Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  The whole argument by utility may be one of the most dangerous strategic errors that the environmental movement has made. The best reason for saving the snail darter was this: precisely because it is flat useless. That’s what makes it special. It wasn’t put there, in the Little Tennessee River; it has no ironclad reason for being there; it is simply there. A hydroelectric dam, which can be built in a mere ten years for a mere $119 million, will have utility on its side of the balance against snail darter genes, if not now, then at some future time when the cost of electricity has risen above the cost of recreating (or approximating) the snail darter through genetic engineering. A snail darter arrived at the hard way, the Darwinian way, through millions of years of random variation and natural selection, reaching its culmination in a small homely animal roughly resembling a sculpin, is something far more precious than a net asset in potential utility. What then, exactly? That isn’t easy to say, without gibbering in transcendental tones. But something more than a floppy disk storing coded genetic lingo for a rainy day.

  Another example: On a Sunday in May 1972, an addled Hungarian named Laszlo Toth jumped a railing in St. Peter’s Basilica and took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà, knocking the nose off the figure of Mary, and part of her lowered eyelid, and her right arm at the elbow. The world groaned. Italian officials charged Toth with crimes worth a maximum total of nine years’ imprisonment. Some people, but no one of liberal disposition, declared that capital punishment would be more appropriate. In fact, what probably should have been done was to let Italian police sergeants take Toth into a Roman alley and smack his nose off, and part of his eyelid, and his arm at the elbow, with a hammer. The Pietà was at that time 473 years old, the only signed sculpture by the greatest sculptor in human history. I don’t know whether Laszlo Toth served the full nine years, but very likely not. Deoclecio Redig de Campos, of the Vatican art-restoration laboratories, said at the time that restoring the sculpture, with glue and stucco and substitute bits of marble, would be “an awesome task that might take three years,” but later he cheered up some and amended that to “a matter of months.” You and I know better. The Michelangelo Pietà is gone. The Michelangelo/de Campos Pietà is the one now back on display. There is a large difference. What exactly is the difference? Again hard to say, but it has much to do with the snail darter.

  Sage editorialists wrote that Toth’s vandalism was viewed by some as an act of leftist political symbolism: “Esthetics must bow to social change, even if in the process the beautiful must be destroyed, as in Paris during les événements, when students scrawled across paintings ‘No More Masterpieces.’ So long as human beings do not eat, we must break up ecclesiastical plate and buy bread.” The balance of utility had tipped. The only directly useful form of art, after all, is that which we call pornography.

  Still another example: In May 1945 the Target Committee of scientists and ordnance experts from the Manhattan Project met to hash out a list of the best potential Japanese targets for the American atomic bomb. At the top of the list they placed Kyoto, an industrial center inhabited by one million people, which happened also to be the ancient capital of Japan, for eleven centuries the source of much that was beautiful in Japanese civilization, and the site of many gorgeous and sacred Shinto shrines. The target list circulated to a small circle of Washington policy-makers, among whom was Henry L. Stimson, Harry Truman’s inherited secretary of war. Stimson was no softie. He was a stubbornly humane old man who had years earlier served as secretary of war under William Howard Taft, then as secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. The notion of targeting Kyoto put his back up. “This is one time I’m going to be the final deciding authority. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on this. On this matter I am the kingpin.” And he struck the city of shrines off the list. Truman concurred. Think what you will of the subsequent bombing of Hiroshima—unspeakably barbarous act, most justifiable act under the circumstances, possibly both; still, the sparing of Kyoto, acknowledged as a superior target in military terms, was possibly the most imaginative decision that Harry Truman was ever advised and persuaded to make. In May 1945, the shrines of Kyoto did not enjoy the balance of utility.

  “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing), or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.” This was written by Jeremy Bentham, the English legal scholar of the eighteenth century who founded that school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. He also wrote, in Principles of Morals and Legislation, that “an action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility…when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.” In more familiar words, moral tenets and legislation should always be such as to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. And “the greatest number” has generally been taken to mean (though Bentham himself might not have agreed: see “Animal Rights and Beyond,” above) the greatest number of humans.

  This is a nefariously sensible philosophy. If it had been adhered to strictly throughout the world since Bentham enunciated it, there would now be no ecclesiastical plate or jeweled papal chalices, no symphony orchestras, no ballet companies, no Picassos, no Apollo moon landings, no well-preserved Kyoto. Had it been retroactive, there would be no Egyptian pyramids, no Taj Mahal, no texts of Plato; nor would there have been any amassing of wealth by Florentine oligarchs and hence no Italian Renaissance; finally, therefore, no Pietà, not even a mangled one. And if Bentham’s principle of utility—in its economic formulation, or in thermodynamic terms, or even in biomedical ones—is applied today and tomorrow as the ultimate standard for matters of legislation, let alone morals, then there will eventually be no parasitic microbes and no mosquitoes and no man-eating crocodiles and no snail darters and no…

  But we were talking about the Big Hole grayling. George Liknes was finding few, and none at all near the string of car bodies, and this worried me. I had strong personal feelings toward the grayling of the Big Hole. What sort of feelings? “Proprietary” is not the right word—too presumptuous; rather, something in the vein of “cherishing” and “reliance.” I had come to count on the fact, for cheer and solace in a very slight way, that they were there, that they existed—beautiful, dumb, and useless—in the upper reaches of that particular river. It had happened because I had gone up there each year for a number of years—usually in late August, which is the start of autumn in the Big Hole Valley, or in early September—with two hulking Irishmen, brothers. Each year, stealing two days for this pilgrimage just as the first cottonwoods were taking on patches of yellow, we three together visited the grayling.

