Sisyphus on the Hill
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
- The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats
Much has been lost since man first started his Earthwide trek. The pursuit of conservation can often leave one feeling like the Falcon in Yeats’ gyre. The last 50,000 years have been a gradual unwinding of the world’s ancient ecosystems. One by one, as species disappeared, entire networks of interactions have unravelled, causing in places knock-on extinctions, in other places novel developments. Humanity found itself at the centre of an ecological maelstrom or churn, which followed us wherever we went. Into the mix was thrown the old, and much of it destroyed, ecosystems broken down to base components. Yet in places, new systems arose, sometimes mirroring the old ones they replaced, other times without parallel. The marsupial lion and tiger were lost, yet man brought dogs over the sea, and the Dingo was born. Mice, stowed away in errant boats, gave rise to island-populations, so distinct in size and lifestyle from their mainland counterparts as to scarcely be conspecific. These new interactions are often deplored, and not without reason, but reason demands consideration. Despising the new does not bring back the old, and we risk cherishing a wound whilst shunning all remedies.
Between Hippos in South America, water-buffalo in Northern Australia and novel assemblages in Hawaii, humanity’s wake is a broad one. These introductions may be damaging to their new environments, yet an oversensitivity to change may cause us to conflate impact with harm. Water-buffalo in Australia create wallows and tracks, dig channels and nutrify the water with their dung. The result is a radical transformation compared to the previous, almost wholly undisturbed ecosystem, and one alarming to the Australian agencies. But the “original” state, in which Europeans found the ecosystem upon arrival, was anything but. Between diprotodonts, marsupial “tapirs”, giant varanids and more, the true pristine state of Australia was one in which natural disturbance was rife. Does this mean the ecological role of water-buffalo is identical? No. Does it mean their impact is positive? Not necessarily. What it does mean, however, is that a conflation of “change” with “damage” is overbold. An identification of the status quo with Eden is certainly fallacious. We all live in the gyre, and the gyre is what we know.
Figure 1. A hippopotamus in a Kenyan wetland. Many such animals have escaped into the Colombian wild.
Terms of use: This image is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. It is uncredited. The image is unedited and the original can be found here
Nature-conservation suffers from something of an intrinsic paradox: On the one hand, it serves to, as the name implies, conserve nature. Conservationists love the world they know and wish to see it preserved and protected. On the other hand, however, nature cannot be conserved. It is not a commodity that can be trapped, frozen, and then brought out later, still vigorous. Nature is, at its core, a dynamic process; a splitting and dissolving, an accumulating and coalescing. Try to freeze nature, and you break it. Try to halt its collapse, and you risk stopping its heart. Of course, I am not saying that there is no such thing as codified ecosystem. The African savanna is a real place, as is the Eurasian taiga. Yet it might be helpful to view ecosystems less as things, which can be either protected or preserved, but rather as processes, which may be maintained, restored, or disrupted. Nature, in a sense, is not an abstract noun, but a verb. I must be careful here to stress that I am not calling for some postmodern deconstruction of the natural, abolishing conservation in favour of some fluid acceptance of a shifting world. To do as much would be to hand a green-card to any developer or logger wishing to replace an old-growth forest with a more profitable alternative—"after all, nature is fluid; the forest would not have lasted forever anyway.”
My point, rather, is that an overly static view of nature risks a destructive purism. We see it for instance in the rejection of the dingo as being in some sense ecologically “invalid”, since the proper occupant of their niche is the Tasmanian tiger. Yet the thylacine is gone. Save the chance of some radical break-through in de-extinction technology, or the wild hopes of cryptozoologists, it will never return. Certainly the marsupial lion will not. A rather extreme example of such purism has been the trepidation over the reintroduction of Cheetahs to India. It was caused by the revelation that the Asiatic subspecies, to which we ascribed the Indian population, is slightly genetically distinct, separated by some 30-60k years. One wonders whether the denizens of India’s ecosystems, whom the reintroduction is meant to benefit, are as hung-up about mitochondrial DNA as the Indian government. Doubtless, in a reintroduction scheme, nearly all parties would, if given the option, select representatives of the extirpated species. A true reintroduction is preferable to mere ecological surrogacy. Yet to reject such surrogacy outright, even where it is the only option, is to impose upon nature a static perfectionism, unnatural even at the best of times, impossible in an age of extinctions. As a character says in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, “For everything to stay the same, everything must change”. If our object is to safeguard nature—not our idealised, codified picture of it, but the actual, living world—then we must at times be willing to abandon our images to save the thing.
Figure 1. A pair of Dingos. For decades, a fierce debate has raged in Australia regarding the status of the animal - feral dog or novel species, protected native or introduced pest.
Terms of use: This image is licensed under a creative commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. It is attributed to Robert Lynch. The image is unedited and the original can be found here
As stated already, it is not my purpose with this post to call for a dissolution of all certainties or champion novel ecosystems. Nor will I here claim answers to all the questions I have raised. Most simply put, mine is a complaint against obstinacy. Our idea of nature is important, both in matters of culture, history, religion and more. Yet there is a danger, often indulged by conservationists, to conflate our aesthetic preferences with biological facts. What is more unnatural: the wrong species of elephant, or no elephants at all? What is more offensive: an Australia bustling with introduced life, or an Australia with no life at all? I have opinions on these questions, but I do not claim objective truth. The only claim I do make with certainty is that we cannot freeze nature in some preferred state. If you wish to save a falling person, you may grab him and bring him back up to the roof, or else lower him down to the ground. Perhaps you may even place him on an adjacent balcony. What you cannot do is grab him, raise him up some metres, back to his location when first you spotted him, and then let him go again. Within seconds, he will be back to where he was when you grabbed him. A few seconds more, and he will be dead. To return an ecosystem to a state already in decline is to be Sisyphus on the hill.
What then is to be done? For many years, humanity has played sub-creator on our planet, and still we idealise the farmer as steward of the land. Yet man is a mercurial steward, acting at times in nature’s interests, and at times not. When his wants overlap with those of other species—as they did between Neolithic man and the curlew and partridge when he cleared the ancient forests—he may act the part. Yet his whims change, and soon he will be paving the very meadow he himself had cleared but some centuries prior. Total reliance on the stewardship of man is what brought nature to its current state. Nature may be left to crash and crumble, or it may be restored to some measure of agency, lest it depend wholly on the whims of humanity. How exactly this should be done, I will not say. Among all uncertainties, only one surety is provided us: Complacency is not an option.