Small Wonder Read online

  My daughter wanted to take it home, I know. She turned it over, already awed like any lottery winner by the stroke of sudden wealth and the rapid reordering of the mind that tells itself, Yes! You did deserve this.

  And then her face fell. "Uh-oh," she said. "Already taken."

  "Oh, shoot," my mother said. "Is it alive?" There are laws, on Sanibel, about taking live creatures from the ocean.

  "Well, not the conch--that's gone. But a hermit crab's in the shell."

  Two small white claws protruded from the opening. The sluggish gastropod that had been architect and builder of this magnificent orange edifice had already died--probably yesterday, judging from the condition of the shell--but as any house hunter can tell you, no home this gorgeous stands empty for long. A squatter crab had moved in.

  "Oh, they don't care if you take those," my mother reassured her. "There are thousands of hermit crabs on this beach."

  She was right, of course, though I could not help thinking, There are thousands of us on this beach, too--at what point do we become expendable? But I said nothing, because I had nothing sure to say, and anyway I was more interested in hearing how my daughter would respond. I decided to watch my leggy, passionate ten-year-old walk into the jaws of this dilemma by herself.

  She looked up, uncertain. "But it's a living creature, Grandmama. We can't kill it just because we want a shell for our collection."

  My mother, like every grandmother, wants her grandchildren to have the sun, the moon, and the stars, all tucked into a box with a bright red bow. If my daughter really wanted this shell, Grandmama was going to give her an out. "Well," she said, summoning remarkable creativity, "can't we find it another shell?"

  My daughter pondered this. She knows, as I do, that a hermit crab won't give up its shell just because you want it. It will hold on. It will relinquish a claw or a head, or whatever else you manage to pull off, rather than come out. Were we going to take this thing home and set out an array of alternatives in front of it, as if it were a hapless shopper who'd won a dazzling spree? Some hermit crabs, the bigger ones with reddish claws, are game for a certain amount of terrestrial adventure, but this one wasn't that kind. Away from the littoral zone, this tiny life would give up its ghost within a few hours. I know this, I'm ashamed to say, from experience. So I waited, as did my husband, who had jogged up to join us, wondering what our little life-and-death huddle was all about.

  My daughter looked at the creature in her hand for a long time and then said firmly, "No. We can't kill it."

  "Anyway, it has the best shell on this whole beach," Steven said, quick to nail a few planks of support to her decision lest it should wobble. "It deserves to keep it."

  So we handed it over to him, and he tossed it far out into the surf, to brood out there however a crustacean mind may brood upon a catastrophe narrowly escaped in the cradle of a human child's hand.

  I have tried to teach my children to love nature as my parents taught that reverence to me--through example, proximity, and plenty of field guides and age-appropriate biology books. As long as I've been conscious of my thoughts, I've considered myself a lover of nature. Only when I was old enough to have fallen in and out of love with other things and people did I begin to understand that there were different kinds of love. There is the sort I think of as maternal--both selfless and wholly giving--the point of which is to help some other life do as well as possible even outside your presence, and hopefully to survive beyond you. Even if the object of your affection moves, say, to New Zealand, and you know you're never going to see it again, you will still love it, and love it fiercely. You'll send it food, money, anything.

  Then there is a less selfless, more possessive form of passion. This may be what most of us felt for our first high school flame: a desperate need to be near, to observe, to show it off, to have and to hold.

  I understand that I waver between these kinds of love when I throw my heart to nature. I cherish the wild things in my backyard, but I also love that I get to be near them. I need to live somewhere, I reason; the house was already built when I got here, so I will be a responsible steward of the place and take it under my wing. It's easy when that stewardship coincides with my own needs, but not so much fun when these programs collide and I am forced to feel more like what I really am: a colonist on occupied territory. When the cute wild things charge down the fence around my garden and bury their faces in my watermelons, they're not cute anymore; then they're the uncutest damn ugly things I've ever laid eyes on. I count to ten. I don't shoot them. We are working this out.

  And we are working it out at the level of species, as we arrive slowly at our new understanding that we are wiping nature off our map before we have ever even had the chance to get to know it well. As recently as my grandfather's generation, critters and varmints were unquestionable enemies--reasonably enough, I suppose, considering that however much my kids enjoy our watermelons, my grandfather's kids literally survived on the crops he grew. Back then, the going assumption on such creatures was simple: You couldn't shoot them fast enough out of your fields and orchards, and if you could eat the corpses that fell, so much the better. There will always be more passenger pigeons where those came from.

