City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  The Australian dingo has lived on the Australian continent for four thousand years or more, and is believed to have crossed the land bridges that existed between Indonesia and Australia. Academic and author Deborah Bird Rose observes:

  Dingoes provided a companionship that had never before existed in Australia. These creatures were the first non-humans who answered back, came when called, helped in the hunt, slept with people and learned to understand some of the vocabulary of human languages…People gave them names, fitted them into the wider kinship structure and took care of dead dingoes in the same way they took care of dead people. Dingoes have been fitted into the sacred geography as extremely powerful Dreamings, and they now figure prominently in ritual, songlines and stories.3

  Settler Australians sometimes refer to the dingo as introduced, which is a bit rich. It’s also self-serving. A native dingo might be worth saving; an introduced wild dog, not so much. But for any variety of reasons the dingo is now classified as vulnerable in the wild and is, according to some, close to extinction, in part because of interbreeding with domestic dogs to which they are related, but not, genetically speaking, identical. It is difficult to distinguish hybrids from pure dingoes and the actual population numbers are not known, but it’s believed that more than a third of southeastern Australia’s dingoes are hybrids. Hybrids have, historically, made humans uncomfortable and are often ‘eradicated’.

  In the northern hemisphere coyotes have been interbreeding with domestic dogs, and with red wolves. Such was the concern that the red wolf would become impure that hybrids began to be slaughtered. This hasn’t saved them from their inevitable extinction—at the time of writing there were fifty red wolves left.

  Hybrids present a particular problem when it comes to legal policy, particularly in the USA where the Endangered Species Act has been described as ‘almost eugenic’4 because it excludes hybrids from protection. Sometimes it’s not even clear if the interbreeding is between two different species at all. It’s a long story and Dan Flores, the author of Coyote America, tells it well. But, long story short, coyotes are red wolves, give or take geography and a few thousand years of separate breeding, virtually indistinguishable genetically speaking. Between a wolf and a dog. The animals mate because they recognise each other. They mate because humans have disturbed the environment in such a profound way that coyotes have migrated east, desperate to get away from the legislated slaughter of their kind. Riding the boundary line of genetic purity is an ongoing issue in times like these, when we fear losing species, but to insist on it is the same as insisting that human beings of different species didn’t mate when there is an increasing body of evidence that they did, and that the result was European humans.5 Other mammals, such as the golden jackal and the wisent (or European bison) are, basically, hybrids.

  Hybridisation can be a form of evolution, and there is no doubt that the urbanisation of the planet (alongside climate change) is creating a series of pressures on fauna to adapt and evolve very quickly. Some hybrids struggle to reproduce, but others display traits popularly known as hybrid vigour, which, if they can reproduce, is useful in an adaptive sense.

  The grey wolf was one of the most widely distributed wild mammals in the northern hemisphere, in part because it can tolerate a wide range of climates. They now occupy about two-thirds of their former range worldwide, and about ten per cent of their historic range in the USA, where there are estimated to be six thousand left (sixteen thousand if you include Alaska). The release of fourteen grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 is a much touted good news story that certainly illustrates the positive effects of allowing predators back into the system. Elk numbers are down, which means that a greater diversity of plants can thrive. This, in turn, benefits the grizzly bears. Hare and beaver numbers are up and, as a consequence, bald eagle numbers. On it goes, the trophic cascade, rippling, powerful, driving down through the ecosystem like a waterfall.

  As well as its numbers improving in the US, the grey wolf is returning to parts of Europe after a period of extinction. In general, when I’m looking for good news stories, it’s in Europe that I find them. Bison returning to Romania, wolves thriving in France, bears in Scandinavia. I asked a Finnish friend of mine if she’d ever seen a wolf and she said yes, she had, far off in the distance. She elaborated: the Finns also love wolverines, lynxes and bears unless they live close to them. People from the city love the idea of them, she said (and George Monbiot argues), but those who have to live with them are more fearful. This, despite the fact that a wolf hasn’t killed a person in Finland in more than a hundred years. Wild boar were hunted to extinction in Britain some three hundred years ago and they, too, are making a comeback, having staged their own prison breaks (they are farmed as heritage livestock). Fabulously, they pose quite a legal problem as they are designated as variously ‘dangerous’, ‘non-native’ and ‘wild’, each designation providing different protections to the boar. To kill a dangerous and non-native animal is allowed. Killing a wild animal is not. Best of all, boars don’t just tear up legislation, they tear up the soil as they root around for food. This is great for plant diversity, but not so great for church lawns.

  Coyote have proved more resilient than wolves when it comes to surviving the relentless slaughter of the last hundred years. They have extended their range out of the western deserts where they once thrived as far north as Alaska and across to cities on the eastern seaboard. Only human beings have managed to extend their range as quickly and widely. ‘Southwestern Hispanos have a rich folk tradition about coyotes and have long said the only thing smarter than a coyote is God.’6 I’ve seen them myself in Joshua Tree National Park. Trotting along. Flopping down into the cooling sand of an evening and gnawing on jack rabbits while throwing you the occasional glance, insolent as teenagers. Virginia saw one that was somewhat shyer early one morning on Bernal Heights. Seventy breeding pairs live in San Francisco. It’s not known how many live in Los Angeles, though is undoubtedly a larger number than that, and some 145 are currently being tracked there by the National Park Service, who are trying to understand how they can live in such a fragmented environment.

