Life

Climate & Instinctuality

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

I write this on the Sea of Cortez, where sparrows chirp in the palms, brown pelicans splash down to catch their lunch, a whale takes a quick breath before diving down again, and a sign on the beach warns me not to step on stingrays. Most of the time, we live and work in air conditioned buildings, watch fiction on screen, and eat processed foods produced by big agricultural conglomerates. Nature often seems distant, filtered and controlled, which suppresses our natural affinity with other living creatures. Here, I am surrounded by many different forms of life, filling my senses, each living free. Looking out over the ocean is calming, and the smell of salt in the air reminds me that our roots are in the ocean; it’s in our blood. When we are in nature, we feel more connected with all living things that eat, breathe and cheat death, like we do.

But our selfish thoughtlessness now risks mass extinctions, as we unbalance the living world oblivious to the damage done by our pollution. Anger is what I feel most when contemplating the climate crisis, but also despair. People refusing to change, repeating lies, smugly imagining themselves smarter than scientists. Despair about the coming diseases, droughts, mass extinctions, famines, floods, heatwaves, refugees, storms and wildfires. Do we not fear death, like those trapped in their attics during Katrina or engulfed in Lahaina on Maui? Have we lost our survival instinct?

I’ve already seen huge wilderness forests, in areas largely untouched by man, burned over 95% in wildfires 100 or 1000 times larger than normal. I’ve stumbled on the moraine where glaciers once clung to mountaintops. I’ve swum along dead coral reefs that were brimming with fish when I was a teenager. In Mexico last year I heard about the decline in monarch butterflies in their winter refuge after migrating from all across North America. This year I heard about the decline in gray whales, breeding less due to less food, as our carbon pollution is rapidly changing the ocean’s temperature, acidity and salinity, poisoning the lifeblood of the smallest and simplest organisms upon which larger ones rely to survive.

We are betraying our evolution. I feel shock, despair and anger that my fellow humans knew and mostly refused to act. Pain of loss is what I feel when I know that future generations will never again experience the bounty of life we once had, to learn from or appreciate the living natural beauty we could have enjoyed, but recklessly gave up, unwilling to change our behavior.

Next week, I’ll wrap up this trip to Baja, and then we need to work on thinking rationally.

Extinction is a Mistake

/ bigdiff / 2 Comments

Imagine a universe like ours, except devoid of life. Space, stars, planets, air, ocean and rock. Imagine our Earth, with waves on the beach, wind blown sand, lava, floating ice cap, canyons and waterfalls, spinning each day, heating or cooling each month, year after year, for eons. Structurally, very similar, but empty, without any living things, anywhere.

Nobody would explore it. None would appreciate its beauty, and no one could try to divine its purpose. Without any living creatures to inhabit it, and without us, such a world would be meaningless, neither studied, understood nor experienced. Without life, there is no knowledge.

Without knowledge, there is no life. Every living thing contains within it a recipe, the ingredients and the drive to cheat death. The recipe is our genetic code, passed down from our ancestors. Every living cell in our bodies carries this knowledge, which includes hidden traits and alternate characteristics for future generations, a master cookbook of the adaptations our successful ancestors employed to live, including our survival instinct. All living things carry such ancestral knowledge. Life began when some tiny process replicated itself in a repeatable way—an accident, a trick or a miracle. Life began when the knowledge of that trick was passed on to create the next generation. Life is that knowledge, plus every other trick that worked to keep life going for generations, in all forms, through billions of years of evolution.

Some such knowledge may be useless, dangerous or doomed to fail. In nature, failed ways of life die out, and such mistakes are forgotten. But species that have survived many times longer than mere humanity, have proven their success far longer than we have proven ours. Their lineage is noble, deserving of a place among earth’s great tapestry of living creatures. Our more recent genealogy is dubious, as we have used our supposed ‘superiority’ to create both weapons and pollution that could extinguish most life on earth, including ourselves. In our arrogance, we dismiss all wild species for not having adapted to us, when in truth we should adapt ourselves to sharing this earth with them. The mistake is ours, not theirs.

Life is knowledge. Many living things have learned to communicate, to call for help, to warn, locate and comfort each other. The tactics learned by observation, communication and mimicry become living knowledge of ways to outwit death, shared in community and thus kept alive for the next generation. Our species created written records as yet another path, besides our genetic code and our learned behavior. Some trivial knowledge may offer only a scant promise to enhance some future life with a minor convenience or comfort, while other knowledge may redesign human civilization, if we have the wisdom to discern it. We pursue knowledge to survive, to improve life and to pass it on. Because knowledge is life.

So extinction is the permanent loss of the secrets of life, both the code and the living behaviors. Most species have carried that knowledge for millions of years, long before humans evolved. We have learned from many species, observing how they act, adopting their tactics, and we have used tens of thousands of species to make medicines. We neither know the present value nor can estimate the future value of this accumulated knowledge.

Prematurely and unnaturally extinguishing masses of species, is far worse than simply killing. We do not know which species’ removal will affect other species’ survival in the indirectly connected, mutually evolved web of life. Extinction is the permanent end of life, and the erasure of all the accumulated knowledge used to create, to sustain both that life and the other species that depend on it, and to evolve further into some unrealized beautiful future. It is the silencing of tongues we do not understand, before we could learn what they were trying to tell us. And it is permanent. Forever. Never to be seen or heard again, despite eons of outwitting death. Extinction is the loss of what was, what is and what could have been. Artificial extinction is the ultimate betrayal of life.

