bears but were committed vegetarians, could not afford to daintily browse on individual leaves. Instead, they had foreclaws as long as a person’s forearm, designed to hook thick clusters of vegetation toward their mouths; hawthorn’s spines served to discourage such damaging browsers. Similarly, holly is designed to ward off animals tall enough to feed through the windows of a second-storey apartment, despite the fact that the plant hasn’t encountered such threats for thousands of years. Holly and hawthorn are memory incarnate. They are ecological ghosts, manifestations of a world that no longer exists.

Place names are a measure of the relationship between people and their surroundings.

To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see its effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself—including human nature.

The natural world of the past is not simply gone and forgotten; in many ways it is still with us. The presence of absence is an idea that dates back at least to Plato, and is instantly understandable to anyone who has traced a family tree and seen the patterns of his or her own life reflected in the personalities, historical wounds and turning points of distant ancestors.

“Either massive numbers of country people are experiencing social psychosis, or there is something out there that is worth investigating,” says Alayne Street-Perrott, a geographer with Swansea University in Wales. It may be, though, that it is the landscape of the imagination that should be investigated. Whether or not black panthers are lurking in the British countryside, it is clear that a lot of people want very badly to believe that they are.

Awareness can be its own reward. One particularly endless February, when the grey and damp of the season had crept into life itself and good news seemed to have gone out of fashion, I noticed that the heads and necks of glaucous-winged gulls were changing, almost overnight, from the smudged brown of winter to the waiter’s-apron white of breeding season. The traditional first sign of spring—the arrival of the first robin—was weeks away at most northern latitudes, but here was a more subtle, much earlier reminder that, yes, one day the sun would again beat down upon our backs. There is much to be gained and nothing to lose in these small acts of reconnection.

There is an ever more urgent need, as the environmental historian Donald Worster puts it, to hold fresh “the memory of a world by which civilization could be measured.” Research today considers new questions: How much balance is normal in nature, and how much change? At what point does change become damage? In what ways is natural change different from the changes wrought by human influence?

In 1916 Clements published Plant Succession, one of history’s most influential books of ecological ideas.

Our baselines have shifted. But it’s one thing to recognize that amnesia, and another to say what the original baseline actually is. Where in the billions of years of life on earth could we possibly draw that line?

The pioneering book on the sixth extinction is The Sinking Ark, published by the biologist Norman Myers in 1979.

The best available evidence suggests that we exist in the accelerating freefall of what has been branded “the sixth extinction”—a fading-to-black of species worldwide at a rate that recalls five earlier spasms of mass loss imprinted in the fossil record. These range over time from the Ordovician extinction, 440 million years ago, in which 85 percent of known animal species died off, most likely through the fluctuations of an extreme ice age, to the most recent Cretaceous extinction, which sidelined 75 percent of species, among them the dinosaurs, probably in the aftermath of an asteroid’s collision with the earth or a period of spectacular volcanic eruptions. Today, worst-case scenarios count as many as 36 percent of the planet’s life forms as vulnerable to near-term extinction. It is not an empty threat: among species believed to have gone extinct since the year 2000 are the Chinese paddlefish, a European mountain goat called the Pyrenean ibex, and a tiny vesper bat with the lovely name of Christmas Island pipistrelle.

“The ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon, largely unexplained and often inexplicable,” writes the sociologist Stanley Cohen, author of States of Denial. Yet we find denial useful. It fulfills, to quote the definition preferred by Cohen, “our need to be innocent of a troubling recognition.”

Denial is the last line of defence against memory. It helps us to forget what we’d rather not remember, and then to forget that we’ve forgotten it, and then to resist the temptation to remember.

By the end of the American Revolution, not quite a century later, the natural economy of the Muscogee was in collapse and they were no longer able to find enough “bucks”—the origin of the slang term for money—to pay off their debts to colonial traders offering easy credit, especially for tafia rum.

Yet the belief that your own eyes will not fool you is persistent enough that psychologists have given that condition a name too: “change blindness blindness.” If you don’t believe that you are capable of missing significant changes to a scene, then you won’t heighten your awareness in order not to miss them—which means that you probably will. Change blindness blindness is the failure to see that we so often fail to see.

We generally don’t notice small or gradual changes. Our minds would otherwise be crowded with turning leaves and the paths of clouds across the sky—a beguiling madness, but a madness all the same.

scientist Daniel Pauly published a commentary about what he called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Pauly had been inspired, in part, by the 1984 book Sea of Slaughter, in which author Farley Mowat reviews five centuries of explorers’ journals and pioneer accounts to expose the terrible toll of human hunting and fishing in the North Atlantic. The book had recently been revisited by three biologists who concluded, based on Mowat’s research, that biomass—the total weight of living things—off North America’s east coast may have declined by 97 percent since written records began. The failure of coastal residents and scientists to recognize such a shocking diminution seemed to Pauly explainable only by a long-term pattern of amnesia. Each generation of people saw the coast that they grew up on as the normal state of nature, and measured the declines of sea life against that baseline. With every new generation, the baseline shifted—“a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance,” Pauly said. We were forgetting what the world used to look like.

there is no question that we are flesh-and-blood animals, carbon-based life forms spun from the same celestial dust as the rest of creation. At the same time, we have always sought to define ourselves as separate from all other species, whether through our capacity for self-awareness and rational thought or the presumed existence of the human soul. Such efforts often carry more than a whiff of desperation: one philosopher saw a sign of human exceptionalism even in the fact that our noses are a “marked projection” from our faces—apparently unaware of, say, the proboscis monkey, which has a hugely bulbous nose that dangles down to below its mouth.

When hunting, a fox can leap eight metres and land with enough precision to pin a mouse beneath its forepaws, meaning that at takeoff the fox has accounted for its own speed and trajectory, the speed and trajectory of the mouse, along with other factors such as wind and ground cover, all without ever actually seeing the prey. Such a pounce is so carefully controlled that a fox will, at times, beat its tail to one side or the other in mid-air to adjust its flight path. There were always fox dens on my home prairie.