  The Animal Damage Control Act was passed in 1931 with the stated aim of total eradication of coyote. The poisonous baits that were left out to kill them in numbers approaching the millions took other animals as well. Eagles, bears, domestic pets. You name it, the poison kills it. Richard Nixon banned the use of strychnine, thallium sulphate and cyanide for the poisoning of coyotes, declaring, ‘The old notion that “the only good predator is a dead one” is no longer acceptable.’

  Pesticides don’t just poison the trees but also the soil and the plants that spring up once the trees are gone. They poison the animals that eat those plants. They’re an environmental disaster, a disaster that was first recognised when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published back in 1962.7

  There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play, and would die within a few hours. And there was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people, baffled and disturbed, spoke of them. The feeding stations in the back yards were deserted. The few birds to be seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.

  The use of pesticides has become more widespread since Carson wrote those words, and the spring steadily more silent. ‘It’s estimated that there are 421 million fewer birds in Europe in 2009 than there had been in 1980…very large declines in the volume of insects have been recorded.’8 Half of the species of bees in Germany are close to extinction, a country in which eighty per cent of its plants (which includes food) rely on bees as pollinators. All the Midwesterners I spoke to on my most recent trip to the US—a cohort often described as conservative on these matters—were extremely concerned about pesticide use.

  In her Quarterly Essay ‘Us and Them’, Anna Krien refe
rs to the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s description of the period that will follow the mass extinction of species that is currently taking place as ‘The Age of Loneliness’. It’s the kind of phrase that chimes out, and leaves a deep silence in its place. What does extinction sound like? Wind sweeping across land denuded of trees? I suspect that it sounds like the world did after Cyclone Tracy wiped out much of Darwin:

  No sounds at all—no birds, no frogs, nothing, I think that was one of the things that hit us more than anything else, was that there was not a sound of anything which you would normally associate with the wet season, like cicadas or birds or frogs—nothing, absolutely nothing.9

  Bernie Krause, once a composer of film scores, including Apocalypse Now, has been recording the sounds of nature for fifty years. He is described as a soundscape ecologist. That project has evolved/devolved into one in which he has recorded the sounds of extinction through America.

  When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for ten hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully fifty per cent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they’re either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form.10

  There is, of course, a lot of human noise to fill in the silence, and yet another issue is that bats, birds and other creatures struggle to be heard over the din. Air conditioners, industrial machines, planes, helicopters, cars. The list is long. This human noise is known as anthrophony and it competes with natural sounds, known as biophony.

  Krause has given examples of the ways in which human sound drowns out nature’s sounds, and how this can lead, in turn, to more sounds of silence. The Great Basin spadefoot toad digs itself down each winter, about a metre under the hard-packed desert soil of the American West. In the spring, when there’s enough moisture both in the soil and pooling into puddles on top of it, the toads will dig themselves to the surface and gather around the temporary water sources. They then launch into a harmonious chorus: both because they’re looking for mates, and because if they vocalise in sync it makes it difficult for predators like coyotes to single out any individual for a meal. Recently, however, one of their habitats has been favoured by US Navy jet pilots flying over at speeds greater than 1100 kilometres an hour only a couple of hundred metres above ground level. Krause found that the noise masked the sound of the chorusing toads so they couldn’t harmonise. After each fly-by, it took the toads forty-five minutes to resume their chorusing—during which time, under a full moon, Krause watched as two coyotes came in to pick them off.

  You can listen, if you are brave enough, to the final chittering of the last Christmas Island pipistrelle bat as it calls, searching for others of its kind. It received no reciprocal call and was never heard from again. Scientists warned the federal government about the ‘looming catastrophe’,11 but the government prevaricated—back and forth, back and forth—for three years, by which time it was too late.

  Da!

  Fort!

  Thirty-five per cent of all global mammal extinctions since 1500 have been Australian, and ten per cent of all reptile extinctions. That is thirty out of eighty-four worldwide. We have the worst mammal extinction rate in the world and a massive 1700 species of our animals and plants are listed by the Australian Government as being at risk of extinction.12 Federal laws have been put in place to protect the ecosystems of a host of rare species, but scientists recently took satellite data of forest and bushland that had been logged or bulldozed, and overlaid it with maps of threatened-species habitat. They found 7.6 million hectares of that habitat had been destroyed between 2000 and 2017. Animals particularly affected include the koala, cassowary, greater glider and several bird species. In the middle of 2018 the Senate opened an inquiry into the extinction crisis. Issues raised included poor monitoring of extant laws, cuts to environment department budgets, poor coordination between state and federal departments, failure to implement management plans—though less than forty per cent of our threatened species even have management plans—and a lack of accountability. Australia has not listed a critical habitat for protection on the federal register for more than a decade.13 Whether this inquiry will lead to effective changes in a timely manner it’s hard to tell. History suggests not.

