by Carl Safina
Wordsworth and the Romantic poets elevated love of nature:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
—“The Tables Turned,” 1798
So did New England’s Transcendentalists of the 1800s, principally Emerson and Thoreau. Said the observant Emerson, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.” “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau howled to the sky. Thoreau’s prescient dictum has resonated truer and truer over the last century and a half as we’ve learned the price of losing what’s wild, the vulnerabilities of small populations, and the miseries of people in degraded landscapes.
Charles Darwin’s great incendiary insight blasted a crater in the philosophers’ firewall between humans and nature, with his articulate realization that all the world is kin. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote famously in 1859, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin’s insights blurred lines and blended borders, placing us on a continuum of lineage and time, in an organic tree of life. Again, here was a genius realizing we’re not the center of the circle, and pushing the borders outward.
Industrial pollution and the wholesale destruction of wild lands during the latter half of the 1800s prompted early perspectives on nature conservation. George Perkins Marsh, a Yankee intellect who had been a farmer, lawyer, teacher, businessman, scientist, congressman, linguist, and foreign ambassador, made the first systematic assessment of damage to the natural world. He’d observed degraded landscapes in Europe and the Middle East, where logging and farming had ruined soils. He saw that crops were most plagued by pests where people killed the birds that ate them; thus the farmer was “not only depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies.”
Concern about running out of natural resources like wood spawned a conservation ethic called utilitarianism. Theodore Roosevelt sent utilitarianism into the forests by appointing Gifford Pinchot head of the U.S. Forest Service. The utilitarian philosophy is “To provide the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest time.” Pinchot defined forestry as “the art of handling the forest so that it will render whatever service is required of it without being impoverished or destroyed.” Utilitarian thinking underestimates interrelationships of nature and processes like evolution; but still, it isn’t bad strategy. Pinchot eventually clashed with his contemporary John Muir, who believed both that nature has an intrinsic right to exist and that protecting wild nature is essential for the human spirit. Twining their strands, you get something like: the world is ours to use, never ours to harm. In his 1864 book Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, Marsh had written, “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.” He concluded that rebuilding nature “must await great political and moral revolutions in the governments and peoples.”
Right he was. Wait we do. But one doesn’t wait for a revolution. One becomes it.
MARCH: OUT LIKE A LAMB
Spring begins painting the landscape with a slow blush. Red Maples are showing such a subtle glow that at first I’m not sure whether it’s just the early light. But no, the blush is swelling buds. The sensual implies the sexual. This is the season of anticipation, full of vernal foreplay.
Not all migrations of middle March are long-distance or aerial. Blue-spotted Salamanders are moving out of burrows and into ponds to mate and lay eggs. They do this when the first warm enough rains wake them. For a Blue-spotted, warm enough rain is 40 degrees Fahrenheit—still pretty cold by hairless-ape standards. But for a salamander, spring rains mean a long nighttime trek for a tryst. Using navigational abilities no one understands, they mysteriously find their way around logs and boulders to small “kettlehole” ponds, then take to the water to locate mates in the dark.
As mysterious as the rite itself is that anyone even knows it happens, and where. My friend Andy—we call him the “salamander commander”—knows where. Because we are not salamanders, for us it’s a fairly short walk from the road to a little woodland pond that Andy has found. Ours is a tiny, isolated population; this species’ main range is much farther north, throughout the upper Midwest, New England, and southern Canada. But it’s special. Andy is telling me that our local area may have the only pure, nonhybridized form of this salamander in the country. We pull on waders and step into the pond, headlamp halos casting little search beams into dark water.
Andy annually brings in kids and families game enough to brave the nocturnal chill for a glimpse at this little local mystery. Tonight he’s scouting for an upcoming night walk.
In a few minutes Andy spots a salamander swimming underwater like a miniature alligator. He scoops it with a net. It’s about five inches long. For an animal that spends most of its time underground, it has surprisingly large eyes. The skin is smooth and pleasant, dark blue with light flecks and spots, like old enamelware. We find another. The air is actually below freezing; the nets are getting stiff with frost. I remain amazed equally that these animals are even moving in such cold and that Andy knows the habits of such small and secretive forms of life—and can find them.
To protect the salamanders from the freezing air and to better see them, we put them into a white bucket of water. Andy says, “See, look at the color on their belly; isn’t that beautiful?” Having affirmed that the salamanders are at it, in a few days he’ll be back with several dozen kids and their parents. We release the pair and spend a little time looking for more, talking softly—it’s so quiet here—as we slowly walk, with our attention focused through the water’s surface.
Amphibians are declining in many parts of the world, with several well-documented recent extinctions of formerly abundant species. The Americas have been hard-hit, and Andy says that even locally, amphibians are declining at an “unbelievable” rate. Not so much the Spring Peepers, but these salamanders, the Wood Frogs, the Leopard Frogs, Fowler’s Toad—.