  At that time of year the Big Hole grayling are feeding, mainly in the mornings, on a plague of tiny dark mayflies belonging to the genus Tricorythodes and known casually by the shorthand “trikes.” A trike is roughly the size of a caraway seed, black-bodied with pale milky wings. Inconsiderable as individuals, they appear on the water by the millions, and the grayling line up (in certain areas) to sip at them. The trike hatch happens every August and September, beginning each morning when the sun begins warming the water, continuing daily for more than a month, and it is one of the reasons thirty-one grayling can be caught in a few hours. The trike hatch was built into my understanding with the Irishmen, an integral part of the yearly ritual. Trike time, time to visit the Big Hole grayling.

  Not stalk, not confront, certainly not kill and eat; visit. No great angling thrills attach to catching grayling. You don’t fish at them for the satisfaction of fooling a crafty animal on its own terms or fighting a wild little teakettle battle across the tenuous connection of a fine monofilament leader, as you do with trout. The whole context o
f expectations and rewards is different. You catch grayling to visit them: to hold one carefully in the water, hook freed, dorsal flaring, and gape at the colors, and then watch as it dashes away. This is good for a person, though it could never be the greatest good for the greatest number. I had visited them regularly at trike time with the two Irishmen, including the autumn of the younger brother’s divorce, and during the days just before the birth of the older brother’s first daughter, and through some personal weather of my own. So I did not want to hear about a Big Hole River that was empty of grayling.

  A fair question to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks is this: If these fish constitute a unique and historic population, a wonderful zoological rarity within the lower forty-eight states, why let a person kill five in a day for cat food? FWP biologists have offered three standard answers: 1) They, the departmental biologists, possessed no reliable data (until George Liknes finished his master’s thesis) on the Big Hole grayling, and they do not like to recommend changes in management regulations except on the basis of data; 2) grayling are very fecund—a female will sometimes lay more than 10,000 eggs—and so it’s the availability of habitat and infant mortality and competition with trout that limit grayling population levels, not fishing pressure; finally 3) these grayling are glacial relicts, meaning that they have been left behind in this marginal habitat and are naturally doomed to elimination by climate change, with all adverse actions of mankind only accelerating that inevitability.

  And yet 1) over a period of twenty-five years, evidently without the basic data that would have revealed such efforts as counterproductive, FWP spent large sums of money to burden the Big Hole grayling with 5 million hatchery outsiders; 2) though fishermen are admittedly not the limiting factor on the total number of grayling in the river, they can easily affect the number of large, successful, genetically gifted spawning stock in the population, since those are precisely the individual fish that fishermen, unlike high temperatures or low oxygen concentrations or competitive trout, kill in disproportionate numbers. There might be money for more vigorous pursuit of data, there might be support for protecting the grayling from cats, but the critical constituency involved here is fishermen, and the balance of utility is not on the side of the grayling. As for 3), not only have the rivers of Montana grown warmer with the end of the Pleistocene, but Earth generally is warming, thanks to human actions and probably also larger geophysical considerations; in fact, our little planet is falling slowly, inexorably out of orbit and into the sun; and the sun itself is meanwhile dying. So all earthly wildlife is doomed to eventual elimination, the world will end, the solar system will end, and mankind is only et cetera.

  The year before last, the Irishmen and I missed our visit. The older brother had a second daughter coming, and the younger brother was in Germany, in the army, soon to have a second wife. I could have gone alone but I didn’t. So all I knew of Thymallus arcticus on the upper Big Hole was what I heard from George Liknes: not good. Through the winter I asked FWP biologists for news of the Big Hole grayling: not good.

  Then one day in late August last year, I sneaked away and drove up the Big Hole toward the town of Wisdom, specifically for a visit. I stopped when I saw a promising stretch of water, a spot I had never fished or even noticed before, though it wasn’t too far from the string of car bodies. I didn’t know what I would find, if anything. On the third cast I made contact with a twelve-inch grayling, largish for the Big Hole within my memory. Between sun-on-the-water and noon, using a small fly resembling a Tricorythodes, I caught and released as many grayling as ever. As many as I needed.

  I could tell you where to look for them. I could suggest how you might fish for them, but that’s not the point here. You can find them yourself if you need to. Likewise, it’s tempting to suggest where you might send letters, whom you might pester, what pressures you might apply on behalf of these useless fish; again, not exactly the point. I merely wanted to let you know: They are there.

  Irishmen, the grayling are still there, yes. Please listen, the rest of you: They are there, the Big Hole grayling. At least for now.

