VICE: The world’s favorite disaster story: One of the most repeated facts about Haiti is a lie

When the geologist Peter Wampler first went to Haiti, in 2007, he didn’t expect to see many trees. He had heard that the country had as little as 2 percent tree cover, a problem that exacerbated drought, flooding and erosion. As a specialist in groundwater issues, Wampler knew that deforestation also contributed to poor water quality; trees help to lock in rich topsoil and act as a purifying filter, especially important in a country where about half of rural people do not have access to clean drinking water.

Haiti is frequently cited by the media, foreign governments and NGOs as one of the worst cases of deforestation in the world. Journalists describe the Caribbean nation’s landscape as “a moonscape,” “ravaged,” “naked,” “stripped” and “a man-made ecological disaster.” Deforestation has been relentlessly linked to Haiti’s entrenched poverty and political instability. David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, once cited Haiti’s lack of trees as proof of a “complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.” More recently, a Weather Channel meteorologist reporting on the advance of Hurricane Matthew made the absurd claim that Haiti’s deforestation was partly due to children eating the trees.

Few places in the world have as dismal a reputation. And as the recent destruction wrought by Hurricane Matthew shows, Haiti is tragically vulnerable to natural disasters. But as Wampler would discover, Haiti’s reputation as a deforested wasteland is based on myth more than fact — an example of how conservation and environmental agendas, often assumed to be rooted in science, can become entangled with narratives about race and culture that the powerful tell about the third world.

Read the rest at Vice

The New Yorker: No Country for Panthers

Earlier this year, a motorist driving near Picayune Strand State Forest, in southwestern Florida, spotted a dead panther on the side of the road. Although the entire population of Florida panthers numbers fewer than a hundred and eighty, this was not a particularly unusual sight. In 2014 alone, twenty-two panthers were killed by automobiles. This animal, it turned out, had not been hit by a car. When wildlife officials conducted a necropsy, they found that it had died from a gunshot wound. It was the second such attack in six months. The previous October, a different driver on the same road had spotted a two-year-old male panther behaving strangely. When the animal was captured, officials discovered that he had been blinded by buckshot. Because Florida panthers are endangered, intentionally killing one is a federal offense, punishable by up to a year in jail and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. Nevertheless, at least five panthers have died this way since 2008. In the couple of cases that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has solved, the perpetrators were hunters—people who didn’t like the cats competing for the same prey. Florida has a panther problem. Read the rest at newyorker.com

The Brilliance of The Last Alaskans

I watch a fair amount of nature shows and documentaries but lately I've been totally captivated by one called The Last Alaskans. I've never quite seen anything like it. This may be the quietest TV show ever made. Only The Yule Log has less dialogue. Somehow this eight-episode "docuseries" from Animal Planet manages to create the same ruminative, even meditative, state of mind as staring into a fire while being infinitely more fascinating. The Last Alaskans is about people who live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19 million acres of wilderness in northern Alaska. As the opening sequence explains, the U.S. government banned new human occupation in the refuge in 1980 and only seven families remain—their permits will run out when their youngest children pass away. It has been accurately been described as "hypnotic" and "cinematographic" but that's really only a small part of why it's so unique: this is reality TV that actually manages to reveal something amazing and powerful about people and wilderness. 

The format of The Last Alaskans is recognizable—the show’s producers weave back and forth between characters, splicing in interviews and the characters' commentary to build narrative in each episode. But the story lines are unrecognizable from any show out there. They are about judging the integrity of new ice, setting trap lines, tracking caribou and wolves, the psychology of solitude, hunting animals, scarcity, the change of seasons, and the nature of change itself. We meet Heimo and Edna Korth, a tender couple who raised four daughters in refuge, as they begin their 40th year living in a one-room cabin and hunting and gathering food. We follow Ray Lewis, tall, mustachioed and in possession of a quietly philosophical nature, trapping beaver to help his family through the winter. And we meet Bob Harte, the oldest of the group at 65, whose struggles with aging coincide with a string of misfortunes—an invading bear, a bush-plane crash–that threaten his cherished-isolation and freedom. These aren’t the stable of freaks (Alaskan Bush People), hippies (The Legend of Mick Dodge), or adrenalin junkies (Running Wild with Bear Grylls) presented to us in wilderness shows by television networks attempting to grab viewers. These are people who have chosen lives of solitude so far from our own, so astonishingly different in their day-to-day concerns, that it will make you look anew at your trip to a grocery store or car ride down the freeway. The Last Alaskans immerses us in a world without roads or stores or media, and in the process reveals how far modern society has departed from a mode of existence directly dependent on nature.

