E.O. Wilson, the Eastern Curlew, Bears, Honeybees, Midnight Special, and Tomorrowland

Sometimes I feel as if most of the world is on a different page, and then I have to wonder if it’s something that’s wrong with me. With regard to environmental issues, I feel very much as I did right after 9-11. I worked in an office then and as soon as the second plane hit, I was torn between sorrow at the loss of life and immediate concern that George W. Bush would use the attack as an excuse to tear up the Middle East and tear up civil liberties at home. Those thoughts expressed aloud didn’t go over well. I was supposed to be patriotic, nationalistic. To be bifurcated between loss/sorrow and concern for the future wasn’t allowable.

And now I wonder if it’s the same situation, different context. I feel out of step with so many people I respect about global warming and about the environment. Not enough urgency. Solutions that seem not to address the basic problem.

I wonder if E.O. Wilson may feel the same–especially given his latest book, Half Earth, which made me nod, aghast at the things he documents–the rationale by some that because so many places are compromised, no places are worth fighting for. That somehow we should give in to rampant greed and corruption and unexamined business practices and just turn the world into asphalt and cities, with maybe some small gardens and zoos to document a past in which the nature we came out of still existed.

I see so much rhetoric that makes no sense to me. Business as usual is sociopathic. Continuing existing practices, even if global warming did not exist and was not human-made, would be a kind of self-destruction. The kind of act that would mean we should expect no pity and no mercy from any extraterrestrials who came down from above to judge us.

We are not smart enough to gauge the complexity of the world around us, even as we feel entitled to destroy it in the perverse, finite name of re-making the world to hold more of us and to contain less of everything else. Yet scientists tell us even insect brains are more intricate than we previously knew. Bears are complex organisms with feelings. Birds are highly evolved and still offering up their secrets. And yet somehow we think we are entitled to kill them whenever we like. We somehow still operate from the idea that the wealth of the world is infinite.

But this attitude goes beyond how we think of animals, how we create rationalizations for how we treat them that allows us to continue to exploit and destroy them. It is also about the landscapes we inhabit and how we think of them.

James Bradley on facebook alerted me to this great piece on the Eastern Curlew, which reads in part, “To refer to a place, particularly a natural landscape, as ‘liminal’, demonstrates not imagination but a catastrophic failure of imagination: it is to refuse or to be unwilling to see a place for what it really is, which is above all else of itself.”

I was thinking of this when watching the last third of a critically acclaimed movie about kind-of aliens, Midnight Special. It’s actually a pretty bad movie that disguises this fact with a very smart first half. But by the second half, the pay-off is a disturbing kind of closing-down into Hollywood cliche, and cliches about the world we inhabit. I can’t pretend that it didn’t hurt me to see the movie makers use the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge as a backdrop for what is basically a hymn to sentimentality and senselessness, but any natural backdrop would have shown the dysfunction of the movie.

Leaving aside the many illogical moments in the movie’s late stage, there’s a scene in which alien structures appear in the backdrop of the marsh reeds of St. Marks. It is the very exemplification of what the Eastern Curlew chapter warns against, as jarring as it is distasteful. To the filmmakers, the natural world–the wonders of that world–are just the frame for the real wonder: a vision of another wondrous other world that is straight out of 1950s science fiction, with all the blinkers that implies.

In fact, there is little to differentiate the horrible banality of that final vision in Midnight Special from the visions in Tomorrowland, a lively movie that is still, in the end, unthinking in its foundational assumptions. In Tomorrowland, as if to articulate what Midnight Special only presents as visual subtext, the protagonist gets to a vision of a glorious 1950s-ish technologically positive future while waist-deep in a swamp depicted as fetid and distasteful. Waist-deep in one of the very kinds of ecosystem complexity that might one day be the salvation of our species if we can unlock its secrets and/or restore its primacy to our landscapes.

It’s little wonder then that in both Midnight Special and Tomorrowland the vision of utopia is of clean, crisp concrete and glass, with little moments of carefully cropped and cultivated greenery. But this is not a vision of utopia: it’s a vision from the past for one thing, because it’s no different from those 1950s extrapolations. And it’s also a vision of dystopia, because it is once again a failure of the human imagination to integrate culture with nature. (Those who want to say humans are part of nature rather than a thing apart may be deluding themselves at this point–assuming we all share the same definition of “nature.” Those who take this distinction as license for dominion may be psychotic or selfish or corrupt or just don’t care.)

