In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Long Run, Part One

In my collaborations with marine photographer Wayne Levin, not quite twenty thousand leagues under the sea, many times we’ve been deep in the deep. Diving with dozens of sharks, scores of dolphins, enormous manta rays. With gyrating, rotating vortexes of thousands of fish. Thunderclouds of fish. Surrounded / deluged / encompassed by streams and rivers of bodies and eyes. Thus this batch of weke ‘ā, evening after evening, might seem too paltry to feed whatever hunger’s driving me. Hovering or hove-to with several dozen goatfish? Only yards from dry land? In a fallen water-world a few feet above whatever benthic life remains on a once-teeming reef?

Seeing me, the weke ‘ā, appraising local conditions, are surely entitled to look askance. Pick your poison, as they used to say: pollutants, trash, chemicals; silt, debris, pesticides; sewage, runoff from farming, overfishing.

POV of the weke ‘ā: this must seem like madness. Like doomsday. I can almost hear them saying, “If your gods are into punishing you, suggest that they stick to making Floods.”

Two centuries ago, Lord Byron wrote that “man marks the earth with ruin, his control / Stops with the shore.” But that was then.

A question: Are fish in the school in any way individuals, as when shoaling? Or, Wayne has wondered, are they “like cells of a larger entity.” For him, the question is whether or not we humans are “entities unto ourselves” or “just a part of a larger being, humanity.” And, having gone that far, might one also ask, “Is humanity just a part of a larger being, the living earth?” And, should that connection be denied, a further question: how characterize Homo sapiens?

Malignant growth? Pestilence? Plague? [End Page 21]

One wants to demur. And Wayne, when out in the open ocean somehow focused beyond fear, is teased by friends for being prone to imagine worst cases on land. Still, he’s spent much of his life through and under the “liquid mirror.” This is where, we’re told, so many organisms of so many species are found. Most of the living world is not human, the eight billion of us now said to be only 0.01 percent of all living things. If only we could see this vast amount of life the way we see, say, dogs and cats.

Edward O. Wilson writes that “the most striking fact about the living environment may be how little we know about it.” He estimates there are ten million living species, of which we’ve named and classified only some two million. And though humans, if not suicidal (“which, granted, is a possibility”) are capable of stabilizing climate change, “the worldwide extinction of species and natural ecosystems . . . is not reversible.” By the end of this century, human activity will have “eliminated more than half of all species.”

What to do? Wilson proposes keeping half the planet’s land and sea “as wild and protected from human intervention as possible.”

Right-o. Calculate the odds? Place a bet?

Natalie Angier describes bacteria that when allowed in the lab to “grow at will . . . end up polluting their local environment so quickly and completely that the entire population soon kills itself off.” But this is—just—in a lab. Still, about our sewage or use of carbon, Angier notes “the perpetual struggle found at every stratum of the natural world and its human hyper-projection: between cooperation and selfishness, the tribe and the individual.” And, she writes, new research “suggests that extinction is more easily set in motion than previously thought... once it gets started, the responsible parties may be helpless to make it stop.”

Or will it be like my IBM Selectric typewriter back in the 1970s—“self-correcting”?

Diffenbaugh and Field argue the planet is undergoing one of the largest climate changes in the 65 million years since extinction of the dinosaurs, ten times faster than any previous shift. Such a report documents human disruption even as it manifests our awareness of it. Self-awareness: we have to work now to not know what’s what / what’s up / what we’re doing. As Richard Grusin writes, “Humans must now be understood as...

pdf

Share