Storming the Gates of Paradise (39 page)

In the deserts east of Los Angeles, ravens are even more devastating. There the highly endangered desert tortoise still roams, and though habitat loss and being run over by cars and off-road vehicles have reduced its numbers, ravens may matter more. The birds have become what wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a “subsidized species,” meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around the edges of the deep desert have encouraged a population explosion among ravens, one of the many ways population centers destroy habitat at a distance. Adult desert tortoises are as tough as anything in a shell, but the thinner-shelled young are, for the first five or six years of life, extremely vulnerable to ravens. Beneath one raven’s nest in the Mojave desert, naturalists found 250 baby tortoise shells.

The success of the raven means the failure of other species, also valuable, so the very sight of these creatures, particularly in new places—like outside my window—is
bad news. Tortoises are sacred to some of the Mojave’s local tribes, while Raven is, in the mythology of the Northwest Coast, a creator deity. That something sacred or symbolic can become a weed and a pest is disturbing. A raven used to be an oracular sight, an omen, impressive, noble, wild; now they are bad news, weeds, menaces. This decline is troubling not just in what the birds do but in what they mean. They have shifted from being part of an ecosystem into being its destroyer, the birds acting as agents of our own disruption. Ravens, like coyotes, may have been creator deities because they are rather humanlike in their ability to adapt, improvise, and change, to trick and to shift (which is why Coyote is also Trickster in the old myths of this continent). Perhaps in seeing ravens go wrong, we might see ourselves—if we looked hard enough.

In recent years, a number of books have reported on ravens and crows, members along with jays and magpies of the family
corvidae
. Biologist Bernd Heinrich’s 1989
Ravens in Winter
took on the communitarian survival strategies of those birds, while Candace Savage’s 1995
Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays
took a wider look at the workings of the complex corvid mind, which learns and adapts: some crows can even figure out how to make and use tools, and others become skillful mimics of other birds and of humans. Savage’s book cites at least one scientific study by Tony Angell and several by John M. Marzluff, the co-authors of a new illustrated book,
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
. It is a generalist’s book written by experts, whose text meanderingly considers the role of crows in the human cultural imagination and provides some information on their behavior. The accompanying drawings by Angell sometimes sink into cuteness, as in one picture of crows picking dead insects off the grill of a car whose license plate reads “CORVID.” Marzluff and Angell know their subject intimately, but not their readers, and they often stoop to overexplaining basic concepts.

At times engrossing—for example, when revealing the ancient tradition of raven keeping in the Tower of London as a recent forgery—their book is more often dilatorily bland, as when they mention for the second time (on p. 134, after illustrating the stuff on p. 10) the Three Crows brand of spices in Maine, to bolster their case for the cultural importance of crows. And even in debunking the
myth that ravens have been kept in the London Tower since the time of Charles II, they conclude, “The power of ravens to make people believe the impossible and survive difficult times is obvious” (p. 112). With such enthusiasm, the authors fall into the trap of all those popular science books in recent years, each of which claims that its subject is a world-changing pivotal event, phenomenon, or invention. Crows and ravens matter; they’re in the Bible and Norse mythology and the Northwest creation stories, as well as on the wire outside my window. But they’re not that central or powerful or cheering; the likelihood that the idea of protective ravens really spurred on the British during the blitz seems a little far-fetched.

Bird Brains
does a better job of describing the remarkable intelligence of these birds, and neither book quite describes their threat. In fact,
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
often becomes a defense of the birds, as when Marzluff and Angell write that “demonstrating an ability to find and prey on nests efficiently does not necessarily mean that crows or ravens limit other bird populations” (p. 232). Sixteen pages later, the authors note that the house crows imported to Zanzibar by a British governor in 1891 have “reached half a million in Dar es Salaam alone. They are spreading across Africa, threatening rare birds and annoying people.” Tokyo, they report, has seen its crow population quadruple since the 1980s, fueled by accessible garbage.

In and of themselves, ravens and weedy plants like the Himalayan tree of heaven that is all over the rubbly and neglected margins of cities from Berlin to Detroit are admirable and even beautiful. But they function as a biological equivalent of Burger King or Microsoft; they threaten to become transnational monopolies that force out the local versions. In fact, you can see the one almost as a byproduct of the other: the industrialized world that creates garbage, cities, and shipping (which often transmits the weedy species from one continent to another) encourages these species to move out of their former niches and proliferate. It’s not coincidental that the crows invading Africa came as part of the imperialist package.

The industrial age’s climate change will root out other species of animals and plants—the yellow-bellied marmot, which lives in the high Rockies, is dying out
because the thaws now often come too early, before the plants the marmots eat have started to grow. Wolves, too, who have been successfully reintroduced after being hunted into near-extinction in the United States, get through the winter by eating elk who have been weakened by the cold and the snow that covers their foodstuffs; with warmer winters, however, the elk thrive and the wolves starve. Red foxes are moving north to compete with arctic foxes. What will be left in most places will be a brutally simplified ecology, with lots of trees of heaven, dandelions, robins, ravens, and raccoons, what the science writer David Quammen calls “a planet of weeds,” though if we ourselves, the chief weed, go extinct or get scaled back, even these weedy species may begin evolving into creatures more delicately adapted to specific niches. But that is the million-year view, not the thousand-year version. In the meantime, what’s sauce for the raven is poison for the snowy plover.

