ANYBODY HOME?

A pair of house finches have brought me a mini-Darwinian insight this morning. (The variety of the finches in the Galapagos Islands helped shaped his thoughts on evolution.) As the sunrise extended to the feeder by my office window I watched a female finch picking out sorghum and sunflower seeds. Above her on the arch of the pole holding the feeder sat her mate in his crimson plumage. His head moved alertly from side to side, up and down. At any moment he might save them both from the thunderbolt of a falcon plunging murderously out of the sun.

For a moment I thought, “How nice that he watches out for her.” He then dropped off his perch, hovered momentarily above his drab brown mate at the feeder perch, took his fill and flew off. He left her alone, and he left me knowing I had been suckered not by him but by my all too human desire to find the best human qualities in other species.

The fact is we can much more easily and accurately find the most troublesome human qualities in other species. Wildness may have some value for civilization as in Thoreau’s oft repeated proclamation, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” However, overcoming our wildness is exactly the crowning triumph of civilization. The fact that civilization and civility are very much a tentative and unfinished effort is exactly why we seek in other species the validation of our best qualities—intelligence, conscience, and the capacity for love. We feel lonely being the only species struggling to turn these qualities into great institutions.

So for a moment my decades of struggle to be a good provider and protector found validation in a pair of house finches. Why have I tried so hard and why have I been so frustrated by my failures? For a moment it seemed that the finches proved nature wants us to be providers, to care for each other. So it seemed for a moment.

The human animal is the only animal that spends any time trying to prove other species share its best qualities. We are the only species that cares about the well being and survival of another species that does not directly feed us or clothe us. This hope for company explains why efforts to raise money for environmental causes are dominated by images of animals with large eyes, soft noses, warm fur, and a tendency to care for their young. If they move in herds or family groups so much the better, and if they have hands and touch one another, even better. And best of all—do they touch human animals gently?

We grasp at any of these signs to assure ourselves we are not alone with our intelligence and sympathies and our desire to like and be liked. We are not far from the children we used to be who loved books filled with talking, feeling, human-like animals.

To seem more adult, we try out arguments like, “Chimps and humans share 95% of their DNA.” How unscientific. When the human genome has some 3 billion DNA base pairs the 5% difference could mean 150 million possible differences. Similarly among the 20 thousand plus protein coding genomes, 5% means 1,000 differences. Consider that a single variation in a gene can mean the difference between an average human and a seriously deformed or retarded human or a human devoid of all empathy and sympathy.

The human animal is a very social animal. That means that when something nags at its conscience, it seeks company. And we are willing to spend money to get that company. As Robert Frost advised:

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

So, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars we have sent space ships out beyond our solar system looking for signs of intelligent life. For scientists the search may mean many things, but for the average person the message the space ships carry is simple, “Hey, is anybody home out there?” I used to say something like this when I would return home from first grade and open the door to a silent house. I’d immediately yell, “Anybody home?”

In all probability we are entirely alone with our humanity both on our little blue planet and in any part of the cosmos we might reach. We don’t like it one bit. We have only each other. W.H. Auden contemplated this situation in one of humanity’s darkest and most brutal hours.

His poem on the eve of World War II begins

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Even at this hour, however, this man who knew so much of human history and failure knew the solution. The poem ends this way:

Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

(from “September 1, 1939,” by W.H. Auden)

Why Wildness?

Because for most of my life I have lived and worked alone out of sight of any neighbor in the middle of hundreds of acres of forest, people often ask me, “Why do you like living out there?” I am not a misanthrope, a person who detests mankind. I not only admire the human animal above all others, but I believe over the long run civilization has made the right choices and will learn how to manage both itself and the natural environment.

Many of the people who ask why I want to live in a wild place are fellow environmentalists but of the kind who believe that the human race is at best ignorant and self-destructive, at worst, a selfish and cruel horde that pillages and plunders innocent nature. When such an environmentalist asks why I live alone, I should reverse the question and ask why he or she is not living in a wild place, enjoying a vacation from civilization and communing with the spirits of nature.

