Category: Environment

Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard: Still timely and eloquent

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I finally got hold of the late Peter Matthiessen’s classic, The Snow Leopard, after a several week delay at Amazon, which was out of it. I had never read Matthiessen before, even though I knew he was a fervent lover of nature.

He began writing the book back in 1972, essentially a daily journal, shortly after the death of his wife, Deborah, from cancer. It tells of his trek across the Himalayas with field biologist George Schaller in quest of the Himalayan blue sheep and, for Matthiessen, in particular, the elusive snow leopard. It would win the National Book Award on its publication in 1978, our country’s most prestigious literary award.

I, too, confess to loving nature intensely to the point that my graduate prof in a Wordsworth course told the other students I had a leg up on comprehending Britain’s foremost nature poet.

In the middle part of my boyhood we lived in Philly, and I do mean the city. Occasionally we’d drive over to the Jersey coast for relief from the asphalt oven that is Philly in summer. For me, it was liberation to be among trees, fruit stands, and the shore.

I used to travel a lot, often abroad, always with camera ready, but I got complaints that there weren’t any people in my photos. I simply preferred landscape and I’m still that way.

But back to Matthiessen, I read several tributes following his death in April and even wrote my own in Brimmings a few weeks ago. I knew I had a lot of catching up to do. After all, he wrote some 33 books, both fiction and non-fiction, excelling at both.

Certainly, I had to read The Snow Leopard after coming upon one reader’s comment that he goes back to it every year, always gleaning new insights. For someone to do this–it’s rare we re-read a book, let alone, continually–implies considerable substance.

Similarly, I also liked what eminent travel writer Pico Iyer, who wrote the Introduction, had to say:

I have been reading Peter Matthiessen’s silver classic for more than a quarter century now, and every time I do, like any classic, it gives off a different light, growing as I do and shifting to meet the needs of every moment,

After comments like that, how could I not want to splurge my time indulging in this book. Out of curiosity, I googled “nature classics,” only to be disappointed to find no mention of the book that deserves company with the likes of Thoreau, Muir, Carson and Leopold. Perhaps it’s because The Snow Leopard, while surely taking in nature with eagle eye observation recorded in some of the most elegant prose ever, moves past nature into spiritual autobiography. In brief, the outer search for the snow leopard ultimately symbolizes his inward pilgrimage to find meaning and, with it, himself.

This said, I hadn’t previously known that Matthiessen was a serious devotee of Buddhism, that gentle faith, from which he continually draws strength and insight in this book, or a sense of what matters in a cosmos of flux and temporality:

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

I wasn’t prepared for how unflinchingly honest this book is: “I am aware of all that is hollow in myself, all that is greedy, angry and unwise.” Matthiessen acknowledges that things were not well in his marriage with Deborah. There follows his intuitive decision to commit; his ineffectual attempts to show love. After her death It would be a year before this prolific writer found himself able to take up the pen again.

Deeply sensitive and rich in compassion, he is always aware of the plight of nature continually ravaged by humans in their relentless self regard and unbridled exploitation. He laments how even the Himalayas are being depleted of their forests, unsafe despite their remoteness, and with their loss, a habitat that gave sanctuary to unique animals like the blue sheep and snow leopards. Always in Matthiessen you have a sense of a paradise lost, with Man the driving agent of its extinction.

I wish I had time to explore the depth of the book’s many insights, for The Snow Leopard is surely a repository of cerebral wrestlings, an exploration of what it is to live meaningfully in the context of impermanence frequented with suffering. Accordingly, neither the past nor the future really matters, for it is in the Now that we find our paradise and thus our deliverance.

I close with Matthiessen’s sobering admonition:

…almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of the meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

–rj

Convincing meteorologists that climate change is real

Obamaclimate

You can see from the above photo the challenge our president faces in convincing, of all people, our meteorologists, that climate change isn’t simply cyclic, but ongoing, posing devastating consequences for America, with no region spared. Further, we humans are its driving force.

The National Climate Assessment came out yesterday, only to be immediately dismissed as “alarmist” by–imagine my surprise–Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). Guess he must think the same about the recently released  UN Panel’s 40 volume plus study conducted by leading climate scientists. I’m reminded as a former prof of Victorian lit just what it must have been like for Darwin in the outpouring of public vitriol that followed upon his perceived tampering with hallowed establishment assumptions. By the way, I never cease to be amazed at the gall of politicians assuming equal footing with reputable scientists.

But it isn’t just the Republicans we have to worry about in Washington when it comes to taking climate change seriously and initiating immediate steps to at least mitigate its effects. You see this most pointedly when it comes to the Keystone XL project. Presently there’s a bipartisan effort to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate in favor of the project, assuring veto proof passage.   So far, 11 Democrats have shown willingness to join 45 Republicans in such a move, with one Democrat optimistic of getting several more.

