The Hunt for the Golden Mole (11 page)

For most people leading orderly lives, contact with wild animals is rare and fleeting. Bird tables and nesting boxes are compensation for some. But we are always being encouraged to go further. Excited young television presenters lure animals ever closer into contact, diluting their wildness in a bath of nursery sentiment.
Aaah!
This is danger of an altogether different kind. Throughout history, from the meagre knowledge of animal life demonstrated by the scribes of the Old Testament (when, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, God seemed to have had no idea that he had once invented dinosaurs), misunderstanding is a common thread in human interactions with other species. Disrupting an animal's behaviour is always risky, and sentimentality is no substitute for respect. Many people (10 per cent of households in Bristol, for example) are so pleased to see foxes in their gardens that they put out food for them. The sensible ones scatter it at a
distance from the house, then watch discreetly from a window. That is as far as kindness should go. Luring foxes to the house, trying to feed them by hand, is literally a confidence trick. To hand-feed a wild animal is to ensure confusion when it confronts a less welcoming neighbour. Many fox ‘attacks' begin this way.

Vulpes vulpes
nevertheless is one of the world's winners, always flexible enough to adapt to change. The sufferings of the snow leopard and black rhinoceros are more typical. Environmental deprivation can be surprisingly easy on the eye. Two years ago I stood on a high bluff overlooking a raw slab of sub-equatorial Africa in the rainy season. The vegetation was of the kind that, in the language of television, could only be called ‘lush'. Birds in a multiplicity of sizes and colours called and responded like a sonata for woodwind – oboe, flute, piccolo – while insects gnawed at my burning neck. Africa never lets you forget how vulnerable you are.

Two-hundred-year-old sterculia trees testified to a primeval landscape in vibrant good health, Gaia absorbed in self-love, while rainclouds layered above the hills promised more of the same. The conical thatched roofs of village houses were a frail, distant archipelago in a trackless ocean of green – men, women and children subsumed by nature like termites. It looked utterly, unimproveably right.

And yet it was wrong – completely, utterly wrong, the eye deceived, as it so often is, by beauty. I should have been looking at dense riverine forest, not at this inviting grassy plain. The huts should have been hidden away in clearings known only to those who were born in them, and the sterculias lost among trees as tall as themselves. They were there only because it was taboo to harm them – the local people, who know them as
Mudjerentjes
, believed the rains would stop if they cut them
down. The glorious panorama that filled our lenses simply should not have existed.

This part of central Mozambique has had it harder than most. Sixteen years of civil war cost many thousands of lives. The wildlife – once a bankable asset in a thriving tourism industry – was killed to feed soldiers, and the forest was cut down for fuel to cook it on. What the fighters had begun, illegal logging gangs and charcoal burners had done their best to finish. You couldn't blame people for taking what they could. Malnutrition is no great friend of wildlife conservation. Add rampant malaria, Aids and patchy medical care often rejected in favour of the chants and potions of witch doctors, and it was a miracle that average life expectancy reached as high as forty. For protein at this time of year the people had termites, ants and caterpillars. And yet there is another misperception into which your eye might lead you. The alienation of the landscape from its oldest inhabitants is not an event: it is a process.

It is often said that the first significant work of conservationist literature, the first plea for wildlife against malign human intervention, was Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring,
published in 1962. This great and brave book did much to launch the environmental movement that grew in the decades that followed, but the echo it picked up – of nature battered and bruised – was very much older. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln's United States was fighting the Confederates in the American Civil War. The future Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, was still Minister President of Prussia; Napoleon III was emperor of France, Tsar Nicholas I and Franz Joseph I bestrode their empires in Russia and Austria. In London, Her Britannic Majesty's prime minister was Lord Palmerston. In that same year Charles Dickens published
Our Mutual
Friend
, and Jules Verne
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
. Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Clare died. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Richard Strauss and Alois Alzheimer were born. The Royal Navy launched its biggest, fastest (and last) wooden warship,
HMS Victoria
, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge opened in Bristol. A Dutch brewer called Heineken opened for business, and James Robertson started making marmalade in a room behind his grocer's shop in Paisley. Also in that year, nearly a century before
Silent Spring
, the American diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh published his masterwork,
Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.
He began it with a quotation from Horace Bushnell's 1858
Sermon on the Power of an Endless Life
:

Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionise the earth as MAN, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.

Like Alfred Russel Wallace, Marsh had one of those cavernous, polymathic nineteenth-century minds with a seemingly infinite capacity for storing facts. In
Man and Nature
he cites references from 210 different publications, many of them written in German, French, Italian, Dutch and even Norwegian. It is not an example that the current writer is remotely capable of emulating. To say that Marsh showed prescience is to understate his achievement by several magnitudes. ‘Sight is a faculty,' he wrote. ‘Seeing, an art. The eye is a physical, but not a self-acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks.' What his own eye sought was an unglossed, finely detailed picture of the earth as reshaped
by human activity. A photograph shows an apparently large, bespectacled, somewhat pear-shaped man stiffly dressed in frock coat and weskit, holding a silk top hat. He wears a voluminous Abe Lincoln beard and the severe expression of a man not given to frivolity (though that might be accounted for by the need to hold a pose for the photographer). No elder of the church ever looked more forbidding, and he was not shy of handing down judgements. On bad habits, for example: ‘I wish I could believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilisation upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life . . .'