Because this is a reality TV show there is still the predictable creative editing and sound design intended to build drama and tension into scenes and the infrequent flashbacks. But for the most part there’s a remarkable amount of restraint. This might be because the risks of encountering winter bears or crashing a bush plane don’t really need to be fabricated. They’re real enough on their own. “It’s easy to die up here,” says Harte in Episode Two, “everything else is work.” The exquisite visual aesthetic of The Last Alaskans is remarkable too. The episodes are full of long shots and slow-motion close-ups. The camera people, who spent five months filming, capture images of shadows on sandbars or pike thrashing in the air. There are stunning aerial shots and what's communicated is the starkness of the Arctic landscape, its incredible changes in light, and overwhelming quiet. More about this quiet: a few episodes in, I began to notice that nearly everybody seems to have some sort of vocal tic—a faint stutter, a halting cadence. This struck me as strange until it occurred to me that what all the characters have in common is they probably don't talk a lot. Whole scenes The Last Alaskans are frequently conducted in hushed whispers. Lewis describes how it takes several weeks for his ears to stop vibrating after returning to the refuge from "town." 

One of the show’s unforgettable scenes takes place in Episode Five, when Tyler Selden, a young man who came to the refuge six years ago with his wife, catches a lynx in a trap. When Selden reaches it, the animal is snared but not dead. The cat’s back is arched, its teeth bared, it’s almost shockingly wild and alive. Selden kills it by strangling it with a wire noose on the end of a birch pole. It’s almost unbearable to watch but the camera never flinches. It’s one of the most honest things I’ve seen on television at a time when nature shows abound but rely on anthropomorphizing (Meerkat Manor) or sensationalizing (World’s Deadliest Animals). “It’s just part of it. I mean, I just killed an animal, right?” says Selden after. “A lot of people would feel bad about that…it’s a heavy thing to do. It’s not something I enjoy." The show repeatedly returns to this subject as if challenging our distaste as well as our hypocrisy. And we get the benefit of hearing the moral logic of individuals who have chosen to make explicit their dependence on animals for survival by killing them with their own hands. “It’s not the pursuing or the killing of the game that makes me happy,” says Lewis in Episode One. “It just gives you a perspective how everything is connected together. You have to study the terrain, the country, you really have to study the habits of the animals, you get to the point where, you know, you’re a part of it.”

I think the real reason I fell so hard for this show is it made me reconsider a long-held assumption that television about nature mediates our experience of the real thing to great detriment. The Last Alaskans is still a mediated experience but it gets a lot right that other nature shows barely attempt. Rather than distort or degrade a natural landscape by packaging it to fit into human dramas, The Last Alaskans is all about showing humans trying to fit themselves into a landscape impossibly bigger than them. The thoughtfulness and skill required to survive in the refuge is truly impacting to watch, you start feeling grateful that these folks let you in for a little bit. 

The fact that these are indeed some of the very few remaining individuals who will live in this place is powerful. It reminded me that while delineating wilderness from civilization and protecting it from its impacts is good conservation, much is also lost when the vital relationships between people and wilderness are severed. "I hope this life doesn't go extinct,' says Bob Harte in Episode Eight. In James Campbell's' book about Heimo Korth, The Final Frontiersman, he writes: "The Arctic is a wilderness, but it has been inhabited for perhaps as long as 10,000 years by descendants of those who crossed the Bering Land Bridge. Modern definitions of wilderness won't allow for the presence of people, however; in fact, they demand their absence." 

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.”