  When humans decide to work our will, we are so tragically efficient. Now that we've used up all the prairie, we've taken to burning the rain forests to clear pasture for fast-food beef, slashing and burning a new plot of it the size of Tennessee each year, without much of anyplace left to go after that. In the meantime, and largely as a result, the rate of species extinctions has reached astounding new highs; many scientists predict we will lose about a quarter of the world's wildlife over the next two decades. "We ignore these losses at our peril," warned Al Gore in his brilliant book Earth in the Balance. "They're like the proverbial miners' canaries, silent alarms whose message in this case is that living species of animals and plants are now vanishing around the world one thousand times faster than at any time in the past 65 million years." What we're witnessing now is the most catastrophic extinction event since the dinosaurs died--it looks like Rome is burning. And plenty of people are fiddling as it burns: In November 2000 exactly half of the voters in this country opposed the man who wrote the words I just quoted. But the other half voted for him, I remind myself. Right now, other frightening imperatives have distracted us so far from the program of benevolence toward our planet that it seems we might just try to burn the whole world for fuel to keep ourselves guarded and cozy. But that is not the expressed will of our people. Most of us do understand, when we can calm down and think clearly, that whether we are at peace or at war, the lives that hang in the balance are not just ours but the millions more that create the support system and biological context for humanity. More and more of us are listening for the silent alarm, stopping in our tracks, wishing to salvage the parts of this earth we haven't yet wrecked.

  Even in our best-intended efforts, though, it's hard to sort out goodwill from self-interest. We want every square inch of our national parks to be accessible by paved road and private automobile, with rest rooms ever handy. We work lots harder to save the panda than to rescue the snail darter, presumably because the latter is such a plain little fish that we don't much care whether or not our children will ever get to see one cavorting in a zoo. I do not begrudge the lovely pandas one penny of their save-the-panda money, heaven knows they need it, but I worry that our bias toward saving "charismatic megafauna" (as a friend of mine calls them) begets a misguided strategy. If we believe in putting women and children in the lifeboat first, we should look harder at ecosystems to see what's at the bottom of their replication, cleanup, and maintenance--the crucial domestic labor of a planet, the grunt work that keeps everything else alive. That is: soil microbes, key-stone predators, marine invertebrates, pollinating insects, and phytoplankton, oh my. The day I see a Soil Microbe Beanie Baby, I'll know we're getting somewhere.

  It seems impossible that humans could view the world with less immediate self-interest
, and yet it isn't. The first people to inhabit North America arrived here without a biblical mandate to go forth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth. Those first Americans had different stories, which allowed them to take an utterly different approach: Their culture accepted the sovereignty of the animate land that fed and sheltered them, and it held that certain mountains and valleys were too sacred even to visit. Even then, humans were sometimes too successful for the earth's good; the prevailing theory on the extinction of the mastodons and other large Ice Age mammals in North America is that people came along and ate them, every one. But the point is, they didn't have a Manifest Destiny that claimed this destruction as righteous. The religion of their descendants, at least, precludes such smugness.

  Those of us who come from a different tradition may find it hard to grasp as sacred the notion of inaccessible wilderness per sisting all on its own, unlooked upon by human eyes, preserved simply for the sake of its grandfathered membership in the biodiverse club of wild habitats on this planet. For most modern Americans, that amounts to the sound of one hand clapping. We'll preserve the wilds, sure, but we still want to own them somehow, and take home a snapshot as proof.

  Some friends unknowingly proposed a dilemma about nature-love in a story they told me of visiting Cancun years ago. It was still a relatively sleepy fishing town then, surrounded by paradise, poised on the edge of discovery and prompt destruction. These friends are of a certain age and were far ahead of their time in the manner of appreciating nature. Over the course of their lives they have dedicated a great deal of their energy to conservation.

  "We saw what was coming to Cancun," they said. "We actually saw the bulldozers starting to clear it. So we saved what we could out of that jungle. We have orchids growing in our greenhouse that we collected from there."

  I admired their enterprise and empathized with their heartbreak at seeing delicate, rare lives crushed. And yet if it had been my choice to make, I think I'd have felt uneasy at the prospect of profiting in any way--even just aesthetically--from the destruction of a sacred place. Maybe I'm wrong about this, or maybe there really is no right way to look at it, but my heart tells me it's better to grieve the whole loss than to save a handful of orchids. Better to devote oneself to anger and bereavement, to confront the real possibility that soon there will be nowhere left to go, anywhere, to see an orchid in the wild, than to derive a single iota of pleasure from these small, doomed relics of a home that's forever gone. Anger and bereavement, throughout history, have provided the engine for relentless struggles for change. In a greenhouse these orchids will flourish awhile and then, after a few years or many, die. A jungle is a form of eternal life, as ephemeral and enduring as the concept of love or mystery. It cannot be collected.