By recklessly causing extinctions, we are like barbarians burning down the only ancient library of a lost civilization, full of wonderful ideas, miraculous cures, and priceless books, before we learn to read. E. O. Wilson, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, once said, “destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”

The world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon, is being cut down for logging and ranching. We are literally destroying rainforest for hamburgers. Besides the direct extinction of species, we are tipping this critical ecosystem towards desertification, releasing more carbon, raising temperatures, increasing fires, and changing our global climate. There is no wisdom in this course of action, no moral justification, no long-term net economic gain, no rational reason to give up so much for so little gain, no scientific approval, and no appreciation of the beauty of so many forms of life lost forever. And apparently, there is insufficient concern among people today to stop making this colossal mistake.

Which Side Are You On?

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

We are all on the side of the living. I am as I write this, and you are as you read it. We eat, breathe and have a pulse, and we have a common enemy: death. When we are in nature, we feel an affinity with the living creatures around us. When I was a boy, a large deer jumped out of the brush, stopped on the trail in front and looked, silently assessing me for a few seconds. As I looked into his large brown eyes and listened to his breath, I recognized our shared experience in being alive. We eat, breathe and have a pulse, and we have a common enemy: death. 

When we encounter other forms of life, we share a living affinity, and perhaps we curiously wonder about our differences. Lichen also photosynthesizes, respirates and circulates nutrients, and it constantly clings to life and struggles to survive. Even predators and prey are on the same side, ultimately. The prey understands the predator’s hunger, even as they evade it. The predator benefits when their prey thrives and multiplies. Both are trying to live and avoid death. Even a parasite or pathogen fights to stay alive in a living host. Every living thing contains within it a recipe, the ingredients and the drive to cheat death and stay alive, even if only for a brief time.

Recognition that all living things are ultimately on the same side is a revelation, a comfort and an inspiration. We are alive, akin to all living creatures who eat, breathe and have a pulse. We are human—all of us the same species, fundamentally members of the same tribe and all on the same team—, so we must want humanity to succeed. We may be a newer species, but we, like all living creatures, evolved in a diverse natural world. Nature sustains us, and our future is inextricably linked to how well we sustain nature.

And yet, somehow, we have chosen to stay on a path that will lead to mass extinctions. Many of us now fail to feel a part of the living world. A few of us are broken, fearful, violent and incapable of empathy, even with our fellow humans. Some are greedy, and selfishly don’t care that they are causing the natural world to become unbalanced. Many deny the need to change sufficiently to stop excess carbon pollution, irrationally believing we can ‘adapt’ to a climate in continuous, precipitous decline. Too many just give up, not bothering to make an effort, which perpetuates the problem. These unnatural views are myopic, and the path we are on leads only to regrets.

Each of us wants to live in a better world, with more life and less death. We don’t want more droughts, floods, hurricanes or wildfires. Our human conflicts are transitory tragedies, that we should try to resolve as a family, however distant or estranged we may feel. But our conflict with nature is existential, with consequences that will last forever.

Each one of us should reduce our carbon footprint, saving both money and life on earth. My car costs less to operate than any internal combustion car. Even when I charge in a state that still burns some coal for electricity, it still produces less carbon overall. Every switch to renewable electricity further simplifies our global task of replacing the fossil fuel infrastructure. And yet, people still resist making any effort to change, even though delay only makes the future worse.

So what madness has tricked us into extinguishing most life on earth? Were the coral reefs not beautiful when they still brimmed with colorful creatures? What temporary insanity has convinced us that making our only world uninhabitable for most forms of life is somehow desirable for us? Have we forgotten that we are part of the natural world we evolved within, inhabit and that sustains us? Do we no longer recognize the beauty of trees? Are we now cruel to animals?

As living beings, we eat, breathe and have a pulse, and our common enemy is death. Why are we allying ourselves with our common enemy against life on earth? When did we switch sides? 

”Our survival is affected as the abundance of life is diminished.” 

Unknown

Sagamore Hill National Historic Site

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

After Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt was the first to receive Secret Service protection. At 42, Teddy is our youngest president, the war hero who led a cavalry charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, becoming the only president to earn the Medal of Honor, posthumously. A student of our weak navy in 1812, Roosevelt not only built new ships, but projected them in force around the world, building the Panama Canal in part to enable America to shift fleets between oceans rapidly. He was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, after bringing the parties together here at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay on Long Island in New York.

The north wing above is the trophy room of his life and presidency, and many of the artifacts were gifts, including the tusks given by the King of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the Remington bronze Bronco Buster given by his regiment, the samurai doll given by Admiral Togo, the swords given by the Emperor of Japan and the carpet from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). The hat and saber on the elk horn on the left are from Teddy’s rough rider gear. Roosevelt shot most of the animals displayed, including the Cape buffalo—the most dangerous of the big 5 safari animals—over the entryway mantle, but the the polar bear hide in the living room was from North Pole explorer Robert Peary and the Siberian tiger hides were gifts from the Empress Dowager of China, including one in daughter Alice’s room after she threatened to run away unless she got it.

The children recalled being “expected to have fun, and we did”. Thomas Edison, John Muir and first solo circumnavigator Joshua Slocum were a few of the many guests with standing invitations to dinner, so long as they helped educate Teddy’s kids. The kids took boats out into the bay, traipsed through the woods, rode horses, learned to shoot, raced and played, ate fruit from the orchards and drank milk from their dairy. They were small witnesses to history, as Roosevelt ran the country from the Summer White House and met a constant stream of dignitaries.

For Teddy, his birthplace in New York was where his mother and first wife died, and his ranch in North Dakota was where he grieved and grew. After death, he would be remembered on Mt Rushmore and on his island in the Potomac. But, as much as he loved world travel, Teddy lived his happiest days here with Edith and his family. Edith held his life together, supported him and his presidency, lived here for almost thirty years after his death and is buried next to him on the property.

“Well, my dear, I was married to Theodore Roosevelt.”

Edith Roosevelt on being asked why she never remarried.