Small Wonder Read online

  I applaud any religion that devotes itself to protecting life; I applaud it right up to--but stopping short of--the point where protecting one life-form brings an unintended holocaust upon others that are being overlooked. In this contest between a handful of pigs and thousands of native birds, insects, and plants, neither side could fairly say it was simply advocating life. It had become necessary to make a choice between systems--restoring a natural one versus upholding an increasingly damaged one.

  For the sake of informed choices, I took a trip. I walked in that magical forest, by special invitation, so I might carry out a story that would wring compassion from people far away who would never get to see its wonders. The story is a heartbreaker, so I did the best I could. I could already see the ghosts of the place; it was that near death, and that willfully alive. White mists rose through the curved spines of blue-green fern trees. A single scarlet bird with a sad, down-curved bill spoke its name, iiwi, again and again, like the eulogy a child might sing for himself if every last relative had died of the plague. I want that place to be, forever. I will never step on that soft moss again, I don't want to leave any more footprints, but I would give anything for that scarlet iiwi to find a mate and produce two small eggs and a future of songs among those ferns. I felt sorrow for being human there and ached for the ignorance of my kind, who seem always to arrive in paradise thinking only of our next meal. For this bowl of lentils--a pork chop, a can of sliced pineapple rings--we sold our birthright to paradise and infected Hawaii with a plague on its native kind.

  This story of pigs and forest is a tale about possession. A pig can be owned; an iiwi can't. Pigs are a human invention, as are cows, Chihuahuas, and house cats. Over thousands of years our ancestors transformed wild things into entirely new species that they named food, work, or companionship. These beasts are alive, as surely as the yeast that makes our bread is alive, but they are animals only by our definition, not by nature's. They have no natural habitat. However much we may love them, or not, they are our things, like our houses and vehicles. When cats or dogs or pigs go wild, the effect on nature is something like what would happen if our useful yeast were to transform itself into an Ebola virus: It begins a cascade of deaths one after another, extending far beyond the reach of what we ourselves have bulldozed or killed. Scientists who study this destruction have estimated, for example, that domesticated cats in North America kill as many as four million songbirds every day. (The millions of feral cats out there--those that have left human habitation and are fed by no one but themselves--add many more deaths to this toll.) These animals are a living extension of our possession. There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

  A sad loss recently befell my friends, the orchid growers who witnessed the sad destruction of Cancun many years ago: The large, forested lot next to their home was cleared for development. They had been assured, from the time they moved into their house, that the beautiful piece of wild land abutting them was not for sale. But everything has its price, it seems, and now when I visit them we sit on the porch facing away from the absurdly huge, modern house that was built next door, right up to the edge of its lot on every side, and though we don't speak of it, we are mourning. Perhaps there really is no such thing as saving the wilderness next door for our own enjoyment. Enjoyment goes only with the enjoyers, who will be the death of this place--of every place. People love the woods but can't abide the mosquitoes, so we spray insecticide from airplanes, which ends up killing not just mosquitoes (and the encephalitis germ we dread) but also monarch butterflies, ladybugs, lacewings, and the birds and lizards that eat the poisoned ants.

  My daughter, a few years after she surrendered the world's best shell to that hermit crab, did a science-fair project on the aerial mosquito spray of choice, malathion, and its effects on life beyond mosquitoes. She discovered that at unbelievably minute concentrations it still causes the tiny microorganisms in our wetlands to swim in desperate circles and then die. This zooplankton--uncharismatic though it may be--is the staff of life, the stuff that supports the tiny fish, which support the bigger fish, which are eaten by raccoons and bears and herons and people and bald eagles. The toxin kills the bugs that pester you, and another million creatures that you've never thought about or even noticed. From an insect's point of view, let's face it, the obliteration of all to punish the perceived crimes of an infinitesimal percentage amounts to precisely the horror that we humans have named, in our own world, ethnic cleansing.

  I don't know if the average human mind can open wide enough to think of it that way. Last night I slapped a mosquito that was drinking from my arm and then stared awhile at the little splat, feeling mildly avenged at the sight of my foe's blood until I realized, of course, that the blood was my own. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to do the right thing! We take care of ourselves, we destroy; we don't take care of ourselves, we destroy. Mosquitoes, I have been told, are important pollinators in the Arctic. So, good, they have their place in the grand scheme, and I'll vote against aerial spraying on behalf of everything else that goes before the fall, but it's taking me some time to get to that emotional plane where I can love a mosquito. It may in fact require more than a few lifetimes' remove from the varmint-killing ethic whence I arose. My generation has taken historic steps toward appreciating nature, setting aside more parklands, and enjoying them in greater numbers than any before it. But if we are going to hold on to this place in any form that includes genuine wilderness, we will have to become the kind of people who can imagine a faraway, magical place like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--and all the oil beneath it--and declare that it is not ours to own because it already owns itself. It's going to demand the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish, and to give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace.

