The Human Age (16 page)
I SOMETIMES WONDER
what Budi would make of our metropolitan jungles. Just like city monkeys the world over, leaping across rooftops, shimmying down drainpipes, nesting at night in the canopy of iron fire escapes, Budi would adapt to the hard surfaces of city life. On school playgrounds, children might see him using the monkey bars and jungle gym with a simian ease they only dream of. He’d find fruit to steal on many corners, densely treed parks where he’d mingle with the other species of great apes, many his own size and mental age, though physically much weaker and easily hurt. Some of the same urban animals that scare us would scare him: bears, coyotes,
mountain lions, and such. Would he regard the city as another natural landscape, with blockish mountains, vast herds of humans, and their many watering holes and bazaars? Most likely he would. He’d not only adapt, he’d change his behaviors to suit the new realm, just as so many other urban animals (including us) have been doing with surprising success. It seems obvious that a city, or a cage in a zoo, is not what we mean by a “natural” environment, but in the Anthropocene, it can be hard to say what is.
IF WE DON’T
want even more animals living with concrete sidewalks and feeding off human garbage, we must intervene. At this point, preserving the wild is not just a matter of hands-off, as traditional conservation decrees, but also the hands-on of creating other kinds of habitats, such as wildlife corridors. In my mind’s eye, I see flashes of the tiny green rainforest on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, an Amazon-like realm where the highest concentration of endangered birds in the Americas and the remaining golden lion tamarins cavort in small pristine Edens atop mountains riven by highways and towns. A dozen years ago, when I traveled there as part of the National Zoo’s Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, another team was busy building a wildlife corridor, Fazenda Dourada, to link up the mountaintops and extend the birds’ and tamarins’ range. Not far away, snaking from Argentina all the way up into Texas, the Jaguar Corridor has gifted the scarce, almost mythic spotted cats with space to roam. It only seems fitting that, having rent the fabric of the wild, we at least stitch some green sleeves back together so that animals can rejoin their kin and migrate along ancestral routes. Around the globe countries have been avidly building these links, prompted by a fruitful mix of compassion and self-interest. The United States has some lengthy wildlife corridors, such as the Appalachian Trail, a thousand-foot-wide greenway running two thousand miles along ridgelines from Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. In India, the Siju-Rewak Corridor protects 20 percent of the
country’s elephants from collisions with human civilization and its toys. Kenya has created Africa’s first elephant
underpass
, a tall tunnel beneath a traffic-snarled major road, which gives two elephant populations long divided by human dwellings a chance to migrate, mingle, find mates, and avoid terrified humans or terrifying traffic.
In Europe, the Green Belt Corridor will soon allow wildlife to ramble all the way from the tip of Norway through Germany, Austria, Romania, and Greece, deep into Spain, following ancient trails while searching for food, mild weather, and safe birthing grounds. Linking twenty-four countries and winding past forty national parks, it spans nearly 8,000 miles, some of it following the old historical line of the Iron Curtain, the 870-mile-long chain of fences and guard towers that once clawed the length of Germany, separating the East from the West. After reunification, what was once “no man’s land” lingered as a lifeless scar, until conservationists began reshaping it into a winding nature corridor. Transformed again by human hands, the blue-ribbon path now proclaims tolerance, not repression. The refuge naturally includes many different habitats, from sand dunes and salt marshes to forests and meadows. Ditches that kept vehicles from crossing are being crisscrossed by endangered European otters. Eurasian cranes, black storks, moor frogs, white-tailed eagles, and other stateless species are mingling safely.
In France, China, Canada, and other countries, more corridors are offering tunnels, underpasses, viaducts, and bridges to help wildlife cross their native range, while protecting them from vehicles and us from them. In the Netherlands, six hundred such over- and underpasses allow roe deer, wild boar, European badgers, and their kind to navigate around everything from railway lines to sports complexes. All this adds to a renewed sense of kinship: animals trotting, shuffling, climbing, and winging safely among us, visibly a part of life’s seamless web. Like any other close relationship, living with wildlife requires compassion, compromise, and seeking solutions that will benefit all. If peaceful coexistence were easy, there would be no
divorce or political strife, only households and empires of domestic tranquillity.