Ancient life is a constant point of reference, an anchorage for his thoughts. He looks to the Roman empire and sees ‘a productiveness of soil of which we at present discover but slender traces'. That bygone fertility, he argues, explains how vast and hungry armies, like those of the ancient Persians, the Crusaders and the Tartars could provision themselves throughout long marches in lands that now ‘would scarcely afford forage for a single regiment'. All around him he sees the scars of ‘man's ignorant disregard of the laws of nature'. The indiscriminate slaughter of insect-eating birds, for example, has dire consequences for crops and wild plants. Man, he says, ‘is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.' The effect is of ‘treacherous warfare on his natural allies'. Marsh is one of the first – maybe
the
first – to note the risk of climate-change from deforestation:

When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns
only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been created. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris, and – except in countries favoured with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a moderate and regular inclination of surface – the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy malarious plains.

Human improvidence, he concludes, threatens to reduce the earth ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species'. It's the kind of talk which these days would arouse a chorus of furies on libertarian blogs and websites. Debate 150 years ago could certainly be polarised, but it was religion and rationalism that were squaring up, not climate science and libertarianism.
That
conflict had yet to be imagined. Marsh was forever conscious of his Creator, and of the responsibilities implicit in man's dominion over what the Lord had provided. God's work, he contended, was everywhere superior to the works of man:

Not only is the wild plant much hardier than the domesticated vegetable, but the same law prevails in animated brute and even human life. The beasts of the chase are more capable of endurance and privation and more tenacious of life, than the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage fights on, after he has
received half a dozen mortal wounds, the least of which would have instantly paralysed the strength of his civilised enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to press forward along the shaft of the spear which was transpiercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who wielded it.

That may be so, but noble savagery is a flimsy defence against malevolent genius. The ‘animated brute' had no answer to a ‘civilised enemy' armed with guns. The ‘terrible destructiveness of man', Marsh said, was exemplified by the hunting down of large animals and birds for those portions of their bodies – often a very small part of the whole – which had commercial value. The wild cattle of South America had been ‘slaughtered by the millions for their hides and horns', the North American buffalo for its skin or tongue, the elephant, walrus and narwhal for their tusks; whales for their oil and whalebone; the ostrich and other large birds for their feathers. Already one big marine mammal, Steller's sea cow,
Hydrodamalis gigas
, had been driven to extinction – ‘extirpated', in Marsh's language – for the sake of its oil, fat and fur.

Marsh saw that where the sea cow had led, others were certain to follow. Seals, walruses and sea otters were also suffering, and the more valuable fish had been ‘immensely reduced in numbers'. Though in fact many mammals had already been forced out of existence by 1864, this was still only the thin end of the wedge. Not even Marsh could have imagined the mass extinction that would be under way by the early years of the twenty-first century, though he had a pretty shrewd idea of the way things were going.

Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every sea. They long since became so rare in the Mediterranean as
not to afford encouragement for the fishery as a regular occupation; and the great demand for oil and whalebone for mechanical and manufacturing purposes, in the present century, has stimulated the pursuit of the ‘hugest of living creatures' to such activity, that he has now almost wholly disappeared from many favourite fishing grounds, and in others is greatly diminished in numbers.

The one piece of good news was the silk topper in Marsh's photograph. Hitherto, the favoured material for gentlemen's hats had been the fur of the beaver – a material of high economic value for which the species had been paying with its life. The irony is that what saved the beaver was not concern for its survival – no celebrities paraded their concern, as they would do in later years for leopard, fox and mink – but rather the ephemeral whim of fashion.

When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers' fur fell off, and this animal – whose habits, as we have seen, are an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature – immediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim might have said. Today another leaflet drops out of my morning paper, courtesy
of WWF. This time it asks me to adopt an Amur leopard – an animal, I confess, of which I know little. There is a good reason for this. According to WWF only thirty-five are left in the wild. Even the IUCN returns no results, though when I broaden the search with the single keyword ‘leopard', the screen suddenly overflows. No fewer than fifty-four listed species include ‘leopard' in their common name. A few are cats. Some are reptiles (leopard fringe-fingered lizard, leopard snake), amphibians (western leopard toad, Las Vegas leopard frog), marine mammals (leopard seal) and fish (leopard sharpnose puffer, leopard-spotted swellshark), so called presumably because they have spots. The swellshark, I learn, is known only from a single specimen caught off Taiwan. Many of the others are endangered. The sad fact is that all the examples in this book could be replaced by others of equal or greater importance. What I have written about mammals might just as well have been written about fish, amphibians, reptiles or plants. Human advance is indiscriminate, an assault on many fronts, and only in their last redoubts do threatened species – the lucky few – hear the bugle-call of the relieving cavalry.