  Yin and Yang in the Tularosa Basin

  IN THE OUTBACK OF SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO, laid down across a thousand square miles of otherwise unexceptional desert, there is a message.

  It is gigantic and stark. A simple design, vaguely familiar, executed in unearthly black-and-white against the brown desert ground. You could see it from the moon with a cheap telescope. Nevertheless, it is more cryptic than Stonehenge. An army of zealous Chinese masons might have spent their lifetimes erecting such a thing—but no, that’s not where it came from. The full design includes four elements, only two of those manmade, the others attributable to natural processes of the sort that are loosely called “acts of God.” In the desert, as Moses found out, God seems to act with an especially bold hand. The constituent materials in this particular case are basalt rock and gypsum sand; black and white, rough and smooth, hard and soft; dissimilar as fire and ice. The message is drawn in high contrast. The text is clear but the meaning is not.

  A dune field of startling whiteness, called the White Sands, sprawls out in giant amoeboid shape, creeping northeastward with the winds. A hardened black flow of recent volcanic lava, called the Carrizozo Malpais, stretches southwestward down the gentle incline along which gravity pulled it from its point of emergence through the earthly crust. Near an old ranch site known as Three Rivers, the leading edge of the whiteness approaches the forward lip of the blackness, leaving a gap of not many miles. Through that gap runs a narrow range road, open for public travel only one day a year. Where the road goes, and why armed men in guardhouses monitor its disuse, are questions for later. The oddities about this place will have to be taken in turn. We are in the Tularosa Basin, a sunken valley full of saltbush and lizards and history, gypsum and lava, plus more than its share of preternatural romance, lying halfway between Las Cruces and Roswell on the way to nowhere at all. We are here, first of all, for the big design.

  The design: Superimposed on the desert by a convergence of geological accidents, it is an unmistakable yin and yang, a huge magnification of the Taoist emblem that stands for the paradox of dialectical oneness—two teardrops bound complementarily into a circle, dark and light, head to tail, representing the unity within which all worldly flux remains balanced. In this particular case, the emblem is as large as Long Island. From the moon or beyond, with your telescope, you might take it for a symbol of harmony. The confusion would be understandable.

  An abundance of gypsum was the earliest of those geological accidents.

  Gypsum is curious stuff from which to make a dune field. In scientific notation it is CaSO4 • 2H2O, meaning simply the mineral calcium sulphate, bound up in crystalline form with a proportion of plain water. More familiarly, it is the main ingredient of plaster of paris. Under ideal conditions, falling out of a heavy solution, it grows into elegant daggerlike crystals called selenite, which are more or less clear or amber, depending on purity. But as erosional forces break selenite down into small granules—sand—the faces of those granules, being relatively soft, become scratched. The scratches scatter light. The result is whiteness. You hear the name White Sands, but until you make your own pilgrimage, until you lose yourself in the heart of these dunes with only a canteen and a compass, the words are unlikely to register as they should.

  Take them literally. White sands. Whiteness like ivory. Like the sun-bleached skull of a lost desert cow. Whiteness like January in the Absaroka Mountains between Montana and Wyoming, 200 yards above timberline. Actually there is nothing and nowhere else quite like White Sands, the world’s largest expanse of wind-blown gypsum. Nowhere else on Earth where you can surround yourself with such profound whiteness and still be in danger of snakebite. The white dunes began forming perhaps 25,000 years ago, but the gypsum has been here much longer.

  It was deposited during the late Paleozoic era, gypsum-rich layers of sedimentary rock left behind from
gypsum-rich seawaters as the long cycles of climate moved an ocean coast back and forth over what is now southern New Mexico. Other sediments were left in the course of other cycles, burying the gypsum beneath hundreds of feet of limestone and shale. It might have stayed there, inert and hidden, like most of the gypsum in Earth’s crust, if not for the next accident. Geological pressures that were creating the Rocky Mountains also caused this particular area to buckle upward into a high rounded plateau. Roughly 10 million years ago, another shifting of pressures caused a pair of fault lines to develop, running north-south for a hundred miles; and along these faults, the plateau fell like a startled cake. The parallel fault lines became a matched set of continuous escarpments, mountainous walls, facing each other over a sunken basin. On the east side looking west was what’s now called the Sacramento range; on the west looking east, the San Andres. In between was the Tularosa.

  To the north and south also, the Tularosa was blocked by high ground. Like many valleys in the desert country of the West, it had no outlet to the sea. So when the next cycle of wetness began, this basin turned into a vast lake.

  Erosional torrents flowed down from the mountains to fill it, and (because the mineral is easily eroded and highly soluble) those waters carried gypsum. The lake in its turn became gypsum-rich. Then our most recent age of relative drought dried it away to almost nothing. The waters shrank gradually back to the lowest spot in the basin, a small area toward the southwest corner, and as the big lake gave up the ghost, it also gave up the gypsum. Meanwhile groundwater flow from the upper end of the basin also carried dissolved gypsum, underground, toward the same spot. These days Lake Lucero is never more than a briny puddle, shin-deep at the end of the monsoon season. For most of the year, it is only a dry bed. But it derives a mute dignity from being the source of the White Sands.