Like many of my neighbors, I fence in the deer’s favorites: roses, rhododendrons, day lilies, hostas. In the front yard, I plant beauties the deer reject—iris, peony, cosmos, allium, false indigo, foxglove, monkshood, bee balm, bleeding hearts, sage, daffodil, veronica, poppy, dianthus, and many more—though they still find a lot to munch on. Instead of fencing in the whole property, I’ve left a corridor for the deer, foxes, coyotes, and other critters alongside a creek that ultimately winds north to Sapsucker Woods.
I enjoy sharing the neighborhood with so much wildlife, a kinship that greatly enriches my life. I’d rather the groundhogs didn’t burrow under my study, and the raccoons didn’t play chopsticks on the bathroom skylight and stare down with bandit eyes—but I haven’t evicted them. I relish the swoop of brown bats at sunset, elegant and enchanting little creatures that eat hundreds of insects every night. Sex-crazed frogs and toads party in the backyard, making a ruckus that can drown out TV or movie watching, but I find their ballyhoo a hilarious part of summer’s jug band music. Plying the water below them and adding to the fiendish din are water boatmen, dark copper insects with olive stomachs who swim on their backs, paddling with two oarlike legs, while carrying a silvery bubble of oxygen to breathe as if they were early argonauts. Though small (¼"–½"), they’re adjudged the loudest animals on Earth relative to body size. During sultry summer nights, their singing penises (scrubbed fast over the stomach, washboard-style) can reach 99.2 decibels. That’s louder than standing near a freight train, louder than sitting in the first row of a concert hall during a thunderous symphony, even if the water muffles some of their clamor. I’m impressed by the platoon of male spotted newts doing he-man push-ups on the driveway and atop the fence, hoping to make females swoon. I’m delighted when a flicker beats heavy metal tunes on the stop sign—or even if he repeatedly rings my doorbell, as happened one summer. I enjoy spotting red-crested pileated woodpeckers, big as Cheshire cats,
whacking the stuffing out of trees. Delving squirrels mean I have to plant bulbs under chicken wire, but I’m amused by their antics. I’m a bit sad I don’t have inquisitive black bears to contend with. Deer are the largest animals to pay house calls, and like the dogfighting hummingbirds, tree-climbing chipmunks, and rabbits engaging in an odd tournament of hopping jousts, they arrive unbidden but are welcome emissaries from the natural world.
Each year, I line up behind a dozen cars on a busy highway as a caravan of Canada goose chicks waddles across in a single line between guardian geese, apparently unfazed by motorized honking and the occasional impatient driver. Most people, like me, sit quietly and smile. Like the turtles at JFK, they remind us that, even with egos of steel and concrete plans, we’re easily humbled by nature in the shape of snowflakes, goslings, or turtles—all able to stop traffic. They also remind us how conflicted we really are about nature.
IS NATURE “NATURAL”
anymore? Of course. But it’s no longer indisputably other. The earth scientist Erle Ellis has invented the term “anthrome” to refer to the “hybrid human-natural systems that now dominate Earth’s surface.” From our small vest-pocket gardens to our giant wilderness areas and parks, nature now reflects our preferences, and one of our most cherished ideas about nature is that nature should be human-free. So we have evicted the indigenous peoples from lands we wished to designate national parks, from the United States’ Yellowstone and Grand Canyon to Cameroon’s Korup National Park and Tanzania’s Serengeti, even though tribes may have lived there for ages, and coexisted to an inspiring degree with the environment.
For Europeans, the word “wilderness” used to mean a wild, barren, chaotic place full of plight and mischief, where it was simple to lose one’s bearings or mind. It’s easy to forget how ugly nature often seemed to people before Romanticism reexplored the ruggedness of natural beauty. Early-nineteenth-century writers found
wildernesses grotesque—not just dangerous and obstructive and rife with bloodthirsty animals but actually a vision of evil. Now the idea of wilderness is just the opposite: a sanctuary, an emblem of serenity, a view of innocence.
Nature is always mutating, on a large and small scale—the lavish suns of summer, the dragonfly’s seasonal demise. Those regular turnovers can become humble as old clothes, nothing to raise a ripple of awareness, let alone concern, and too rarely a sensory cascade. The romance with nature—childhood—gives way to the companionship stage, a time of purposeful beguiling, when it takes more to capture your attention. But a nonmigration of geese, a neverthriving of crops, a carillon of snowdrops blooming a month too early, ripe berries way out of season, a bay full of lobsters ankling off to the north, the weird absence of winter—these give one pause. Our newest idea of nature is one of vulnerability, a vast, sprawling, interlaced organism growing weaker.
