The Human Age (40 page)
Our portrait as individuals will exist, for a while, in books, photographs online, and videos, to be sure. But to know us as a species, far-future humans will need to look to the fossil record of the planet itself. That will tell a tale frozen in ribbons of time. What will it say about us?
We’re at a great turning, our own momentous fork in the road, behind us eons of geological history, ahead a mist-laden future, and all around us the wonders and uncertainties of the Human Age.
These days, startling though the thought is, we control our own legacy. We’re not passive, we’re not helpless. We’re earth-movers. We can become Earth-restorers and Earth-guardians. We still have time and talent, and we have a great many choices. As I said at the beginning of this mental caravan, our mistakes are legion, but our imagination is immeasurable.
NATURE
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. The full sum of creation, from the Big Bang to the whole shebang, from the invisibly distant to the invisibly minute, which everyone should pause to celebrate at least once daily, by paying loving attention to such common marvels as spring moving north at thirteen miles a day; afternoon tea and cookies; snow forts; pepper-pot stew; moths with fake eyes on their hind wings; emotions both savage and blessed; pogostick-hopping sparrows; blushing octopuses; scientists bloodhounding the truth; memory’s wobbling aspic; the harvest moon rising like slow thunder; tiny tassels of worry on a summer day; the night sky’s distant leak of suns; an aging father’s voice so husky it could pull a sled; the courtship pantomimes of cardinals whistling in the spring with
what cheer, what cheer, what cheer!
Nature is life homesteading every pore and crevice of Earth, with endless variations on basic biological themes. Ex.: tree frogs with sticky feet, marsupial frogs, poisonous frogs, toe-tapping frogs, frogs that go peep, etc.
Archaic
: In previous eras, when humans harbored an us-against-them mentality, nature meant the enemy, and the kingdom of animals
didn’t include humans (who attributed to other animals all the things about themselves they couldn’t stand).
Anthropocene:
Nature surrounds, permeates, effervesces in, and includes us. At the end of our days it deranges and disassembles us like old toys banished to the basement. There, once living beings, we return to our nonliving elements, but we still and forever remain a part of nature.
Many thanks to the kind souls featured in this book, who welcomed me so graciously into their work lives: Hod Lipson, Ann and Bryan Clarke, Lawrence Bonassar, Bren Smith, Terry Jordan, Matt Berridge, and others. Continued thanks to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, for all their encouragement and guidance. I’m grateful to the editors of
Orion
and the
New York Times Sunday Review
, who invited variations on a few of the themes. Heartfelt thanks for their support and friendship to my treasured book group (Peggy, Anna, Jeanne, Charlotte, and Joyce); and to Dava, Whitney, Philip, Oliver, Steve, Chris, Lamar, Rebecca and David, Dan and Caroline; Kate, for first reading the manuscript; and my assistant, Liz, who read the manuscript in its many permutations, expansions, and contractions, until eye-glaze finally set in; and to Paul, the only fiction-writing and oldest living wombat.
Apps for Apes
7
Humans have cleared so much forest over the past 75 years that the orangutan population has plummeted by 80 percent. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists Borneo orangutans as endangered, and Sumatran orangs as critically endangered, with only about ten years left for the entire species. One hundred million acres of Indonesian rainforest vanished during Suharto’s reign (1921–2008), and regional timber barons have been plundering the forests even faster since then for mahogany, ebony, teak, and other exotic woods. Then there’s palm oil, which is used in rayon viscose and many other products that include the words “palm kernel oil,” “palmate,” or “palmitate” in their ingredients. Once you start looking, it’s startling how many foods, shampoos, toothpaste, soaps, makeup, and other products use palm oil. Orangutan Outreach encourages people to boycott all palm oil–laced products, and dozens of multinational companies (McDonald’s, Pepsi, et al.) have agreed, for the sake of the rainforests.
Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind
11
The term “Anthropocene” was coined by the aquatic ecologist Eugene Stoermer (Emeritus, University of Michigan), who used it at a conference, and Paul Crutzen, who currently works at the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego; and Seoul National University in South Korea.
12
According to the BBC News website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515.
12
“Nature,” as E. O. Wilson defines it in
The Creation
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), includes “all on planet Earth that has no need of us and can stand alone” (15).
Monkeying with the Weather
42
RinkWatch.org: The website launched on January 8, 2012, and over six hundred skaters at rinks across the continent began reporting.
43
Extreme weather and climate change: The evidence, already overwhelming, continues to mount. When climate scientists in Copenhagen examined the tide and hurricane history since 1923, they found an ominous link between the fever of the oceans and the number and ferocity of hurricanes. Warmer seas provoke higher tides and whip up more violent cyclones. For ninety years, triggered by the warming climate, more hurricanes have lashed our coastlines and spun fiercer winds. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies revealed that from 1951 to 1980 only 1 percent of the planet was stricken with weather extremes (outlandish heat, rain, or drought), but between 1980 and 2012 the figure ballooned to 10 percent of the planet. At that rate, he explained, in the next decade, extreme weather will plague about 17 percent of the world. Because it’s important that we actually see climate change unfolding around us, and feel how it touches us personally, the lively online conservation site 350.org hosted “a day of global action” on which people around the world highlighted their local evidence of climate change. At daybreak in the Marshall Islands, there was a demonstration on a diminishing coral reef. In Dakar, Senegal, people marked out the margins of storm surges. In Australia, people hosted a “dry creek regatta” showcasing a ruinous drought. In Chamonix, France, climbers marked where the Alpine glaciers had melted. “Connect the dots” was the theme. See 350.org, if you want to participate in inspired feats of environmental activism.
