by Ellen Levy
That autumn, I beg my dean to allow me, a term before I’m scheduled to graduate, to change my major from economics and Latin American studies to history. In the end, after much entreaty, I get my way. I sign up for a ridiculous number of history classes in order to meet the requirements of the major, and opt—in the end—to write the required senior thesis on eschatological narratives—stories, that is, of the world’s end.
Specifically, I look at nuclear winter theory to examine whether—despite its scientific grounding—it inadvertently relies on Judeo-Christian myth for the formulation of its predictions. I take my cue from an essay by Perry Miller, the Harvard historian, and argue that though we’re inclined to think that faith and science took different paths after the Copernican revolution, we are wrong: as much as the language of natural science informs Christian exegesis of apocalypse, so, sadly, do we find in the history of scientific development a disconcerting reliance on Judeo-Christian myth.
The development of atomic weaponry especially (and the language of nuclear winter theory as well) bears the unmistakable lineaments of Judeo-Christian apocalypse, the vain hope that by bringing about catastrophe we may bring about rebirth. It’s not a difficult argument to make, and Perry makes it well: the development of atomic weaponry is crudely adorned with religious imagery—from the naming of the first atomic test (the Trinity) to Oppenheimer’s famous quoting of Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as he watched the first mushroom cloud rise over White Sands. More important than Perry’s analysis are the questions he raises: Are we risking destroying the world in the vain unacknowledged hope that cataclysmic destruction will bring about the Kingdom of God? Where is God’s judgment if we are the ones to pull the trigger?
Every culture, Mircea Eliade argues, has its myth of the end, a story of the slow steady decline of the peopled world, its degradation and decline from paradise into horror, culminating in flood or fire, apocalypse, from which will come rebirth, a new beginning, a kingdom on earth, cleansed.
We like to think that reasoned science can save us from pursuing myth blindly into hell. But we’re wrong to assume that we can keep myth or faith out of scientific inquiry. We can’t. Or haven’t yet. Newton, the father of modern scientific thought, spent his retirement defining a key to the book of Revelations.
I concluded my hundred-page thesis on a plea, arguing that danger lies less in the threat of nuclear winter than in our attachment to the idea of a perfectible world, in our attachment to the Judeo-Christian notion that destruction can lead to our redemption, can lead us to a greater good, a Blessed End. I argued that if we are not careful, we may well destroy ourselves and all we love in the pursuit of suspect improvement, specious development, not realizing until it is too late that the world and we are, after all, enough as we are. We must relinquish the hope of perfection, embrace the flawed, settle for safeguarding the miraculous imperfect world, the lovely chaos of things, what is.
Amazon Snapshot #15
When I return to the United States a few months later to complete my senior year of college, I will date a terrifically handsome guy at Yale, a beautiful boy with thick black hair, dense and glossy as a horse’s mane (a sweet-tempered and untormented soul who will grow up to be a psychologist in upstate New York), who will tell me in his room late one night when it seems the world is sleeping and we are inventing it all, that I have just explained the philosophy of Martin Buber to him. I hadn’t read Buber at the time; I’m not sure that I’d even heard of him (I studied economics, knew little of philosophy). I thought we had been talking about love.
I had been explaining to him that I knew that I loved a person if I could not say why I loved him or her. If I were able to enumerate a person’s qualities—I knew that it wasn’t love I felt (I was describing a prized possession, a commodity). But if I could not say why I loved a person—if I could not explain or enumerate his or her virtues—I knew it was love, something that existed between us, a feeling worthy of the name.
He told me that Buber had said much the same thing in his book I and Thou, which my friend had read in a philosophy class the previous term and puzzled over. Buber, a nineteenth-century Jewish mystic and philosopher, describes precisely these two types of relationships, which he terms an I-It relationship (in which we experience the other as an object) and I-Thou (in which we are each a subject, each a being with a soul).
Buber maintains that every time we speak of something separate from ourselves, we conjure a self. So, how we speak of what is not ourselves—a woman, a man, a forest—determines the self we bring into being. If we see a world of objects, the self we evoke (the “I”) will be an object as well. If we see a world of souls, beings vast and remarkable, the self or “I” that we are invoke is a holy thing, vast and remarkable. “Relation,” Buber wrote, “is mutual.”
I don’t remember how our conversation ended that night; but our relationship ended soon after. Twenty years later, I can see that the conversation that night was the beginning of a change—incremental as loss—or, if not precisely that conversation, then ones like it that year that followed my return from the rain forest, when I began to see that the logic of the marketplace and its corrolary self-improvement might not after all be the only or even the best option.