At precisely the moment we’re achieving unprecedented feats and ruling the planet on a grand scale, we’re discovering that our future as a species may suffer as a result. Nature isn’t separate from us, and part of our salvation as a species depends on respecting, if not rejoicing in, that simple companionable truth.
N
amed P-52, as if she were a bomber or a precious fragment of papyrus, the Burmese python recently found in the Everglades weighed 165 pounds and stretched 17 feet in length, setting a local record (not a world record—that’s held by a 403-pound, 27-foot-long python residing in Illinois). A tan beauty, with black splotches that resemble jigsaw puzzle pieces, dry satiny skin, and a body like a firm eraser, P-52 had a pyramidal head, a brain surging with raw instinct, tiny black Sen-Sen eyes, and a mind like a dial tone. In her heyday, she could squeeze the life out of an alligator or a panther. And she was pregnant.
Standing shoulder to shoulder at the dissecting table, amazed University of Florida scientists uncovered eighty-seven eggs in her womb. Not all the hatchlings would have survived. But with such fecundity it’s easy to understand the flourishing of pythons throughout the southern region of the Everglades—slipping through the sawgrass, sibilant as sassafras, slanting up to their prey, and then—slam!—seizing hold with back-curving teeth, crushing and slowly swallowing every morsel.
No one knows precisely how many pythons inhabit South Florida,
but reliable estimates run to thirty thousand or more. Over the last ten years, snake wranglers removed 1,825 pythons from as far north as Lake Okeechobee and as far south as the Florida Keys. In the picturesque, if amusingly named, Shark Valley (no sharks, a valley only a foot deep) in the heart of the Everglades, visitors may glimpse a python plying the river of grass, or even wrinkling across the road. Pythons will also be busy hunting, sun-swilling on the canal levees, mating (in spring), coiling around their eggs and trembling their muscles to incubate them, occasionally wrestling with alligators, and absorbing warmth from still-toasty asphalt roads at night.
Alas, they’ve vanquished nearly all the foxes, raccoons, rabbits, opossums, bobcats, and white-tailed deer in the park; also the three-foot-tall statuesque white wood storks. A survey conducted between 2003 and 2011, and published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
reported that raccoons had declined 99.3 percent, opossums 98.9 percent, and bobcats 87.5 percent. Marsh rabbits, cottontails, and foxes completely disappeared. Last year, one python was found digesting a whole 76-pound deer.
Where did all the pythons—native to India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia—come from? Some were wayward pets or hitchhikers in delivery trucks. Others escaped from ponds overflowing in heavy rains, from pet stores during hurricanes, or from international food markets. They hid in foreign packing materials for plants, fruits, and vegetables, or clung to boat hulls or propeller blades. Some may have freeloaded in the ballast of large ships, which take on water and who-knows-what aquatic species in a foreign port, and release alien life forms when they reach their destination. Others sneak a ride on board globe-trotting pleasure or military planes.
Many invasive life forms arrive legally, as desirable crops or companion animals that help to define us or just strike our fancy. Burmese pythons have become popular pets in the United States, credited with a pleasant personality, as snakes go. They’re sometimes bred as stunning yellow-and-white mosaics—like the one Britney Spears slipped around her shoulders and slither-danced with at
the MTV Video Music Awards in 2001. But many python owners, chastened by the twenty-year commitment, or alarmed by how quickly the reins of power can shift as the snake grows, turn them loose in the Everglades, assuming it will offer an Edenic home. It does. Undaunted by anything smaller than a mature alligator, they eat everything with a pulse, ravaging the whole ecosystem. Native species haven’t yet evolved to resist or compete with them, the strongest toughs around.
OF COURSE, MOST
of us humans are transplants, too, perpetually bustling between cities and taking familiar plants and animals with us—by accident or by design—without worrying much over the mischief we may be unloosing. We are like witches, leaning over the cauldron of the planet, stirring its creatures round and round, unsure about our new familiars—not wildcats, but pythons?—and waiting to see what on Earth may bubble up next.