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

Harper's: Postcard from The Frozen World

A visit to the American Museum of Natural History’s frozen-specimen collection, adapted from Resurrection Science, published in The Harper's Blog. "In an era of anthropogenic global warming, preserving life in man-made freezers is both prudent and ironic, not a solution in and of itself, but a last resort." 

Read the rest at Harper's

The Atlantic: Making Rhino Horns Out of Stem Cells

Last spring I was reporting on the last Northern white rhinos in Africa and I had an interesting conversation with a bush pilot on the veranda of my host's home on the outskirt of Nairobi. I had been explaining how in the future, stem cell technology might be used to recreate Northern white rhinos in surrogate rhinos, when he asked me, "Why don't they just use stem cells to recreate rhino horns and sell them to stop poaching?" I went home and set out to find anyone else who had the same idea and sure enough, I found the bioengineer and entrepreneur Garrett Vygantas. My piece in The Atlantic focuses on how Vygantas is launching a company to produce and sell artificial rhino horns to Asian markets, and the ethics of this endeavor. 

Conserving at the Evolutionary Scale

I've been writing about one of the first individuals to recognize the need for centralized repositories of the planet’s genetic biodiversity, an Austrian-born geneticist and plant breeder by the name of Otto Frankel. Born in 1900, Frankel was a young communist  who wanted to dedicate himself to the fight against hunger and chose to study agriculture. His early research included counting chromosomes of the Jaffa Orange and understanding the evolution of wheat. In the 1960s, Frankel became what some have called the high-prophet of genetic resources conservation, beginning with his involvement in the International Biological Program and its 1st General Assembly in Paris in 1964. Otto saw firsthand through his research that we were losing genetic diversity among plant species, and he believed that institutions needed to respond with long-term seed storage, computerized data cataloging, and the creation of a global network of genetic resource collections. A few years after the Biological Program assembly, Otto helped to organize a conference on “The Exploration, Utilization and Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources,” now considered a landmark moment in the timeline of conservation biology. He argued that humankind’s impact on genetic diversity of other organisms was on so great a scale that we had “acquired evolutionary responsibility and must develop an ‘evolutionary ethic.’” An evolutionary ethic, said Frankel, is one in which civilized man recognizes the continued existence and evolution of other species as integral to his own existence. In 1974 Otto went to Berkeley, California for the International Congress of Genetics and presented his paper “Genetic Conservation: our evolutionary responsibility,” a moment that according to subsequent leaders in the field of conservation biology, was groundbreaking for its presentation of a conceptual and moral agenda for conservation. Here is a quote from that paper: 

    “Neither our pre-agricultural ancestor, nor the peasant farmer who succeeded him had cause for concern beyond the next meal or the next crop, the former because he used a pool of great species diversity, the latter a pool of self-renewing intraspecific diversity. This came to an end with the advent of scientific selection. Today’s concern is with preserving and broadening the genetic base. The time perspective for gene pool conservation might be the next 50 or 100 years—which is merely an acknowledgement of the unparalleled technological transcience of our age; we cannot foresee even what kinds of crops will be used at that time. For wildlife conservation the position is altogether different. Concern for its preservation is new, a consequence of our destructive age. Nature conservation is fighting for reserves and for legal recognition. The sights often are set for the short term, although perpetuity is its ultimate objective. Genetic wildlife conservation makes sense only in terms of an evolutionary scale. Its sights must reach into the distant future.”

Get ready for the rebirth of vanished species

I've got a new piece out in Salon laying out some of the ethical territory when it comes to de-extinction.

"There is the hope implicit in the possibility of de-extinction that it will help humanity avert the environmental apocalypse that extreme biodiversity loss threatens. De-extinction pioneers are eager to invest their efforts with a deeper moral purpose, one that suggests the power to bring back species could mitigate humanity’s liability in the ongoing Sixth Great Extinction, and even work to correct past crimes against the planet. “Humans have made a huge hole in nature, we have the ability, maybe the moral obligation, to repair that damage,” said environmentalist Stuart Brand, former editor of the 1960s back-to-the-land guide Whole Earth Catalog, and co-founder of the Revive and Restore Foundation.

To date, de-extinction has received a lot of breathless publicity but very little critical debate. The question that remains unanswered is whether it could become a useful conservation tool for the thousands of species that are endangered and facing extinction today. In fact, it is possible that these advances could have the opposite effect, putting endangered species at greater risk." 

Read it here!

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.