  More recently, modern science has settled this question by working with governments to place strict limits on the collection and transportation of native species, especially endangered ones. Although the market for contraband exotics still persists (and this perverse appetite regularly precipitates horror stories such as the one about the parrots smuggled from Mexico inside automobile hubcaps), the net effect of the government limits has been to discourage private possession of morally unownable things. A zoo is many steps up from a private collection, at least in its modern form as a park where the animals are given more space to roam and more species-appropriate habitats than the humans who must walk down narrow paved trails to see them. Most modern zoos have signed on to the proposition that they are in business not just to let kids have a gawk at a giraffe or an elephant, but also to join in the worldwide effort to spare giraffes and elephants from extinction on their home ground. From fund raising and reproduction programs to the sponsorship of significant research, most zoos are more about animal advocacy (and increasingly, habitat advocacy) than about possession. And perhaps most important of all, they offer the only opportunity that most modern children (and adults) will ever have to get any real sense of what biodiversity is. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) requires its member institutions to manage captive animals in a manner that furthers their conservation, and half the U.S. population passes each year through AZA facilities--that's more people than attend all professional football, basketball, and baseball games combined. This is a significant contribution to our nation's education, reaching far beyond the population that actively supports environmental projects. Once individuals have experienced "lion," not just with their eyes during a TV nature show but with their ears, nose, and the little hairs that stand up on the back of your neck when a lion stares you down, they can be expected to share the world with lions in a different way--a way, we can hope, that will be more protective of the animals' right to occupy their own place. The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

  Meanwhile, we grapple with what it really means to love animals. My husband, an ornithologist who studies bird populations, was once amazed, in a little, out-of-the-way pet shop, to see an Indian hill mynah on display in a cage. He asked if there was a captive breeding population of these birds--a possibility that seemed unlikely. The man in the store said no, the mynah had been captured in the wild in India and brought here to be sold as a pet. My husband was shocked to hear that; these birds were already known to be declining, though this was some years before their capture and sale became strictly illegal. He asked how the pet-store owner could justify selling a bird that was in danger of being extirpated from the wild.

  "We're keeping it safe," the man explained without a twinge of remorse. "Somebody will take very good care of it."

  "But you've taken it from the wild. It's gone from the breeding population," my husband protested.

  "But it's right here, still alive," the man replied.

  "Yes, but you've essentially killed it. Even if there were a mate for it somewhere, they probably wouldn't reproduce, and that'd be a dead end anyway. Genetically speaking, this bird is dead."

  The pet-shop fellow looked at his bird, which must have seemed to him very much alive, and insisted, "It's extremely dangerous for these birds in the wild. By keeping this one as a pet, we've saved its life."

  Both men restated their arguments a few times until it was clear they had reached an impasse. My husband left the man and the bird that day, but he has never stopped thinking about this semantic deadlock over what it means to "save the animals." For all of us whose first biology lesson was Noah's ark, it is hard to unlearn the fallacy that sparing just a few of anything can provide some sort of salvation. It takes a basic knowledge of population genetics to understand exactly why a breeding population of a certain size, in a healthy habitat, is necessary for the continuation of a species. Low genetic variation, inbreeding, and lethal genes all mean that when a population gets down to the last two of a kind, they might as well be just one; their species is doomed. Certainly a single bird in a cage, separated from its habitat and its species, is done for. Orchids without the mystery of their forest are not what they were; likewise, an Indian hill mynah removed from its Indian hills is nothing but an object of beauty. No longer in its own sense a living thing, it has become a possession.

  The trick here is to distinguish between caring about the good of a species and caring about an individual creature. These two things can actually run at cross purposes. One animal lover, for example, may be putting out seed to attract birds and help them through the winter, even as the animal lover next door is nurturing a cat bent on carrying out a methodical campaign of genocide (or rather, avicide) at the bird feeder. This is not to suggest that it's wrong to love a cat or a dog, or to sell or buy pets, or to lobby for animal rights in the form of better treatment for cats, dogs, veal calves, or lobsters about to be put into boiling pots, but these concerns do not make an environmental case. They make a spiritual case, and animal-rights activists are practi
cing a form of religion, not environmental science. I like to think that the world is plenty large enough for both science and religion, and usually the two mesh well. But sometimes they may confuse or contradict each other. Certainly my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love. (Is there a song about that?) But as I try to sort this out, I find that when I must choose, my heart always comes down on the side of biodiversity.

  A famous conflict between these interests arose when the Nature Conservancy undertook to preserve the very last few hundred acres of native Hawaiian rain forest. This tract is a fragile fairyland of endemic ferns and orchids that were being rooted to shreds by feral pigs. Anything native to Hawaii has no defenses against ground predators, simply because these ecosystems evolved without them; thus, nene geese don't run or fly when humans approach, and native birds are helpless against the mongoose-come-latelies that eat their eggs. For the flora, the problem is pigs: The Polynesians brought them over in their canoes for food (they would later be replaced by larger pigs brought in European ships), and some escaped to the wild, where their descendants now destroy every root in their path. The Nature Conservancy faced an animal lover's painful dilemma. The extremely difficult terrain and the caginess of the wild hogs made it impossible to take them alive; to save the endangered forest some pigs would have to be killed. Enter, then, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who set up a remonstration. The Conservancy staff argued that sparing a few dozen pigs would cost thousands of other animal and plant lives and extinguish their kinds forever. They also pointed out that the pigs had come to Hawaii in the first place under a human contract, as a food item. No matter, said PETA; the chain of pig death ends here. The two groups have reached some compromises, but the ideological conflict remains interesting.