The New Yorker: Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” in the Age of Climate Change

In the autumn of 1973, the naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen and the zoologist George Schaller set out on a gruelling trek into the Himalayas. They were headed toward the Dolpo region of the Tibetan plateau. Schaller wanted to study Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen hoped to see a snow leopard—a large, majestic cat with fur the color of smoke. Snow leopards, which belong to the genus Panthera, inhabit some of the highest mountain ranges in the world, and their camouflage is so perfectly tuned that they appear ethereal, as though made from storm clouds. Two of them feature on the Tibetan flag of independence, representing harmony between the temporal and spiritual planes.

For Matthiessen, a serious student of Zen Buddhism, the expedition wasn’t strictly scientific. It was also a pilgrimage during which he would seek to break “the burdensome armor of the ego,” perceiving his “true nature.” After it was published, in 1978—first, in part, in The New Yorker, then as a book—“The Snow Leopard,” his account of the trip, won two National Book Awards, becoming both a naturalist and a spiritual classic. It overflows with crystalline descriptions of animals and mountains: “The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark,” Matthiessen writes. But it’s also an austere Buddhist memoir in which the snow leopard is as alluring and mysterious as enlightenment itself. Read the rest here

The New Yorker: Finding the Way Back

A new piece at NewYorker.com about the stars, GPS, and a physicist: "As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land." Read the rest... 

Drill at Wuppertall

Fine art photographer Anne Berry has made primates a subject of her work in the collection "Behind Glass." Here she is on the meaning of the name and her motivation behind the beautiful black and white series :

"'Behind Glass' refers both to the glass or boundaries of an enclosure and to the glass of the camera lens. Often I find myself gazing into the eyes of a monkey, his hand touching the glass wall that separates our worlds. The animal’s candid stare, the reflection of glass, and the frame of a window are all elements that speak to issues of nature and captivity. My photographs are about the beauty of animals but, more importantly, about their plight. The pictorial quality of these images softens the shock, but the punch is there in the eyes and melancholy expressions of the animals. Primates especially are able to remind people of the undeniable connection between man and animal, and this feeling evokes a memory of a time when man was part of nature."

What is Intrinsic Value? Art, Nature, Rewilding

In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother Theo from Arles, France describing his hope to create a painting of a “starry sky” but only “if the sky is glittering properly.”  Included with the letter was a small sketch of a sky by night with two lovers in the foreground and he explained that at times he had “a terrible need of, shall I say the word—of religion." When this feeling struck him he would “go outside in the night to paint the stars.” According to art historians, Van Gogh was almost constantly preoccupied with the task of painting the night sky, writing in one instance to Emile Bernard that it was the painting that haunted him. 

The following summer Van Gogh completed one of his most famous works--indeed, one of the most famous art works of the modern era--"The Starry Night.” Today it is seen by millions each year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and on countless posters, calendars, postcards and products like umbrellas and coffee mugs. A full-size reproduction in oil paint of the iconic work will set you back a mere $200. Few would disagree that viewing the original canvas—over which Van Gogh labored while in a mental institution just a couple of years before his death—is the more valuable experience than contemplating a replica on your wall. But what if the replica and the original were indistinguishable in quality to even the best-trained eye? Do originals have intrinsic value? 

Some of the most interesting arguments around the question of intrinsic value come from environmental ethicists. In 1982, Robert Elliott penned a paper called “Faking Nature” for Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy as a rebuke to the idea of environmental restoration—that an ecosystem disturbed or damaged by development or human presence could be restored to its original state or have equal value.  For Elliott, the origin of something, whether it is a work of art or an ecosystem, is critical as an “integral part of the evaluation process. It is important because our beliefs about it determine the valuations we make.” To him, nature is  “not replaceable without depreciation in one aspect of its value which has to do with its genesis, its history.” 

Elliott’s arguments and the analogy to art have been carried on by other ethicists. For Eric Katz, there is a fundamental ontological difference between nature formed through processes outside of human interference and nature that has been manipulated, marked or restored by men. Such places are, Katz believes, actually artifacts and when we stand before an artifact we value the purpose and designs of its creator. For instance, standing before “The Starry Night,”an artifact by Katz's definition, we might think of Van Gogh’s mastery of the medium or his terrible need for religion—the origin and story behind the painting.  Similarly, when we stand before nature we might think of the awesome power of natural processes or the mysteries of creation. This is a powerful if not unpragmatic argument against the idea of rewilding that is receiving so much attention in conservation circles and being implemented in places such as Europe and the American West. 

For ethicist Bryan Norton, the destruction of natural environments is wrong for the same exact reason destroying a great work of art is wrong. “In losing either, we lose the best example we have of a quality which we do not otherwise fully understand or on which we have no better grasp.”

On the discovery of "God's Bathtub" (and the Need for the Unknown)

If there was any hope during the 20th century that untrammeled, truly wild places still existed on earth it was diminished by the realization that man-made climate change was occurring at a devastating scale, affecting permafrost and ocean ecology no matter if humans had ever set foot there before. The last couple of days I've been reading Bill McKibben's classic The End of Nature, which I see as a kind of window into the thoughts of someone who believes deeply in a conception of nature as eternal and separate from man, and the moment they realized that this idea is dead because of climate change. Written in 1989, it's still a sad and even dark text: McKibben likens nature to a forest where the whine of a saw (representing perhaps man's ultimate folly) will forever reverberate and taint it.  

 "An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is 'nature,' the separate and wild province, the world apart form man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental 'damage.' But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of the lymph or blood. We never thought we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces--the wind, the rain, the sun--were too strong, too elemental." (pg. 48) 

Climate change alters the very forces that shape nature, giving birth to new deserts, altered landscapes, different air. It kills the conception of nature as something that is bigger, more powerful than humanity. 

There have been many challenges to McKibben's ideas, particularly the dichotomy that he establishes between men and nature. In the 1990s, environmental ethicists like J. Baird Callicott began questioning the assumption that wilderness is an objective thing at all and not simply an ethnocentric concept that arose out of a particular cultural and philosophical moment, namely the arrival of Europeans to the "New World." This place looked pristine, never mind the tens of thousands of people who already lived there. "1492, the only continental-size wilderness on the planet was Antarctica," wrote Callicott in A Critique of and an Alternative to the Wilderness idea. "The aboriginal inhabitants of North and South America, further, were not passive denizens of the forests, prairies, and deserts; they actively managed their lands--principally with fire." 

Despite these conceptual challenges, McKibben's idea of untrammeled nature and a sense of mourning over the loss of it is, I think, very much alive even 25 after it was declared dead. In June, scientists announced they had discovered a lake on the Gold Coast of Australia that was untouched by climate change for 7,000 years (the whole of human civilization, in other words). Calling it a "climate refuge," researcher Cameron Barr of the University of Adelaide said they had tested fossilized pollen and algae and found little change in the lake's chemistry over time. "It's like God's bathtub," he said. 

It's an apt description, not for accuracy but because "God" is the only word in this context that could convey the sense of otherness or separateness from man that I think Barr was trying to communicate. It reminded me of a similar story about Lake Volstok in the media last year, when Russian scientists finished two-decades of drilling to reach the freshwater lake which had been hidden under miles of Arctic ice for 20 million years. "There is no other place on Earth that has been in isolation for more than 20 million years,' said Lev Savatyugin, a researcher with the AARI, at the time. 'It's a meeting with the unknown."

It's revealing that such stories focus on the novelty of these ecosystems' pristine condition. Maybe this focus is as much about a wish to still have undiscovered, unknown places on earth, places that are different and independent from us, beyond our reach despite our seemingly unlimited power to wreak ecological havoc.