What worked for amphibians for 300 million years seems suddenly to have stopped working. These soft, naked animals, so apparently vulnerable to small changes in temperature and moisture, are beset by perhaps the widest and deepest losses to hit any vertebrate class during recorded history. Since just the early 1980s, about 170 amphibian species—frogs, toads, salamanders, and the like—have gone extinct. About 2,500 of the world’s 6,000 species are suffering declines. The continued existence of nearly 2,000 is formally assessed as threatened. They’re losing ground not just in developed areas where people drain wetlands and eat certain amphibians but also in wilderness, including Yellowstone National Park. The reasons appear varied: a deadly fungus that may have been spread around the world by African Clawed Frogs sold as pets and formerly used for pregnancy testing in hospitals; chemicals from common weed killers proven to cause frog deformities and death; climate changes that are warming, drying, and otherwise altering their habitats; increased ultraviolet radiation formerly deflected by the ozone layer and now known to interfere with growth and immune function and to kill outright; and chemical pesticides, metals, and estrogens in human wastewater that disrupt their sex hormones. Atrazine, perhaps the most commonly used herbicide in the world, seems to interfere with tadpoles becoming adults and to convert testosterone to estrogen, also disrupting sexual development. While the causes are many and varied, the amphibians’ dilemma shows again that industrialization affects more than just the industrialized.
* * *
On the penultimate evening of March it’s still too chilly to think about opening windows. I’ve got some music playing. But through t
he closed windows I hear something else, something I’ve been anticipating. So I open a window to let in the season’s lushest, most delicious sound. It’s from tiny tree frogs that come to water to go a-courting—Spring Peepers. So far, these little amphibians remain abundant. And for as long as they’ve been, and as long as they are, their singing makes the difference between the night of winter and the breath of spring.
Unlike earlier evenings, when a scattered few gave voice from vernal pools in the wetted woods, tonight the peepers have gathered strength enough to become a chorus. With a ringing chirp that pierces half a mile of damp woodland, their calls emanate from various ponds and wetlands and from rainwater pools just yards above the high-tide line. After the sun melts away, with the air full of salt scent and the distant rumble of ocean surf, thousands of tiny frog “peeps” merge into a trilling chorus. At water’s edge, they’re often loud enough to vibrate in your chest.
Hearing them is easy. Seeing them takes some effort. But even after I step into the shallows as deep as my boots allow, even though I hear calls coming from the half-submerged vegetation right around me—well within the halo of my flashlight—they’re all invisible. They’re smaller than the tip of your thumb, colored like dead leaves. The majority of my neighbors—even many who were raised here—have never seen one. Many people assume the callers are crickets. But the sound and season are so different, one might as logically assume the moon is just the sun at night.
When I was a kid, I didn’t know what they were, either. One night I discovered them, and taught myself how to find them, by just following the sound into the night-shadowed woods. The calls were coming from the grassy edge of a rain-swollen stream. I stopped and crouched. The calls stopped too; then a peep here, a peep there, until everywhere—. I localized one caller almost under my nose and flicked on the flashlight. He stopped, and for the life of me, I could not see anything in the flooded grass.
I froze as still as a heron. The surrounding chorus resumed full volume, but the invisible being somewhere within my light beam held his peace. Eventually, though, he couldn’t stand being left out, and resumed calling.
And when that tiny movement caught my eye, I saw the littlest frog I’d ever seen, his bubble-gum throat puffed almost as big as his body, calling his heart out. That mighty sound from that tiny body appealed to my teenage sensibilities. His was a strong, clear voice, defiantly undaunted about being so small a soul in so big a world.
In recent years, with these oddly warm winters, you might hear Spring Peepers calling in any month. Even in January or February the ponds may stay ice-free, and after a few warm days a couple of bold and hopeful peepers might rise from the mud and call for a while.
With amphibians declining worldwide, Spring Peepers remain—so far—a strong and joyous life-affirming presence. I’ve shared Spring Peepers with many a friend and child, taking them by the hand with boots and a flashlight, re-creating that spark of first discovery.
My appreciation of them has deepened like true love. At first, they were merely charming. Now I find the sound more soothing and delicious than ever. I gladly suffer a chilly bedroom just to open a window in spring when the peepers are at their peak, and let that exuberant, trilling chorus resonate in my chest. “We’re alive,” they seem to say, “and time is short.” No sound in our region is so welcome and welcoming, so revivifying, as peepers in full spring chorus. Or so seemingly unlikely. Out of dust, God is said to have made one man. But here, out of mud, such song!
* * *
It’s often said that animals live “in the present” and don’t fret about the future. But all these exertions and strivings and migrations are about getting somewhere you will need to be. Mating and raising young are future-focused. DNA itself is a blueprint for something that will be built. All life recognizes time. And that this moment—is already gone.