Most environmentalists feel about nature the same way they often say they feel about New York or Chicago--a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. When they do move to the country, they usually bring their domestic partners, both human and animal. Going for a walk in the woods with a dog is akin to attending a concert with a turned on paper shredder. These are often the same people who delight in drinking from clear streams oblivious to the excrement or dead bodies upstream, and who often kiss their dogs and cats who have just licked their own unbathed genitals and rectums.

I do not feel the need to drink nature’s excrement and kiss its dirty kisser exactly because I have observed it closely and thought about it long and hard. So why would anyone, including me, would want to live in a wild place without human neighbors?

My answer is power. Living here I have the thrill I experienced as a city kid entering the ocean waves for the first time. They bowled me over, tossed me around, slammed me into the sand, and spit me out in the foam. I kept going back for more. I learned to duck under the waves and to body surf on the crests, no expensive board between me and that power, something like galloping bareback.

I have come to appreciate the risks and enjoy other powers of nature—cold, wind, trees, sun, and mountains. Living with these powers and protected by few intermediaries and defenses tests our limits and defines the edges of our lives. In short, it is a way of defining who we are.

Wildness and its powers do something more important for some of us. Oddly enough the people who often find the greatest relief living in the presence of a wild power are prone to self-doubt and depression. Their personal frustrations often come from their commitment to make a difference in the civilized world. Their lack of power, if you will.

That’s how it was for me when I left my forest and served for two years as a resident adviser on housing and land reform in a Central Asian capital city of 1.5 million people. I was struggling with the language, struggling with bureaucracy there and in Washington, infuriated by the daily dose of corrupt officials, and breathing city air thick and greasy with coal smoke, car exhaust, and diesel soot.

I had the good fortune to live in a shoddy little neighborhood of old cottages instead of the tall concrete apartment buildings where the embassy security officer thought Americans should live. Every morning I got up early enough to walk outside. High above the city of Alma Ata (now Almaty), from east to west rose an unbroken wall of snow covered peaks 15,000 feet high, gleaming in the morning sun. In geological time these are new mountains, a few rifts northward toward Siberia from the Himalayas. They had been rising for millions of years. And for millions of years the snows and glaciers had been shaving them down, grinding the grit from them, cascading avalanches of mud and rock over the plains below. The city of Alma Ata and my cottage sat on a gentle slope of old avalanches. As recently as twenty years earlier the mountains had invaded parts of town with boulders and mud.

Every morning I paused to look at these mountains, to drink them in with my eyes. I grew very small beneath them. I had lived more than five decades, but my life was a nanosecond in their time. Civilization was a little bubble. Those mountains loomed above me like the crests of ocean waves. The forces that had been building them for millennia sometimes shook the city and made the glasses dance on my kitchen shelf and the light bulb swing on its cord.

Every morning I looked at the great still peaks and went on to my work with my staff and my clients. In my mind, we were like the children my brother and I were when we went into the ocean waves and locked our hands together to see if we could stand up as a big ocean wave washed over us. No matter how firmly my brother and I locked arms, sooner or later we were knocked down. My staff and I would do our best, but it would stand only afew seconds in the cosmic scheme of things. You might think it odd I took some comfort in that realization. But after all, it shrunk not only the importance of my work but the importance of my frustrations and failures.

Apart from that kind of comfort and perspective, I have no other explanation for why I like to live in a wild place. Whether the wildness is ocean waves, great mountains, or the stillness of an old forest, it tells me what Lord David Cecil’s father, the prime minister of England, once told him: “Few things matter very much, and most things don’t matter at all.”

Will Wildness Preserve Civilization?

Henry David Thoreau proposed that wildness would save civilization, and millions of his followers today use that pronouncement to condemn civilization because they believe it destroys wildness and the wilderness in which it thrives. Thoreau had a great deal of scorn for the civilization of his day too, although much of it was tongue in cheek. Many of his serious followers today have a lot of trouble smiling and suffer from humor deficit. They are Thoreauvian fundamentalists.

Here is an answer to their misanthropism: "Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink." - "Wine when it is red" All Things Considered by G.K. Chesterton