The title of this post appears twice in Canadian conservationist Terry Glavin's remarkable new book Waiting for the Macaws.
It should have been the book's title, but then a lot of people would
have been put off and not be attracted to buy it, as I was initially,
by the extraordinary picture of the endangered scarlet macaw on its
black cover. The masthead of How to Save the World features macaws, so
of course I could not resist the book.
The book is ostensibly
a set of seven stories of Glavin's visits to seven far-flung areas
around the globe, and their lessons about loss of biodiversity and
cultural diversity. Glavin is careful not to preach, letting the
stories convey the messages:
- Singapore, the story of tigers:
How zoos hold out false promise of preserving biodiversity and, in
addition to rendering most of their inmates insane, actually encourage
the hunting of species to extinction by those who pursue the perverse
'market philosophy' that the fewer there are, the greater bounty they
will command.
- Costa Rica, the story of macaws: How habitat
loss, due to human agriculture, grazing, forest 'products', urban
sprawl and even well-intentioned 'parks', is producing the fastest rate
of species extinction in 65 million years.
- Russia, the story of
fish: How illegal logging, illegal hunting, poaching and organized
crime contributes to species extinction, starting on land and moving to
the sea, and starting always with the largest species and moving to the
smaller as the larger are exterminated.
- Vancouver Island, the
story of cougars: How overpopulation, the pushing of people and their
domesticated plants and animals into more and more remote areas in
search of land, recreation and the spiritual need for wilderness, is
wiping out species that had previously proved resilient to human
encroachment.
- Norway, the story of whales: How the shift from
subsistence to industrial harvesting of animals and plants, and the
resultant shift of wealth and power from community to a remote,
uncaring elite, is exterminating life in the sea.
- North
America, the story of plants: How monoculture, the planting and
husbandry of single engineered species in place of astonishingly
diverse native fruits, vegetables, trees and farmed animals, has
impoverished the food chain and led to a staggering reduction, first in
plants, and then in the animals that lived on them, while making human
food supplies immeasurably more fragile and vulnerable.
- Nagaland (India/Burma border), the story of hotspots (what PBS calls Living Edens):
How a few dozen areas around the planet, many still offering both
biological and cultural (including language, health, and other
knowledge) diversity unmatched anywhere else, are now under siege from
overpopulation, slash-and-burn agriculture, monolithic religions,
'modernization' and political corruption and interference.
The
consequence of this is a "plague of sameness" and the loss of a
distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables
have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every
two weeks. "We are not gaining knowledge with every human generation",
Glavin says, "we are losing it". "All these extinctions are
related...and the language of environmentalism is wholly inadequate to
the task of describing what is happening...It doesn't have the words
for it". Wherever he travels, he says, he finds the overwhelming
majority of people are troubled by this loss of diversity, but at a
loss to know what to do about it.
He unearths some interesting
and astonishing facts in his research: Did you know that the Bronx zoo
once proudly included aboriginal peoples in its 'exhibits'? Or that
Vladimir Putin abolished Russia's environmental protection agency,
forest service and conservation authorities?
"We are living in
an age when we will at last discover the answer to the question that
has haunted philosophers from time out of mind. It's the question about
whether humanity is capable of determining its own destiny. We should
know that by about 2030. Certainly not much later...To find some
parallel with the conditions of recklessness and excess that prevail in
the world...you have to look at those desperate moments in human
history, those moments just before everything falls apart." He draws
parallels in particular with the situation in Ireland just before the
horrific potato famine.
In his prologue, he suggests that we may be
headed for a titanic human struggle between two human 'survival myths',
those of engineers and of naturalists. The engineers are those who fear
and hate nature, who loathe complexity and diversity, who espouse the
murderous ethic of the Puritans, who seek protection from fear and
danger and death in genetic engineering, cryogenics, the homogenization
and desensitization of humanity and culture, separateness from 'nature
as other', immortality, and the extermination of all life that is not
in the service of humans. The naturalists are those who suffer the
grief of biophilia, who embrace complexity and celebrate diversity,
whose ethic is one of sacred responsibility and respect for all life on
Earth, who oppose technologies that increase ecological fragility and
uniformity, and who accept that we are part of, not apart from, all
life on our planet. The engineers, today, have the power and momentum,
and are on the offensive; the naturalists still have the numbers but
are always fighting a defensive, rear-guard battle. What makes the
struggle so hard for the naturalists is that so many humans today know
of no other life than an engineered, artificial one, and their
proportion is growing. Now it is only 'natural' that they should fear a
'natural' way of living that they don't know and cannot, any longer,
even imagine.
In the meantime, the dark and gathering sameness
of the world keeps increasing, as biological and cultural diversity
wither. Ultimately, Glavin says,
This
is a book about extinctions. It was written at the harsh dawn of an
epoch that is coming to be called the Sixth Great Extinction. It is a
time without parallel in the 65 million years that have passed since
the end of the Cretaceous period. The world is again weary of empires.
The dews still fall slowly, and the dreams still gather, but no matter
the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries of unknown perishing armies
in Yeats’s poem, we wonder, and we wait, and we go about our business,
even as the sound of something terrible slowly approaches from across
the hills.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