Genetics and evolution might explain why you care for and protect your child. But they don’t quite explain why you should protect anyone else’s. If humans deserve moral consideration in face-to-face dealings, what about humans living a mile or a hundred miles away? Is there any moral difference between strangers living miles apart and days apart? Between strangers living now and strangers who will be living in a few years, a few decades? Here things begin to get interesting.
And what of those children a generation or a hundred generations down the line, whose hearts will pump by the unbroken beat of our own genes, just as much as our hearts were handed to us?
The philosophers whose thinking is imprinted in our thinking largely rejected the future. Future people posed no concern because of their “remoteness,” “incapacity,” “non-actuality,” and “indeterminacy.” Easy for those philosophers to say, but from where we sit now—local, capacitated, actual, and determined—they appear wrong on all points. Yet we indulge the same fallacy, granting ourselves the same clemencies. And that’s a problem, because the future—and, with it, all those people—arrives daily.
A stranger who lives across town, or across the ocean, or in 2050, falls into the same category: people we happen not to know personally. Except that those in the future cannot be queried or respond to e-mail, cannot defend their interests, are more helpless, and are more reliant on us to consider them.
But really, what can we do for future people when we know so little about their wants and needs? Who in 1850 could have guessed that we’d want cell phones and frozen peas?
Yet people have been people for a long time, and they’ve all needed air, water, and food. They’ve created art. They’ve cared for their children. I’m willing to believe that this will continue to be true. The gadgets of our great-great-grandchildren and their families and friends will differ, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess that their lives will be about as valuable to them as ours are to us.
So, do we have justification for calling ahead and canceling the reservations of the next generations just because we want to eat their lunch? I guess it’s obvious that I don’t think we do. If we wholly discount the needs of those blameless innocents who will in the coming days and decades appear on our planet’s surface, then the whole notion of moral responsibility to anyone loses all its value. In that case, the point of every human action and interaction becomes: to take away as much as possible and to leave, ideally, nothing.
Shouldn’t we try to reduce the suffering we inflict on future generations? Don’t we have strong personal utilitarian motives even now, anyway, to develop new energy sources and halt population growth, so that people will have a more reasonable chance at happiness and peace? Shouldn’t we just care, if only because that’s the kind of people we wish to be?
Maybe not. It’s debatable. Anyway, these kinds of arguments always seem a little shrill. Who’d miss Yellowstone and Central Park if they’d simply been settled like all the adjacent land? Would we miss the Grand Canyon if it was merely as full of water as Lake Powell and Lake Mead, whose water-skiers happily circle where hawks once did, above now-forgotten canyons drowned behind dams? There are trade-offs. We lost a few canyons and rivers but benefit from gifts received from those same times—like antibiotics and classic movies and anesthesia and jazz. We live with what we have.
In 1850, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant bird in the Americas. Around that same time, a long-distance migrant bird called the Eskimo Curlew was shot by the wagonload on the plains. The prairies and their herds of Buffalo are essentially gone, both birds are extinct, and even the very remembrance of the curlew is vanishing. I feel a loss, but, honestly, does it matter? How many people miss Passenger Pigeons?
Into the 1800s, Passenger Pigeons ranged from Newfoundland through the whole forested East to Florida and west to the plains, occasionally spilling into Mexico, reaching the Pacific coast, even straying at times to Bermuda and the British Isles. The pioneering ornithologist Alexander Wilson described one Passenger Pigeon breeding colony in Kentucky around 1806 as occupying an area forty miles long and several miles wide, with dens
ities of over one hundred nests per tree, containing many millions. In 1810, Wilson described one “almost inconceivable multitude” of pigeons that rolled overhead all during an afternoon. By multiplying flight speed by hours taken, he estimated the flock at 240 miles long, with 2.2 billion birds. He judged that flock’s fuel needs at 17.5 million bushels of acorns daily. Others described flocks taking days to pass, darkening the sun “as by an eclipse,” as “abundant as the fish” on the coast, and elsewhere “beyond number or imagination,” “in innumerable hordes,” and, often simply, “incredible.” Audubon painted this description from Kentucky in 1827:
Few Pigeons were to be seen before sunset; but a great number of persons, with horses and wagons, guns and ammunition, had already established encampments.… Suddenly, there burst forth a general cry of “Here they come!” The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea.… As the birds arrived, and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by polemen. The current of birds, however, still kept increasing.… The Pigeons, coming in by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses … were formed on every tree, in all directions. Here and there the perches gave way … with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout, to those persons who were nearest me.… The uproar continued … the whole night.… Towards the approach of day, the noise rather subsided.… The howlings of the wolves now reached our ears; and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, opossums, and pole-cats were seen sneaking off from the spot, whilst Eagles and Hawks, of different species, accompanied by a crowd of Vultures, came to supplant them, and enjoy their share of the spoil. It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying, and the mangled. The Pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each [hunter] had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder.
