I recently saw that J. B. MacKinnon's book The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be was shortlisted here in Canada for the RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, and I wondered at that term "literary non-fiction". Intrigued, I picked up the book and right from the beginning, MacKinnon showed me what it means:
My childhood landscape was the northernmost tip of the rain-shadow drylands that sprawl up most of western North America, and I could have stepped out of my house and walked three thousand kilometers to Mexico and been thirsty all the way. It was rattlesnake country and black widow country, and as a boy I was brown-skinned and blond-haired and so much a son of that sun-baked earth that I wouldn't flinch if a two-inch-long grasshopper thudded down on the bare skin of my ribs as I ran through the fields.MacKinnon packs this volume with interesting facts, cites innumerable studies and books, but as he writes with such an expressive style and emphasises a philosophical approach to ecology, it was a pleasure to read; neither dry nor preachy.
The first interesting idea I encountered was called "change blindness" or "Shifting Baseline Syndrome". Essentially, it means that we all assume that the environment we grow up with is the "normal state". Even if we have grandparents who tell us that the forest used to stretch as far as the eye could see or that the streams were boiling with fish when they were kids, we look at the last stand of trees and spy minnows in the shallows and think everything is still pretty wild and free. According to a study, even children who grow up in a poor and terribly polluted community in Houston think that their environment is the normal state and only a third of them agreed that pollution affected their lives at all. Like the frog in a pot of gradually boiling water, this explains why we're not all alarmed by the degradation we see around us -- we can't actually see it.
The level of degradation is the next amazing fact: MacKinnon claims that we're living in a "10% world". The variety of species in the wild is 10% of what it used to be, their gross numbers or biomass are 10% of what they used to be, and the range that the surviving animals occupy is 10% of what it used to be. When we start talking about how things "used to be", talking about how to restore the presumed original natural balance, things become complicated: Some people think, to take North America as an example, that "used to be" means in 1491 -- before Columbus. But every corner of the Americas had already been changed by the presence of its Native population before the Europeans came. There's a plan to reintroduce bison to Banff, because they used to live there, but it turns out that that population was probably the Natives' attempt to herd and keep them in the natural corral of the surrounding mountains -- so is a penned in group of bison a return to the natural or not? Or as others have proposed, should a parade of elephants be allowed to range free across Texas because mastodons used to be there before the Natives hunted them off?
The next broad principle explored is that of "double disappearance": Every time a species goes extinct, or is extirpated from its traditional range, it has a profound effect on the human population who once interacted with it -- whether culturally, like the fading away of the Chandelours ("bearsong") festivals across Europe as the bears disappeared, or even physically, like the increase in myopia among populations that no longer need acute vision for hunting. Citing conservation biologist Michael Soulé, MacKinnon writes:
When we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made.In an interview with Harper's Magazine, MacKinnon sums up The Once and Future World:
We need to remember, reconnect, and rewild — in that order. We first need to take a careful look at the past in order to understand nature’s potential and to guide our decisions, for example about what species we might need to remove or reintroduce. We need to reconnect with nature, to become more ecologically literate, so that we are alert to the impacts of our choices. Finally, we can remake a wilder world.The concept of "rewilding" is the final idea, and although it might even be considered the point of the book (the "future world" of the title), it was the least developed to me. After sharing various cautionary stories about the unintended consequences of man's attempts to interfere with rebalancing nature (like on Macquarie Island -- a manmade nightmare of cats and parakeets and bunny rabbits), the ultimate solution seemed unclear. I can accept that I have "change blindness" and suffer from "double disappearance" to the extent that of course I don't want bears or moose or, I can't even imagine, elephants ambling down the street I live on. I understand that rewilding means not only allowing nature to recover and reintroduce itself to the spaces we've pushed it out of but also rewilding ourselves -- recreating connections to the natural world that will allow us to live in harmony with the species that do return to us -- but I cannot see how wishing it will be so can make it so.
In the end, this is not a handbook of solutions, but as a philosophical overview, it was fascinating and optimistic and an enjoyable read. I wish I had the courage to fulfill the promise of its vision:
The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained only by physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness.
I say that I lack courage and I mean that 100% when it comes to the natural world -- I had a great fright last summer as I saw, barely out the corner of my eye, a garter snake slither away from me as I passed the bush it was sunning itself from. I also hesitate to stick my hands under the bushy Hostas while I'm weeding the gardens ever since I read about a woman not far away from here who was bitten by a black widow spider while doing her own weeding. I'm a total wimp, but, as much as I want to be a conservationist, I also lack the fundamental respect for nature that humans ought to have. A couple of stories:
Not that long ago, the brother-in-law, Dan, was doing some yardwork at his house, and when he looked up, he saw some yellowjackets disappear under his eaves. Realising that he must have a wasp-nest in his attic, Dan decided to drop what he was doing and go get some poison -- who wants an infestation of stinging critters in his home? Just before he left, however, it occurred to Dan that what he saw might actually be bees instead of wasps or hornets and he decided to do some research first. After consulting the internet and finding a bee expert who lived nearby, Dan had her come out and what they found was astounding -- the attic housed an active hive of tens of thousands of honeybees. Since the expert keeps a beehive out in the country (which she rents out to farmers at pollination time), she offered to remove the colony for something like a thousand dollars. Not wanting to spend that, Dan consulted the internet again, and along with Dave's support (if not his active help as it seemed to be a one man job), Dan safely removed the bees, destroyed the hive, and sealed up his attic. My question is, how many of us would go to the trouble that Dan did to identify and properly deal with his bee problem? Isn't the poison the first response most of us have? We might catch a spider and free it outside, but what about mice, termites, or ants? It's well and good to think about rewilding ourselves and our spaces, but how many of us want invasive critters sharing our homes with us?
