The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen

  To answer the question, it’s important to acknowledge that drastic planetary overheating is a done deal. Even in the nations most threatened by flooding or drought, even in the countries most virtuously committed to alternative energy sources, no head of state has ever made a commitment to leaving any carbon in the ground. Without such a commitment, “alternative” merely means “additional”—postponement of human catastrophe, not prevention. The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient with bad cancer. We can choose to treat it with disfiguring aggression, damming every river and blighting every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can adopt a course of treatment that permits a higher quality of life, still fighting the disease but protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the latter approach is that, if a miracle cure like fusion energy should come along, or if global consumption rates and population should ever decline, there might still be some intact ecosystems to save.

  Choosing to preserve nature at potential human expense would be morally more unsettling if nature still had the upper hand. But we live in the Anthropocene—in a world ever more of our own making. Near the end of Jamieson’s chapter on ethics, he poses the question of whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the arcadian Manhattan of 1630, lushly forested and teeming with fish and birds, became the modern Manhattan of the High Line and the Metropolitan Museum. Different people will give different answers. The point is that the change occurred and can’t be undone, as global warming can’t be undone. We were bequeathed a world of goods and bads by our forebears, and we’ll bequeath a world of different goods and bads to our descendants. We’ve always been not only universal despoilers but brilliant adapters; climate change is just the same old story writ larger. The only self-inflicted existential threats to our species are nuclear war and genetically modified microorganisms.

  The story that is genuinely new is that we’re causing mass extinctions. Not everyone cares about wild animals, but the people who consider them an irreplaceable, non-monetizable good have a positive ethical argument to make on their behalf. It’s the same argument that Rachel Carson made in Silent Spring, the book that ignited the modern environmental movement. Carson did warn of the dangers of pollution to human beings, but the moral center of her book was implicit in its title: Are we really okay with eliminating birds from the world? The dangers of carbon pollution today are far greater than those of DDT, and climate change may indeed be, as the National Audubon Society says, the foremost long-term threat to birds. But I already know that we can’t prevent global warming by changing our lightbulbs. I still want to do something.

  In Annie Hall, when the young Alvy Singer stopped doing his homework, his mother took him to a psychiatrist. It turned out that Alvy had read that the universe is expanding, which would surely lead to its breaking apart someday, and to him this was an argument for not doing his homework: “What’s the point?” Under the shadow of vast global problems and vast global remedies, smaller-scale actions on behalf of nature can seem similarly meaningless. But Alvy’s mother was having none of it. “You’re here in Brooklyn!” she said. “Brooklyn is not expanding!” It all depends on what we mean by meaning.

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  Climate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably disruptive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward global monoculture—the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech, whether through the efficiencies of Uber or some masterstroke of geoengineering, can solve the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions. As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as “Markets are efficient.” The story can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked.

  Conservation work, in contrast, is novelistic. No two places are alike, and no narrative is simple. When I traveled to Peru last November to see the work of a Peruvian-American partnership, the Amazon Conservation Association, my first stop was at a small indigenous community in the highlands east of Cuzco. With Amazon Conservation’s help, the community is reforesting Andean slopes, suppressing forest fires, and developing a business in a local legume called tarwi, which can thrive on degraded land and is popular enough in Cuzco to be profitable. In an old and dusty and dirt-floored building, women from the community served me a lunch of tarwi stew and dense, sweet tarwi bread. After lunch, in a neighboring courtyard, I toured a nursery of native tree saplings that the community will hand-plant on steep slopes, to fight erosion and improve local water quality. I then visited a nearby community that has pledged to leave its forested land intact and is operating an experimental organic farm. The scale of the farm is small, but to the community it means clear streams and self-sustenance, and to Amazon Conservation it represents a model for other communities. The regional and municipal governments have money from petroleum and mining royalties, and could spend it revitalizing the highlands according to the model. “We’re not jealous,” Amazon Conservation’s Peruvian director, Daniela Pogliani, told me. “If the government wants to take our ideas and take the credit, we have no problem with it.”

  In an era of globalism of every sort, a good conservation project has to meet new criteria. The project has to be large, because biodiversity won’t survive in a habitat fragmented by palm-oil plantations or gas drilling. The project also has to respect and accommodate the people already living in and around it. (Carbon emissions have rendered meaningless the ideal of a wilderness untouched by man; the new ideal is “wildness,” which is measured not by isolation from disturbance but by the diversity of organisms that can complete their life cycles.) And the project needs to be resilient with respect to climate change, either by virtue of its size or by incorporating altitudinal gradients or multiple microclimates.

  The highlands are important to the Amazon because they’re a source of its water and because, as the planet heats up, lower-elevation species will shift their ranges upslope. The focal point for Amazon Conservation is Peru’s Manú National Park, a swath of lower-elevation rain forest larger than Connecticut. The park, which is home to indigenous groups that shun contact with the outside world, has full legal protection from encroachment, but illegal encroachment is endemic in the parks of tropical countries. What Amazon Conservation is attempting to do for Manú, besides expanding its upslope potential and protecting its watershed, is to strengthen the buffer on the flanks of the park, which are threatened by logging, slash-and-burn farming, and a boom in wildcat gold mining in the region of Madre de Dios. Even if it were politically feasible for Amazon Conservation, a half-American NGO, to simply buy up all the land, it couldn’t afford to do it. The project aspires, instead, to be a protective belt of small reserves, self-sustaining community lands, and larger conservation “concessions” on state-owned land.