It would be years before I would see that the logic that I applied to myself then was our culture’s logic and was wrong. The logic with which I viewed myself at twenty-one was that of the American dream: fueled by that all-American ambition to make something of oneself (as if a life were merely raw material to be made ready for the marketplace, a promising resource), a commodity to be improved upon and sold, like a forest or a body.
I didn’t yet know how my time in the Amazon had changed me, and that I had already come to the end of that logic and would have to seek a new one—as perhaps our culture will, too.
Epilogue
Flying into Manaus—the largest city in the Amazon—twenty years after I first visited the rain forest, I was thinking about Manhattan, the city where my father’s family lives and which feels to me like my true home, maybe because the city’s messy restless yearning feels so like my own, or because that’s where I first lived with a woman I loved. Manaus—a city of 3 million people on the bank of the world’s largest river—looks like nothing so much as a chunk of Queens shoved like a splinter into the flank of the forest, which stretches out seemingly endlessly to the horizon.
The forest from the air looks rumpled and green, like broccoli crowns or a verdant quilt—from the air, it seems to have largely survived the ravages of development I’d studied twenty years before as an undergraduate at Yale. In fact, the forest has: some 80 percent remains intact, defying the dire predictions of the early 1980s—activism and a lousy economy having slowed deforestation in the last twenty years.
But the forest’s future is far from secure. Although deforestation rates have been variable, the loss has been consistent and significant since the 1970s. In 2004, scientists recorded the second largest loss of rain forest on record in more than twenty years. More than 10,000 square miles of forest were destroyed that year in 2004—the equivalent of 500 Manhattans. In just five months in 2007, an area the size of Rhode Island (more than 3,200 square kilometers, or 1,200 square miles) was lost.
Such figures are hard to focus on; to say such loss is more acreage than the tiny contested country of Israel, or so many football fields per minute or hour may be accurate, but it makes my eyes blur. So I imagine the loss this way, as personal:
It is as if each day a conflagration were to tear through Manhattan, from the tip of Battery Park to the cloisters on the island’s northern tip; as if every twenty-four hours, Manhattan’s 23 square miles were to be consumed by fire or bulldozer. Like this: at daybreak, Battery Park would be set on fire, the flames stretching from the Hudson to the East River, consuming ten blocks each hour, as it drifted north; the blaze would claim Wall Street and the little white church down there, scorching Tribeca and Chinatown and Little Italy; bulldo
zers would tear up the ginkgoes on Perry Street, taking out the White Horse Tavern, the charming Ukrainian restaurants on the lower East Side; by 10:30 a.m. the Flat Iron building, the Chelsea Hotel, and London Terrace would go up in smoke, along with the fashionable galleries, the garment district and Hell’s Kitchen, the obscure neighborhoods on the east side in the Thirties; by noon the public library at Forty-second and the lovely shade of Bryant Park would be gone; the MoMA, the Plaza, and the southern edge of Central Park would be ablaze by 1 p.m.; the Frick, the Met, the Guggenheim would be tinder by late afternoon; St. John the Divine would be afire by sun-set; into the night Harlem would burn and the Cloisters until everything below 220th Street would be gone by dawn. (Every other month, the fire would consume the other boroughs as well.)
And the next morning—each morning—the destruction would happen again. Every day. Three hundred and sixty-five times a year.
Such destruction would be—as one researcher in the Amazon recently said of the devastation there—“impressive.”
Flying over the Amazon, seeing the vast oceanic green of the forest from a plane, it is hard to imagine the forest as finite—just as it has been difficult, despite forty years of warnings—to imagine global climate change, a world warmed or suddenly cooled—but given time, a forest can become a desert (as the Sahara has), a global climate can change. Because we’re talking about an area the size of the continental United States, it’s hard to imagine the Amazon rain forest as limited, but at the rate of 10,000 square miles per year, what remains of Brazil’s rain forest could be gone in less than forty years. A geologic blink of the eye.
“There are few human accomplishments on the planet that are viewable from space,” writes Howard Lyman in his 1998 bestseller Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat. One, he claims, are “the fires that are burning in the Brazilian rain forest.”