Brainstorming from Equator to Ice
55
In
Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering
, Clive Hamilton makes the point that in the United States, climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, but conservative activists have lumped global warming with gun control and abortion rights as part of a scurrilous liberal agenda, not something apolitical and innately global but a position the liberals have cooked up. Knowing whether someone believes in global warming or not, you can safely guess his or her politics. As one Republican meteorologist noted, it’s become “a bizarre litmus test for conservatism.” And so they deny
the science supporting it on political grounds, which makes no sense at all.
A cringe-inducing example of that was when President George W. Bush, at the G8 Summit in 2008, having rejected climate change targets, turned back to his colleagues as he was leaving the closing session, raised a defiant fist, and said light-heartedly, “Good-bye from the world’s biggest polluter.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/bush-to-g8-goodbye-from-the-worlds-biggest-polluter-863911.html.
A Green Man in a Green Shade
82
Patrick Blanc,
The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 76.
Is Nature “Natural” Anymore?
114
Bill McKibben, “Nature’s independence”: Bill McKibben,
The End of Nature
(New York: Random House, 2006), 58.
The Slow-Motion Invaders
130
A python can open its jaws wide as a commodious drawer. But how does it digest something that large? By becoming larger itself. Every time a python eats, its heart, liver, and intestines nearly double in size. Scientists are studying the fatty acids of pythons (which seem to be involved) for potential heart drugs for humans.
Some catastrophes can offer bright sides, even the infestation of pythons in the Everglades. I loved biking on paved roadways through Shark Valley before 2000, when the ’Glades still twitched and thronged with wildlife. But a superfluity of raccoons kept raiding the nests of turtles, birds, and gators, eating their eggs and threatening their future. Burmese pythons happen to love the tang of raccoons, and now, as the raccoon population drops, more turtle, bird, and gator eggs can hatch. (However, that doesn’t offset the python’s impact on a once-lavish ecosystem.)
Many plants may be going extinct, but we’re also gathering together domestic, exotic, and native species in novel ecosystems. See R. J. Hobbs et al., “Novel Ecosystems: Implications for Conservation and Restoration,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
24 (2009): 599–605.
136
Plankton got their name from the Greek word for “wandering,” because they drift helplessly on the current.
136
food chain: Plankton (plants), at the bottom, are eaten by zooplankton (animals); krill, fish, and other sea creatures eat the zooplankton.
141
“This work . . . this wholesale manufacture of wild birds”: Jon Mooallem,
Wild Ones
(New York: Penguin, 2013), 206.
“They Had No Choice”
149
The navy may be phasing out dolphin combatants, but according to a National Resources Defense Council study, the United States has been using unsafe sonar in training exercises off the coast of California that has harmed 2.8 million marine mammals over the past five years. See Brenda Peterson, “Stop U.S. Navy War on Whales,”
Huffington Post
, March 14, 2014.
For Love of a Snail
158
W. D. Hartman, “Description of a Partula Supposed to Be New, from the Island Moorea,”
Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia
32 (1880): 229.
H. E. Crampton,
Studies on the Variation, Distribution, and Evolution of the Genus
Partula
: The Species Inhabiting Moorea
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1932).
Bryan Clarke, James Murray, and Michael S. Johnson, “The Extinction of Endemic Species by a Program of Biological Control,”
Pacific Science
38, no. 2 (1984).
An (Un)Natural Future of the Senses
175
Jun-Jie Gu et al., “Wing stridulation in a Jurassic katydid (Insecta, Orthoptera) produced low-pitched musical calls to attract females,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
109 (2012): 3868–73; published ahead of print February 6, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1118372109.
Weighing in the Nanoscale
184
“Is there a sleigh for my illness?”: A Cornell neighbor of mine has just invented a lethal “lint brush” for the blood, a very tiny implantable device that snags and kills cancer cells in the bloodstream, before they can transverse the body. We’re constantly minting new metaphors for the brain to use as a mental shortcut. One of today’s metaphors sliding into common usage in a similar way is “low-hanging fruit.” Words are chosen for inclusion in the
Oxford Junior Dictionary
on the basis of how frequently children use them during the day. A great many nature words, such as “kingfisher,” “minnow,” “stork,” and “leopard,” have been removed. Some of the new words added were “analog,” “cut and paste,” “voicemail,” and “blog.”
186
GraphExeter: Invented by a team at the University of Exeter, GraphExeter is the lightest, most transparent, and most flexible material ever designed to conduct electricity.