Somewhat related to the bees, a couple of years ago, when Delight was still living in the far northern reaches of Newfoundland, she told me, with great outrage, that when a polar bear was seen moseying around their village of a hundred or so people, the local reaction was to take up arms and try to hunt it down. "It's not the bear's fault," fumed Delight, "that Global Warming has melted some ice-floe the bear was on and stranded it here where it's never been seen before. It's disgusting that people are so scared of a bear that their first instinct is to kill it." Now, I have a slightly irrational fear of polar bears and I protested, "You know, they say polar bears are the only animal that will kill just because they can. They'll attack people even when they don't feel threatened or hungry or sick. You can't just let a polar bear walk around town -- trap it or kill it, but this isn't a live and let live situation: it's life or death." The bear eventually wandered off, becoming some other village's problem, I suppose, but surely rewilding doesn't mean, like Delight said, that the bear had just as much right to be there as the people?
Just last weekend, my mother-in-law told me that her cousin's farm, a piece of land that had been worked in his mother's family for 150 years, was being "confiscated" by the city for industrial development. She began crying and said that it's not right and that what worries her most is that some day soon there won't be any farms at all anymore and that one day my kids would need to import all their food from America or China. I'm afraid I was a little cold-blooded in response. I pointed out that every city was once farmland and that even her own home sat on what used to be someone's farm -- she has often pointed out that the towering spruce trees in her neighbour's yard used to line the long country lane that led up to the original farmhouse. I was also thinking that this cousin and his wife turned 65 last year and they had retired from active farming, and even though they had a son who was looking forward to buying his parents out, they probably got a higher price from the city and the son would likely find another farm to buy. I just couldn't become outraged by this story -- and that's a terrible reflection on what kind of a person I am, I suppose. I have so little connection to the land that even the loss of it -- the loss of a particular piece of land that particular people had lived on for generations -- couldn't get my blood up. Is that the "double disappearance" at work in me, or just a fundamental lack of empathy? *
Reading The Once and Future World, I realised that it dovetailed so nicely with other books I've been reading recently--
Eli McCullogh, from The Son, not only experienced a "rewilding" as he lived among the Comanche who kidnapped him, but many years later recognised his role in the reshaping of the landscape:
"I don't have to tell you what this land used to look like," he said. "And you don't have to tell me that I am the one who ruined it. Which I did, with my own hands, and ruined forever. You're old enough to remember when the grass between here and Canada was balls high to a Belgian, and yes it is possible that in a thousand years it will go back to what it once was, though it seems unlikely. But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do."
And Ed 's experience from Deliverance, the intimacy he feels as he climbs the rock face, feels like a rewilding:
Time after time I lay there sweating, having no handhold or foothold, the rubber of my toes bending back against the soft rock, my hands open. Then I would begin to try to inch upwards again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman. Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimetre by millimetre.
And the last connection I want to make is that, although these characters, when thrown into the wild, regained something of what we urbanites have all lost, I fear my own experience would be more like what I saw last night on Bear Grylls' new show, Escape from Hell. In this episode I watched, Bear recreated the experiences of someone who had been dumped from his canoe in whitewater and someone else who had to try and climb a sheer cliff-face out of a canyon -- these are both experiences that Ed Gentry found transformative in Deliverance, but as the title of the show clearly states, to most of us these would be hellish experiences.
I have no clue if I would ever have the courage to even attempt a rewilding -- I have no foundation, no skills at all for survival (despite being the granddaughter of a half Mi'kmaq forest ranger who knew nature down to its smallest part), and everywhere outside my city limits screams to me, "There be monsters here".
*Edit from July 7/14
My mother-in-law was talking about the farm again this weekend and lamenting that so much of her childhood will be lost once it's gone out of the family and she told me this story that Dave had never heard before so I'll share it here.
Apparently, her family would drive down to London from Owen Sound regularly and spend most holidays with her mother's family (Uncle Vern and Aunt Olly) at the farm. One day, Bev went out for a drive with her immediate family, and while they were gone, her Grandpa decided to "finally take care of" their dog. Pal was getting old, and having once been hit by a car, one of his back legs dangled pitifully. When they returned from the drive, her Dad got out of the car and began calling for Pal, but he never came. Over the next couple of days, Bev's Dad spent all of his time calling for and looking for Pal, "probably covering 25 square miles". All this time, Grandpa never said a word, and when it came time to return to Owen Sound, Bev and her family had to leave without their dog.
Years later, Bev heard that her Grandpa had taken it upon himself to put Pal out of his misery, and she suspects that his body had been thrown down an unused well. The point of this story was how awful it is to lose family history like this; even to lose the burial place of your favourite dog. It feels to me like there's a larger lesson about what happens when people do live closer to the land and how that affects their relationships with animals -- it's no coincidence that it was a farmer, not his citified son-in-law, who was able to kill that dog.