  Maybe that step begins with giving up ownership of the most beautiful shell on the beach, not simply to save the life of a homely, ordinary crab, but as an exercise in resisting the hunger to possess all things bright and beautiful. It can begin when a ten-year-old mind senses the sovereignty of living worlds apart from her own, so that a perfect shell may be--must be--thrown back into the sea. We humans have fallen far from the grace we once had, when we could look on every mountain with fear and reverence, but we have also crept slowly back from the depths, when we needed to have our names carved on every mountaintop and a passenger pigeon in every pot. We seem mostly to be moving in some kind of right direction, if only we aren't too late. I hope my own mistakes will serve as a benchmark for my children, to show them how life accumulates its wisdom and moves on.

  A Forest's Last Stand

  Xmul. X'pujil. Once you learn to pronounce the X as a "Shh...," the place-names of the Mayas sound like so many whispered secrets. So does the Mayan language that is still spoken, with quiet ubiquity, in the Yucatan. Along rural roadsides, where fathers and sons walk in early light to the milpas, you can hear it. At the Merida market where women sit and lean their heads together behind stacks of tomatoes and chaya leaves, this language of secrets is passed along.

  Leading south from the colonial city of Merida to the ruins of ancient Uxmal is an old road that rises into dry hills of farms and woodlands. This was the road we chose. As Steven drove, I navigated, using a map that showed a Mesoamerican culture's famous antiquities while somehow neglecting to mention that the culture itself was still completely alive. This was Mayan countryside. Nearly every little town had an X to its name, and every woman who walked along the roadside had on the Mayan dress, a lace-trimmed white cotton tunic brilliantly embroidered at the bodice and hem. All of the dresses were different, like eye-popping snowflakes, and they obviously weren't put on for tourists--we were by this tim
e well out of tourist terrain. The women wore them when they did their marketing, laundering, and garden work, and even, as I saw once, when they fed the family hogs; miraculously, the dresses always seemed to remain dazzlingly white. To my eye, this was magical realism.

  Our journey's end lay much farther to the south, in the humid forests that touch the Guatemalan border, but I tend to travel toward destinations the same way I look up words in the dictionary, getting sidetracked by every possible item of interest along the way. So we made a detour to inspect one of the notable antiquities on our map: Uxmal. Older by centuries than the aggressively heroic pyramids at Chichen Itza, Uxmal's structures are just as tall but somehow less high-and-mighty. (They are also far less frequently visited by tourists, because they aren't handily reached from Cancun.) The Pyramid of the Magician is round-shouldered and delicate--if the latter word can reasonably be used of a pyramid. Also the plaza at Uxmal is less grandly paved, more mossy underfoot than Chichen Itza's. The soft ground swallowed the sounds of our steps as we walked through the enormous, silent city. Everywhere we looked, the facades were etched with turtles, monkeys, and jaguars, and the staircases guarded by feather-headed serpents. Living iguanas the size of small alligators perched on the cornerstones, glaring at us in a good imitation of the glowering stone heads above them. The limestone rain gods at Uxmal have looked down their huge, up-curled noses for nearly two thousand years, but the iguanas have less patience with the enterprise; they're inclined to roll off their posts and undulate across the weathered steps. Winding paths lead out from the central plaza through the forest to other clearings and buildings: temples, ball courts, stories carved in stone. The fringe of surrounding jungle hides dozens more structures that have been left unrestored, consigned to crumble quietly under blankets of vine and strangler fig, keeping their secrets to themselves. As we walked the forest path, a light rain began to darken the gods' stone pates, imperceptibly dissolving their limestone, carrying off another small measure of history.

  As we left the modern settlement that surrounds Uxmal, we recalled the counsel of friends in Merida not to head south into the sparsely populated state of Campeche without a full tank of gas. Adventurous but not foolish, we backtracked to the nearest PEMEX. Steven negotiated for sin plomo while I attacked the windshield, facing up to an omelette of Mexican insect life. I was mostly still lost in Uxmal's iguana dreams from the day before, but suddenly as I scraped at the windshield I found my attention snagged on a gigantic agrichemical-company ad painted on the building across the street. It showed a merry campesino dousing his corn with a backpack sprayer as huge green letters loomed in the sky above him: Psst...Psst...There goes your security!

  Something must be getting lost here (or gained) in my translation, I thought; this was just too much truth in advertising. If Mexico is the NAFTA sister with the brightly embroidered dress and the hibiscus behind her ear, she is also the one whose reputation has been most tarnished by chemical dependency. The fields here are dumping grounds for DDT and virtually anything else ever deemed too toxic for U.S. consumers. The country's capital has our planet's most chronically poisoned air; the 1994 earthquake, in momentarily shaking traffic to a halt, afforded many of Mexico City's residents their first-ever sight of blue sky. The chemicals sign might just as well say Psst...There goes your tourist dollar! It's true that Mexico's siren song of beaches and margaritas calls out seductively to students on spring break, but North American travelers looking for nature unspoiled generally skip right over it to Costa Rica and points south.

  In doing so, they fly directly over the place we were now setting out to look for on our full tank of gas, a putative gem of undefiled Mexico. Most people would be surprised to learn that the largest tropical forest on our continent stands on the southernmost reach of Yucatan and northern Guatemala.