The truth is we won’t survive if we don’t bend, if we don’t adapt, if we don’t look at the natural world–from which we are now officially and terribly estranged–and more swiftly and in more areas take our cues from it. If we do not tell better stories with a more multi-dimensional and empathic imagination. And, ultimately, if we don’t make our tech mimic the “tech” of the natural world, we are, quite simply, toast, and the planet with us. In reality and on the level of ethics and morality.

Because in continuing to pursue a course of hard tech that is simply incompatible with quality of life for us and other organisms, we are pursuing a species-wide derangement. One that refutes science. One that refutes logic. One that, in the end, refutes any right to call ourselves ethical or moral. No amount of carbon trading to try to get out from under global warming will solve this larger problem.

Half-Earth-cover

6 comments on “E.O. Wilson, the Eastern Curlew, Bears, Honeybees, Midnight Special, and Tomorrowland

  1. Katie Lavers says:

    I agree with you 100%. I am so glad you wrote this blog. I hope it reaches as many people as possible.

  2. Thanks, Katie. That means a lot coming from you.

  3. Linda Whitefeather says:

    Thank you for inspiring, motivating and expressing what so many feel.

  4. I do think that Global Warming has already gathered momentum that we may not be able to stop. It may be more of a battle to try to save what we can. A big problem is that there are so many people, and most of them have not even started leaving their carbon print yet. If we who already have the advantages of the industrial and technological revolutions don’t find a sustainable way to live, the rest of the world sure won’t. Of course those people who say we just have to live with Global Warming expect to be the survivors. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, there certainly is a risk that many of us will not survive the collapse of our way of life.

  5. Thankyou for this post – not just for mentioning my project, but also for raising some important issues. From a personal perspective I must say it comes as an extraordinary and very humbling surprise to read this – having read and been engrossed by your books I’m delighted that you enjoyed my spec chapter, and of course what a writer wants more than anything is to hear that his or her work has been thought about so carefully and with such consideration. The book is due to come out next year through Affirm Press and I hope it justifies the attention you’ve so kindly given it here!

    I’m in China for research at the moment, moving on to South Korea next week. Some of the so-called land reclamation projects happening in the Yellow Sea are horrifying and it’s hard not to wonder why we don’t just give up. Seeing the amount of environmental degradation around Dandong and Donggang on the Yalu River this week has made me glad that my self-appointed job is just to bring these issues to people’s attention, and not to try to solve them.

    Just last week I was chatting to a bookseller in Melbourne, formerly a biologist, who was forthright in his opinion that we should just abandon some species. Spoon-billed sandpiper? It’s a goner. Orange-bellied parrot? Hopeless case. Put the resources being spent on such species towards more viable conservation projects, he said. While I can see the rationale behind such thinking, and though it’s invariably presented as hard-nosed pragmatism (when it’s actually despair), what I’ve seen again and again – not just in researching my book, but in all my years of watching the natural world – is that nature will take what we give it. Red-billed choughs went locally extinct in Cornwall during that county’s tin mining boom – and then re-introduced themselves 15 years ago. They now nest in the remains of the old mines. Some of the best places to see migratory shorebirds in the vicinity of Melbourne, where I live, are old salt works – and the single best location is the Western Treatment Plant, which is still the city’s major sewerage processing facility. Just two days ago I was at Yalujiang Nature Reserve, which is one of the key staging points for shorebird migration in the Yellow Sea – and the land immediately adjacent to it is almost entirely agricultural.

    I’m not trying to say by these examples that everything’s fine and people are worried about nothing, far from it. We are deep into an ecological calamity of our own making which we can barely even begin to understand. But at least some of the world we’re destroying is recoverable, if we make the effort to give it space to recover. Life wants to persist, that’s the single fundamental fact of the natural world. The whole thing exists because life wants to persist. So that begs the question: do we also want life to persist? I wish I could say that the answer to that was a clear and resounding Yes!, because it seems like that should be the obvious and automatic answer, but I know that when I think that way I’m thinking from within my own bias. Yalujiang when I was there was full of tourists, but none of them seemed to be particularly interested in the birds which is the reserve’s entire reason for existence. It was a very strange scene and I’m still trying to make sense of it. But for now I know at least one thing for sure, and it’s that I’d rather have a world in which we do everything we can to save the spoon-billed sandpiper than a world in which we throw up our hands and declare that there’s no point trying to change our ways.

    How we persuade more people to feel that way, I don’t know. I’d like to think that putting a book in their hands might help – but there I go, thinking from within my own bias again.

  6. Thanks. I hope to expand on some of this in a book I’m writing–and to add more voices in that context.

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