  Dan Flores writes that the yodel of the coyote is ‘inseparable from the silvery wash of the planets and the high moons of winter night skies’.14 James Woodford describes the dingo’s yowl as ‘haunting and beautiful’. Deborah Rose has

  heard the dingoes singing across the cliffs and gorges, across plains and deserts, and I cannot really comprehend that no matter how bright the night, or how sweet the air, there may come a day when we’ll never hear them sing like that, ever. Not to their Sisters in the Sky country, or to the hunter in the Sky and on Earth, or for the love of their own kind, or in celebration of their own way of being in the world.15

  The knowledge of our undoing flickers, as if in the periphery of my vision, and such a flicker comes to me unbidden. I am back—on another trip, in a drier season—in Kakadu National Park, driving back to the campsite at the misnamed South Alligator grounds. It’s after dark. There is no moon. Dingoes race along the road’s embankment and keep pace, momentarily, with the car. It’s exhilarating. They are powerful and pale. Wild. Their paws move steadily over the red earth. Small fires lick all around us—it is burn-off time—and the flames light the dingoes’ way through this darkest of nights.

  ____________________

  1 ‘Paper Tiger’, Brooke Jarvis, New Yorker, July 2, 2018.

  2 The Dog Fence, James Woodford, Text Publishing, 2003.

  3 Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, Deborah Bird Rose, University of Virginia Press, 2011.

  4 Europe: A Natural History, Tim Flannery, Text Publishing, 2018, p. 158.

  5 Flannery, 2018, pp. 178 ff.

  6 Coyote America, Dan Flores, Basic Books, 2016, p. 23.

  7 First published in theNew Yorker, and then as a book. The book is out of print, but the New Yorker articles can still be read online: www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/06/16/silent-spring-part-1

  8 Flannery, 2018, pp. 294–5.

  9 Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy, Sophie Cunningham, Text Publishing, 2014.

  10 ‘The Voice of the Natural World’, Bernie Krause, TED Talk, August 27, 2014.

  11 ‘Unmourned death of a sole survivor’, Tim Flannery, Sydney Morning Herald, November 17, 2012.

  12 australianwildlife.org

  13 ‘Senate launches inquiry into threatened species “extinction crisis”’, Lisa Cox, Guardian, June 27, 2018.

  14 Flores, p. 137.

  15 Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming.

  OLIVE TREE

  (Olea europaea)

  Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and clout. When I’m building and landscaping golf courses, I love to buy beautiful trees. Sometimes, though, those trees aren’t in nurseries; sometimes they are in a person’s backyard. I’ll be driving down the highway, see a great tree, and ask my limo driver to pull over. I’ll knock on the door. Usually, a woman will answer the door, and I’ll say, ‘Hi, lady. I’d love to buy your tree.’ She’ll say, ‘Oh my god! It’s Donald Trump! I can’t believe this is happening!’ And then I’ll tell her that I’m building a golf course nearby…Usually, I’ll get the tree. I’ve bought a lot of great trees that way…Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure as hell can buy some great trees.

  DONALD TRUMP, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire

  A FRIEND recently confessed to me, quite seriously, that she had fallen in love with a tree and needed to spend some time with it every day, preferably lying under its full boughs. I did not find this strange, and the affair became all the more explicable when I learned the tree in question was an olive.

  When I recently h
ad the opportunity to stay in whitewashed Trulli, in an olive grove built on deep red soil, I was in tree heaven. The trees were heavily pruned to maximise productiveness. In Puglia olive crowns can be cropped a cono, a cilindro, a vaso, a vaso polifinicos, a vaso cespugliato. Farmers in northern Puglia prune trees so they resemble ‘crooked old people, who have been frozen in a stop dance. Further south in Salento cropped olive crowns are formed like cups, letting plenty of light into the middle of the trees.’1 That’s what the trees were that surrounded us where we were staying in Ostuni: cups.

  There are up to 60 million olive trees in Puglia, Italy, and they produce forty per cent of Italy’s olive oil. About half a million of these trees are described as ‘ancient’, which means at least centuries old, and can mean millennia. These groves are the oldest and largest group of millenarian plants in the world. Gnarled, twisted, knotted, they are also well past their olive oil–producing prime. That is of no concern to tourists like me, but may explain why the trees are geotagged, a modern affectation made necessary by the trade in stolen ancient trees. These old unproductive trees not only take up space, they have to be pruned at regular intervals so it’s possible that some farmers aren’t totally aghast when they wake up one morning to find a huge hole where an ancient olive stood. The trees, which can fetch as much as twenty thousand Australian dollars on the black market, somehow find their way into the landscaped gardens of wealthy northern Italians. Similar thefts are occurring in Spain, Greece and Palestine. Puglia, though, is the first region to draft laws to protect the trees. There are steep fines for the removal of more than five trees per farm.