We’re each a sac of chemicals, forged in the sun, that can somehow contemplate itself, even if we don’t always know where our pancreas is, and are troubled most days by mundaner matters. When we meet, at parties or on the street, we nonetheless feel like strangers. When we find ourselves alone together in an elevator, it is as if we have been caught at some naughty act; we can’t even bring ourselves to meet each other’s eyes.
It’s time we acknowledged our personality—not just as individuals, but as a species. I once knew a woman who checked into a hotel and, upon entering her room, decided she didn’t like the design of the small ornamental finials topping the lamps. She phoned the desk and insisted that they be changed. That may seem like radical pickiness, but our personality as a species includes wide streaks of tinkering and meddling. It’s an important part of our character; we’re unable to leave anything alone. Let’s fess up to being the interfering creatures we are, indefatigably restless, easily bored, and fond of turning everything into amusement, fashion, or toys. We Anthrops can be lumbering, clumsy, and immature. We’re also easily distracted, sloppy as a hound dog’s kiss, and we hate picking up after ourselves. Without really meaning to, we have nearly emptied the world’s pantry, left all the taps running, torn the furniture, strewn our old toys where they’re becoming a menace, polluted and spilled and generally messed up our planetary home.
I doubt any one fix will do. We need systemic policy changes that begin at the government level, renewable energy replacing fossil fuels, widespread green building practices, grassroots community and nationwide projects, and individuals doing whatever they can, from composting and recycling to walking to work instead of driving.
In the Industrial Age we found it thrilling to try to master nature everywhere and in every way we could think of. In the Anthropocene, we’re engineering ways to help the most vulnerable people adapt, and designing long-term solutions to blunt global warming. Humans are relentless problem-solvers who relish big adventures, and climate change is attracting a wealth of clever minds and unorthodox ideas, as we’re revisiting the art of adapting to the environment—a skill that served our ancestors well for millennia, while they fanned out to populate the Earth from equator to ice.
We can survive our rude infancy and grow into responsible, caring adults—without losing our innocence, playfulness, or sense of wonder. But first we need to see ourselves from different angles, in many mirrors, as a very young species, both blessed and cursed by our prowess. Instead of ignoring or plundering nature, we need to refine our natural place in it.
NATURE IS STILL our mother, but she’s grown older and less independent. We’ve grown more self-reliant, and as a result we’re beginning to redefine our relationship to her. We still need and cling to her, still find refuge in her flowing skirts, and food at her table. We may not worship Mother Nature, but we love and respect her, are fascinated by her secrets, worry about alienating her, fear her harshest moods, cannot survive without her. As we’re becoming acutely aware of just how vulnerable she truly is, we’re beginning to see her limits as well as her bounty, and we’re trying to grow into the role of loving caregivers.
I’m all for renaming our era the Anthropocene—a legitimate golden spike based on the fossil record—because it highlights the enormity of our impact on the world. We are dreamsmiths and wonder-workers. What a marvel we’ve become, a species with planetwide powers and breathtaking gifts. That’s a feat to recognize and celebrate. It should fill us with pride and astonishment. The name also tells us we are acting on a long, long geological scale. I hope that awareness prompts us to think carefully about our history, our future, the fleeting time we spend on Earth, what we may leave in trust to our children (a full pantry, fresh drinking water, clean air), and how we wish to be remembered. Perhaps we also need to think about the beings we wish to become. What sort of world do we wish to live in, and how do we design that human-made sphere?
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 {'N-CHR} N. 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
NOTES
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, e
t 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.
187 “piezoelectrical effect” (literally, “pressing electricity”): using crystals to convert mechanical energy into electricity or vice versa.
Nature, Pixilated
192 mounted shock warfare: Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
192 “Tinkering with plows and horses”: See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
194 Studies also show that Google is affecting our memory in chilling ways: Four studies led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy S
parrow.
199 “At some medical schools”: In med schools, virtual cadavers aren’t intended to fully replace physical cadavers. McGraw-Hill and many other companies have designed software to use in hospitals, pharmaceutical labs, and Internet courses.
199 Stanford’s Anatomage . . . Virtual Dissection Table: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FFd6VWIPrE.
199 Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information: The Twitter haiku site is but one example. The “twaikus” appear too fast to contemplate, which rather defeats the original purpose of haikus. But at 140 characters they’re a great way to let off steam, and they’re immensely popular.
When Robots Weep, Who Will Comfort Them?
214 “when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light”: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 5.
230 On September 14, 2013, the annual Loebner Prize for robots that can pass for human went to a chatbot named Mitsuku. However, it ultimately gave itself away in December with this exchange. Q: “Why am I tired after a long sleep?” A: “The reason is due to my mental model of you as a client.”