Lyman notes that in the late 1990s “as many as seven-thousand [fires] have been detected burning in the Amazon in one day” and that “more of Brazil is aflame now than ever before.” Most of the land cleared each year—an area roughly equivalent to the state of Massachusetts—is for cattle pasture, though increasingly for soybeans as well. (In 2003, more than 20 percent of the state of Mato Grosso’s forests were converted to cropland. Agricultural production of soya, mainly used to feed animals, has become one of the greatest causes of deforestation.) “Humanity is rich in folly,” Lyman writes, “but it’s hard to think of a folly more mind-bogglingly stupendous than that of transforming infinitely rich, diverse, dense jungle into desert in a few years time for the sake of a few more hamburgers.”
According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the desk beside me, memory is “related to MOURN.” But there is pleasure, too, in remembering.
I remember lying in a hammock on a platform in the Amazon in the heat of a late July afternoon, on my last trip to the Amazon, swinging to catch a breeze, when I heard a sigh, a heavy exhalation of breath, then the slur of water. I looked up, expecting to see my roommate there, but there was no one. They had all gone off to do something useful with the afternoon, while I lay idle.
I heard another cough and turned to the river where I saw the smooth arc of a pink dolphin break the surface, exhale, inhale, and submerge again. The tea-brown river was messy with fluff and leaves, the far bank unruly with foliage—apple green, dark ivy, the white trunks of trees.
There is a sentimental school of thought that maintains that wilderness is a repository of divinity, a source of spiritual rejuvenation, our spiritual fountain of youth. But I don’t buy it; I’ve come to believe that the divinity we seek is in us, that we’re at risk of forgetting it in our drive to turn the world into trinkets. Preserving wilderness, we preserve what is best in ourselves, the ability to recognize what is irreducible to commodity or object.
Perhaps wanting to save the rain forest, I was trying to save beings nearer at hand whose peril was less obvious to me: my mother, whose despair was an urgent beacon throughout my youth; or myself, a young woman afraid of where love might lead if she allowed herself to feel. Looking back, it seems clear that I loved Nel, desired Isa, in ways that I could not acknowledge then.
In those days I mistrusted passion; I had not yet experienced the illuminating love that is beyond all judgment or calculation, love like a benediction that makes clear that we do not need to earn our place, calculate our value, that we have an inestimable value all our own before we do a thing, as does a forest or a star. Love like great joy was a thing I would discover late, at twenty-five, in a woman’s arms. And when I do, I will realize that my desperate youthful desire to “make something of myself” and “to get somewhere in life” has been misguided; that there is nowhere to get to, that it is all, already, here.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Clair Willcox at the University of Missouri Press for his insightful editing, admirable patience, and for giving this book a second chance; the wonderful writer S. L. Wisenberg read this manuscript with generosity and tremendous acuity and gave me the greatest gift a writer could ask—making my work look smarter for her efforts. I owe special thanks to H. Emerson “Chip” Blake at Orion Magazine, who accepted and improved upon the essay that would become this book; thanks, too, to the editors at Writer’s Digest who saw fit on the basis of that slim piece to name me among their twenty-five nonfiction writers to watch in the new millennium. I am tremendously grateful to everyone at the University of Missouri Press, whose great skill and generous efforts have made this book possible and better: Beth Chandler, Sara Davis, Daren Dean, Jennifer Gravley, and Lyn Smith. My thanks to Kathleen Anderson, for her efforts. I owe a debt of deep gratitude to friends and writers who inspired and generously read this in manuscript, and to the organizations that offered funding and shelter to support it: Lauren Fox, Gretchen Legler, Howard Levy, Virginia Levy, Marge and Sy Levy, Sawnie Morris, Nicholas Delbanco, Lisa Schamess, Cheryl Strayed, and the wonderful writing group in Washington (Katharine Davis, Ann McLaughlin, Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Amy Stolls), the Sacatar Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. I want to thank Terry Tempest Williams for her inspiration as an artist and activist, and Philip Fearnside, for his efforts to turn the tide. I am grateful to the extraordinary faculty at Ohio State University: Lee K. Abbott, Michelle Herman, Lee Martin, Bill Roorbach, and Melanie Rae Thon. A special thanks to Cleveland Park Coop friends Dierdre Ball and Philip Benson, without whose milagro and faith this book would not have been completed; Susan Bradfield, whose efforts to protect wild birds inspires me daily; and Kyoko Mori and Andrea Way, who literally gave me shelter. I am most grateful to my dearest friend, Maureen Stanton, a fierce advocate for the environment and a brilliant writer of creative nonfiction, whose remarkable memoirs and literary journalism inspired me to try my hand at this, and without whose help this would not have been begun or finished. Finally, my deepest thanks to my family and to Bill, for helping me find the happy ending.