  On the fifty-five-mile road down from the highlands, it’s possible to see nearly six hundred bird species. The road follows an ancient track once used to transport coca leaves from the lowlands to pre-Columbian highland civilizations. On trails near the road, Amazon Conservation researchers peaceably coexist with modern-day coca traffickers. The road bottoms out near Villa Carmen, a former hacienda that now has an educational center, a lodge for ecotourists, and an experimental farm where a substance called biochar is being tested. Biochar, which is manufactured by kiln-burning woody refuse and pulverizing the charred result, allows carbon to be sequestered in farm fields and is a low-cost way to enrich poor soil. It offers local farmers an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture, wherein forest is destroyed for cropland, the soil is quickly exhausted, and more fo
rest has to be destroyed. Even a wealthy country like Norway, seeking to offset its carbon emissions and to assuage its guilt, can’t save a rain forest simply by buying up land and putting a fence around it, because no fence is strong enough to resist social forces. The way to save a forest is to give the people who live in it alternatives to cutting it down.

  At the indigenous village of Santa Rosa de Huacaria, near Villa Carmen, the community’s cacique, Don Alberto Manqueriapa, gave me a tour of the fish farm and fish hatchery that Amazon Conservation has helped it develop. Large-scale fish farming is ecologically problematic in other parts of the world, but smaller-scale operations in the Amazon, using native fish species, such as pacu, are among the most sustainable and least destructive sources of animal protein. Huacaria’s operation provides meat for its thirty-nine families and surplus fish that it can sell for cash. Over lunch—farmed pacu fire-roasted with yuca inside segments of bamboo, with heliconia-leaf plugs at each end—Don Alberto held forth movingly on the effects of climate change that he’d seen in his lifetime. The sun felt hotter now, he said. Some of his people had developed skin cancer, unheard of in the past. Nevertheless, he was committed to the forest. Amazon Conservation is helping the community expand its land title and develop its own partnership with the national park. Don Alberto told me that a natural-medicine company had offered him a retainer and a jet in which to fly around the world and lecture on traditional healing, and that he’d turned it down.

  The most striking thing about Amazon Conservation’s work is the smallness of its constituent parts. There are the eight female pacu from which a season’s worth of eggs are taken, the humbleness of the plastic tanks in which the hatchlings live. There are the conical piles of dirt that highland women sit beside and fill little plastic bags in which to plant tree seedlings. There are the simple wooden sheds that Amazon Conservation builds for indigenous Brazil-nut harvesters to shelter the nuts from rain, and that can make the difference between earning a living income and having to cut or leave the forest. And there is the method for taking a bird census in the lowlands: you walk a hundred meters, stopping to look and listen, and then walk another hundred meters. At every turn, the smallness contrasts with the vastness of climate-change projects—the mammoth wind turbines, the horizon-reaching solar farms, the globe-encircling clouds of reflective particles that geoengineers envision. The difference in scale creates a difference in the kind of meaning that actions have for the people performing them. The meaning of climate-related actions, because they produce no discernible result, is necessarily eschatological; they refer to a Judgment Day we’re hoping to postpone. The mode of meaning of conservation in the Amazon is Franciscan: you’re helping something you love, something right in front of you, and you can see the results.

  * * *

  In much the way that developed nations, having long contributed disproportionately to carbon emissions, now expect developing nations to share the burden of reducing them, the rich but biotically poor countries of Europe and North America need tropical countries to do the work of safeguarding global biodiversity. Many of these countries are still recovering from colonialism, however, and have more urgent troubles. Very little of the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, for example, is being done by wealthy people. The deforesters are poor families displaced from more fecund regions where capital-intensive agribusinesses grow sugarcane, for ethanol and soft drinks, and eucalyptus that is pulped for American disposable diapers. The gold-mining boom in Madre de Dios is not only an ecological catastrophe but a human disaster, with widespread reports of mercury poisoning and human trafficking, but Peruvian state and federal governments have yet to put an end to it, because the miners make much better money than they could in the impoverished regions from which they’ve emigrated. Besides tailoring its work to the needs and capacities of local people, a group like Amazon Conservation has to negotiate an extremely complicated political landscape.

  In Costa Rica, I met a seventy-six-year-old tropical biologist, Daniel Janzen, who has spent nearly half his life doing just that. Janzen and his wife, Winnie Hallwachs, are the architects of perhaps the most audacious and successful conservation project in the New World tropics, the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). Janzen and Hallwachs began working on the project, in 1985, with many advantages. Costa Rica was a stable democracy whose system of parks and reserves comprised one-quarter of its land area and was internationally admired, and the northern dry-forest region of Guanacaste, the site of the project, was remote, sparsely populated, and unattractive to agribusiness. That Janzen and Hallwachs created a reserve that meets the new criteria—it is huge, has good relations with surrounding communities, and encompasses a marine reserve, the dry slopes of a volcanic cordillera, and Caribbean rain forest—is nonetheless remarkable, because they were two unwealthy scientists and the politics never ceased to be complicated.