  By late afternoon we had reached its frontier, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The tiny town of X'pujil ("Shh...pujil") guards a bend in the road and the ruins of Becan, a city even more ancient than Uxmal and even less visited by tourists. We stopped to walk Becan's tree-filled plazas and secret stone passageways in the company of no other humans at all, only birds. A turquoise-browed motmot peered down at us from a branch, its long tail clicking back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.

  My map showed that the reserve pinched to a wasp-waist here at X'pujil. The wilderness broadens out as it stretches north to the Puuc Hills and far south into Belize and the Guatemalan highlands. In its southern reaches, this same forest shadows the ancient Mayan cities of Tikal and Uaxactun. The road we were on skirted the forest's edge. The sun had set, but the trees' upper branches were still lit like candles, aflame with birds. Keel-billed toucans hailed us from high overhead with huge beaks that looked freshly painted by an artist on a binge. In the treetops they threw back their heads and laughed their good-nights. An enormous lineated woodpecker's vermilion crest stood straight up as if frozen in fright--possibly by the news that his next of kin, the imperial and ivory-billed woodpeckers, have gone extinct. We rolled down our windows and breathed in rarefied steam. The boughs of a gumbo-limbo tree drooped low with roosting chachalacas, dark, chicken-size birds renowned for their remarkable singing style. But by now it was too late in the day for singing. Eyes in shining pairs blinked from the roadside: foxes, agoutis, maybe wild cats. The Calakmul Reserve is home to jaguarundis, ocelots, margays, pumas, and jaguars. It also conceals tapirs and opossums, turkeys colored like peacocks, orchids and bromeliads the size of turkeys, monkeys that hoot like owls, and owls with eyes in the back of their heads. Where the map shows a vast green emptiness, the land is alive.

  That this wilderness still exists is something of an accident of geology. In this century the industries of deforestation moved south through Mexico like General Sherman, sweeping and burning it clear of its subtropical forests. The march came this far and then literally dried up. Even though the rains come heavy at times here, no streams at all cross the Yucatan's limestone surface; the same water scarcity that plagued the ancient Mayans has daunted modern ranchers in the region, preventing the successful development of this land for large-scale meat farming. So the Calakmul, for now, still belongs to jaguars and toucans.

  Of course, birds and beasts alone have no power to save a Mexican forest. What the Mayans of old worshiped as gods, the modern Mayans tend to eat. Likewise the Chol, Tzeltal, and other groups fleeing Guatemalan repression and Mexican poverty. Some fifteen thousand refugees poured into this region in the mid-1990s. Their tradition of slash-and-burn farming demanded that they leave behind used-up cornfields every three years to clear new patches of forest. The Mexican government had designated the Calakmul forest a biosphere reserve in 1989, but signs posted to that effect tended to be read by the homeless as invitations to settle. "Hooray," refugees must have exclaimed at the sight of the Forest Preserve signs. "Nobody's living here who will give us trouble."

  And so Mexico's last great forest, having held its own against timber magnates and hamburger franchises, seemed doomed to fall one branch at a time to cookfires and corn patches. But because of an extraordinary program launched in 1991, it still stands. In the villages surrounding the Calakmul another whisper was going around, maybe a feather of hope for the place. That was what we were looking for.

  In the village of Nueva Vida, or "New Life," Carmen Salgado waved happily from her gate and invited us into her backyard garden. We told her we'd been sent from the consejo. Just north of the ruins at X'pujil we'd found the small concrete-block building that housed the farmers' co-op office, and the kind folks there had directed us to Nueva Vida. They'd promised that here and in the region's other small villages we might find an intriguing update on the civilizations we had been admiring in postmortem condition to the north, where the great pyramids poked out of the Yucatan forests. Here and now, in a cooperative of thirty-six families, papaya and lime trees shaded thatched houses elegantly constructed of smooth wooden poles. I kept studying them until the connection registered: The
se high-peaked roofs perfectly echoed the shape of the vaulted ceilings we'd seen inside every Mayan ruin we had visited. The architecture had preserved its central elements for thousands of years.

  But here was another story--the village of New Life was looking very much alive. Outside Carmen's high-peaked thatched house, in her sunny garden, I stepped carefully to avoid solid plantings of cilantro, lettuce, and chaya--which she explained was a high-protein leaf crop that had been grown in the area since ancient times. A vine she called nescafe curled its tendrils around the wire fence that contained her compost pile; from its beans she made a coffee substitute and protein-enriched bread. We walked from her back gate down the gravel path through the village center, where a lush community citrus orchard offered oranges and grapefruits. A turkey paused to eye us, then continued stalking the ground under the citrus trees with a fierce forager's eye, taking seriously his job as the DDT of a new generation.

  No snaking backpack sprayers will psssst in this Garden of Eden. Carmen informed us in no uncertain terms that chemical pesticides and fertilizers are beyond the means of the subsistence farmers here--and what's more, they are learning not to want them. Instead, they demoralize pests with a concoction of soap, onions, and garlic. Their reliance on organic methods of pest control and soil amendment allows these farmers self-sufficiency, while also ensuring that their notoriously poor tropical soil will improve with each crop, rather than deteriorate.