In retrospect, I realize I should have made the connection right away. I was investigating Sequoia National Forest for an environmental magazine. Half the naturally occurring sequoia groves in the world are there, but the forest’s managers seemed to be doing everything they could to service the one logging company that was profiting from the place. Since commercial logging as such had come to an end in 1990, the administrators had come up with various reasons why the forest needed to be logged for its own good, and fire prevention was the latest rationale. The plan that year, 1996, prescribed belts of clear-cutting called Defensible Fuel Profile Zones across the ridgetops of the million-acre place that Bill Clinton would later partially protect during his last days in office. One of the tough women who’d been fighting the Forest Service for fifteen years called the DFPZs a plan to give the forest a “17 million board feet Punk Rock Haircut!!!! Quarter mile wide logged strips snaking MILES all along major ridgetops!” It was a fun assignment in its way, not least because I apparently looked gullible enough that the Forest Service managers I interviewed damned themselves volubly into my tape recorder.

I stayed in an outback motel for a couple of days during my research, and the TV there got three channels: the local news, the Weather Channel, and the Playboy Channel. So I checked out the latter for a while. The perky, corn-fed houris were pretty much unchanged since the days of my older brother’s crumbling pillars of rummage-sale
Playboys
piled up in the garage, though the bodies were a little different. Everyone was toned, and in a Busby Berkeley number, when the camera panned all the women lying with feet to the center like so many
daisy petals, you could see that each one had identical scars under her breasts. But what really surprised me was that they’d all shaved their pubic hair into neat rectangles. Probably it was about the exigencies of high-cut bikinis, but sans bikinis their rectangles recalled both Hitler’s moustache and topiary shrubbery from the age when yew and box were trimmed into Euclidean forms. Landing strips, I was told they were called, and it would be easy to connect them to the helicopter logging and linear clear-cutting in the Sequoia National Forest, and to the geometricizing, rationalizing aesthetics of Versailles in that era when trees came in cubes, cones, and spheres.

Around that time, I wrote an essay called “Uplift and Separate,” which used the aesthetics of the girlie calendar to illuminate the aesthetics of the nature calendar.

The pinup girls and waterfalls in these calendars have some curious things in common, not least among them a highly defined aesthetic that narrows down the categories of Woman and Nature to some very specific subspecies and representational styles. Both are usually portrayed in a kind of photography that calls attention not to its own status as representation, but to what is represented, and like much such “realism” wishes to function as a transparent window onto what is supposed to be represented: the real. Yet what one sees through these windows is a vision of perfection from which death, time, decay, action have been excluded as flaws. Both are souped-up, sleek, flawless, passive; in both the orthodoxy of beauty has produced a curious homogeneity of visual reference to pleasures that are not altogether visual. The chaos of thought and action has been replaced with a stale vision of delight, and the landscapes seem to loll alluringly in much the same way the women do.

I’m now looking at the 2003 Sierra Club wilderness calendar, and nothing there has changed. The aesthetics are pretty much what they were in 1997, or 1987, and if I could remember 1977, I suspect that it would look like this, too. Nature is clean, unpeopled, brightly lit, abundant, and peculiarly tidy. It’s an aesthetic that comes straight out of the work of Eliot Porter, the pioneer of color photography who rocked the world in 1962 with his best-selling Sierra Club Exhibit
Format book
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
. Porter’s book, a breakthrough in color printing technology, practically gave birth to the coffee-table book and to nature photography; it appeared the same year as Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
and seems to have worked in concert with it to create a new environmental consciousness in the United States.

Success for some artists is disastrous: so many imitators crowd upon their heels that it soon becomes impossible to look at that work and see that it was ever fresh, startling, or even individual. Such a fate has befallen Porter’s oeuvre, but he took far more interest in natural processes, in complexity, in landscapes with human traces, and in signs of death and decay than his army of imitators has done. Animal corpses, human traces, leaf litter, and subdued tonal ranges were part of his territory.

The legions who trample in his footsteps dispense with everything that isn’t bright, comfortable, and clean; and they push his interest in what I think of as Busby Berkeley formations to an extreme: in the 2003 calendar, April is a lurid hillside of California poppies in sharp focus from close-up to rolling distance; in August, weirdly abundant wildflowers recede into the Rocky Mountain distance; and by November, the entire frame is full of monarch butterflies, like stained glass on Ecstasy. The world doesn’t tend to look like nature calendars. In fact, the beauty nature photography describes seems to be about technology—the improvements in color photographic processes, darkroom and filter tricks, a flawlessness that seems somehow machined, and probably nowadays refinements wrought by Photoshop. Maybe this is because that moment of epiphany that a single wildflower or a pretty nice sunset even with a freeway overpass in it can arouse can’t be aroused by a photograph of same; the photograph needs to be fifty times as spectacular. And perhaps so do the bodies and acts in what seem to be the most popular kinds of porn, since photographic porn leaves out at least four of the senses and a certain sense of involvement. Which might be to say that photographic porn and nature photography are in some ways formalist, about the limits and essences of the medium.

I’m not quite sure why, but along with e-mail alerts notifying me that two-thirds of all women are dissatisfied with the size of my penis (which raises interesting
questions about the other third), I get sent the occasional sample of Internet porn, and I’ve been interested to see that the landing strips of 1997 have been clear-cut. The loins of women in Internet porn, according to these unsolicited samples, are as hairless as those of Barbie. This is the era of the Brazilian wax, whose name is supposed to reference Rio bathing suits but might well recall some trouble with the Amazonian rainforest canopy as well. Body manipulation, when it becomes a ubiquitous orthodoxy, is the opposite of self-expression, and this particular manipulation seems to reveal a squeamish desire for tidiness on the part of the waxers’ audience that’s interesting to find in pictures once thought of as dirty. Dirt recalls soil, fecundity, generation, life—and, of course, its opposite, death and decay, along with the smudginess of contact. The social developments that have made the acts of mainstream porn ever more dirty while the bodies become ever cleaner and more prepubescent and plasticlike are interesting to contemplate, as is the possibility that the former may compensate for the latter.