  Costa Rica famously has no army, but its park administration has been organized like one. Headquartered in the capital, San José, it freely rotates its guards and other personnel throughout the system, with the parks functioning essentially as territories to be defended from armies of potential encroachers. Janzen and some farsighted Costa Rican policymakers recognized that, in a country where economic opportunities were limited, the amount of protected land enormous, and funding for protection strictly finite, defending parks filled with timber and game and minerals was like defending mansions in a ghetto. The ACG experimented with a new approach: the national parks and the reserves within it were exempted from the park administration’s policy of rotation, which allowed their personnel to put down roots and develop allegiance to the land and to the conservation concept, and all employees, including the police, were expected to do meaningful conservation or scientific work.

  In the early years, this work often consisted of fighting fires. Much of the present-day ACG was once ranchland covered with Africanized grasses. Using money raised with the help of the Nature Conservancy and the Swedish and Costa Rican governments, and from passing a hat after his lectures in America, Janzen was able to buy up huge chunks of pasture and damaged forest between the two existing national parks. After the cattle were removed, wildfires became the main threat to the project. Janzen experimented with planting seedlings of native tree species, but he quickly concluded that natural reforestation, with seeds carried by wind and animal droppings, worked better. Once the new forest took hold, and the fire risk diminished, he developed a more ambitious mission for the ACG’s employees: creating a complete inventory of the estimated 375,000 plant and animal species that occur within its boundaries.

  Borrowing from the term paralegal, Janzen coined the word parataxonomist for the Guanacasteans he hired. They lack university degrees, but after a period of intensive training they’re able to do real scientific work. They walk the dry Pacific-slope forest and the wet Caribbean forest, collect specimens, and mount them and take tissue samples for DNA analysis. There are currently thirty-four parataxonomists, whom Janzen is able to pay respectable salaries with grant money, interest from a small endowment, and dogged fund-raising. Janzen told me that the parataxonomists are as highly motivated and eager to learn as his best graduate students. (He teaches biology at the University of Pennsylvania.) I saw one team early on a Saturday morning collecting an assortment of leaves for the caterpillars it was raising in plastic bags, another team setting out on a Sunday morning to scour the woods for specimens.

  Of the three new criteria for successful conservation projects, integration with surrounding communities is the most difficult to meet. Janzen’s taxonomy endeavor serves this goal in several ways. Most basically, for Costa Ricans to care about biodiversity—their country, which covers 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface, contains four percent of its species—they have to know what it consists of. Biodiversity is an abstraction, but the hundreds of drawers of pinned and named Guanacastean moth specimens, in an air-conditioned room at Santa Rosa National Park, are not. Hands-on science, the s
pecific story that each toxic plant and each parasitic wasp has to tell, also provides a focus for the Guanacastean schoolchildren whom the ACG has been hosting for thirty years. If you spent a week in the dry forest as a child, examining chrysalides and ocelot droppings, you might, as an adult, see the forest as something other than a purely economic resource.

  Finally, and perhaps most important, the parataxonomists create a sense of local ownership. Some of them are husband-and-wife teams, and many live at the research stations that dot the ACG, where they exert a more powerful protective influence than armed guards ever could, because their neighbors are their friends and family. During my days at Guanacaste, I passed the station at the entrance to Santa Rosa many times and never saw a guard. By Janzen’s account, poaching and illegal logging are much rarer in the ACG than in other, traditionally guarded Costa Rican parks.

  Janzen and Hallwachs spend half the year in a tiny, cluttered hut near Santa Rosa’s headquarters. Deer, agoutis, magpie-jays, wasps, and monkeys frequent the bowls of water in front of their hut. Over the years, they’ve kept a porcupine and a pygmy owl as rescue pets; Janzen remarked to me wistfully that he wished it were possible to have a pet rattlesnake. White-bearded and shirtless, wearing only sneakers and dirty green cotton pants, he looks as if he’d walked out of a Conrad novel. Hallwachs, who is a tropical ecologist, is younger, more emollient, and skilled at converting Janzen’s scientific rationality into conventional social currency.

  The forest in Santa Rosa seemed desperately dry to me, even for a dry forest in the dry season. Hallwachs pointed to the cloud cover on the volcanoes and said that during the past fifteen years it has steadily moved upslope, a harbinger of climate change. “I used to win cases of beer betting on the date the rains would come,” Janzen said. “It was always May fifteenth, and now you don’t know when they’re going to come.” He added that insect populations in Guanacaste had collapsed in the four decades he’d been studying them, and that he’d thought of describing the collapse in a paper, but what would be the point? It would only depress people. The loss of insect species is already harming the birds that eat them and the plants that need pollination, and the losses will surely continue as the planet warms. But to Janzen the warming doesn’t obviate the ACG. “If you had the only Rembrandt in the world,” he said, “and somebody came and slashed it with a knife—would you throw it away?”