As always, it’s the old song-and-dance scenario of jobs, when the fact is that if we were to put environment on a war-footing we’d have universal employment in harnessing the forces to slow global warming.   Solar energy has considerable promise, for example, and is already a key component in countries like Denmark. Instead of constructing pipelines with their potential for spills–and sabotage–we’d do better in shoring up our coast lines.

How wonderful it would be to see Republicans and Democrats give priority to long term public welfare rather than short term corporate interests and their reelection prospects. (Once again, a good point for term limits. If it exists for the Presidency, why not for Congress?)

As for the meteorologists, a George Mason University survey in 2010 showed only 19% of them accepted human activity as the primary contributor to global warming.  Some deny climate change period! (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1 ) While good at short term forecasting, they fall considerably short at the long term. Public icons, they can be given to a narcissism of overreach. Unfortunately, 62% of us trust our TV weather forecasters more than we do climate scientists!

The greatest proofs of climate change lie not simply in natural catastrophes, but in their ever increasingly frequency. We have computer models for that!

above

–rj

 

Climate Change: Can we win the fight?

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We just celebrated Earth Day on April 22, an annual fête of huge importance for those of us wanting to increase the public’s awareness of the challenge of climate change, and our substantial human contribution to it, and ways we might fight it.

It’s an important time for us in another way, too, as this yearly outpouring of Green advocacy transcending borders buoys up our enthusiasm, telling us we’re not alone in our caring. After all, sometimes it seems that we’re on this great big mountain we impulsively thought we could climb; so rituals of solidarity like Earth Day give us pause to catch our breath, reassess, and press on to our worthy goal of a humanity in harmony with nature as one species among others, each necessary to all. Just maybe we can pull this thing off. Anyway, good to dream big rather than live small.

The truth is that so much more needs to be done and that we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace in making climate change a palpable issue for the public. I saw this demonstrated all too clearly in the presidential debates in 2012, or just 18 months ago, with not a single question directed to environmental matters raised by debate moderators.

If the press can seemingly have no feel for the greatest issue ever to menace us with its destructive pay-load should we evade addressing it, then how much less can we expect the public to grasp what’s at stake? As is, individual lifestyle changes like driving less, getting rid of plastic, cutting back on electricity in our homes aren’t going to do the trick. We need more than bandages to treat the Earth’s hemorrhaging.

Now consider that a recent poll suggests that 37% of Americans don’t even believe in climate change. There exist also a good many, perhaps even more, who look at climate change as simply cyclic and that, just maybe, it might even right itself. Of course that view gets us off the hook and we can conduct business as usual.

Just recently the United Nations released the findings of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a careful study by credentialed scientists encompassing some 40 volumes. Insiders say they toned down some of their language and projections so as not to unduly frighten, though their findings still emerge as deeply sobering, with none of us escaping vulnerability to what surely are predictions on an apocalyptic scale. In all honesty, I haven’t noticed any work-up by media or any concerted effort by members of Congress to hold hearings on the report and what we might do to save the day. Like many of you, I grow weary–and wary–of their feckless accommodations to corporate interests.

What’s vital is that we impact the political process, as happened with the Vietnam War, ultimately culminating in LBJ’s decision not to pursue reelection. It started with just a few protesters, then took hold and proved unstoppable. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything like this breaking out. I think this is because many of our projections for climate change impacting us lie still in the future, whereas flag covered body bags coming into Dover AFB were a daily, tangible occurrence, which the media ultimately caught up with when it perceived a muscular protest movement, packing a punch, that wasn’t going to go away.

On the other hand, if we haven’t been able to muster cadres of protestors against our Iraq and Afghanistan incursions with their costly toll in life and wounded for a dubious cause, how much less likely for an environmental movement devoid of blood and gore? And that’s what makes climate warming so horrendously insidious, or like some invisible killer we know is out there, but don’t know where he is, or when he’ll strike, or how.

Perhaps our young people will again show us the way as they did with Vietnam by way of their fossil fuel divestment sit-ins sweeping our college campuses, some 300 as I write, with several success stories, including Harvard with its $32 billion endowment. If it’s wrong to destroy our planet, it follows we shouldn’t be seeking to profit from those who do.   I wrote earlier of the Vietnam days when students rallied to make a difference. All of us: unions, retirees, teachers, tech workers, etc., might do well to follow their lead in choosing our retirement portfolios more discriminately.

But divestment has its limitations, too. While it was practiced widely in the 70’s and 80’s to pressure South Africa’s apartheid regime, the invariable result was that other investors stepped in. It’s true value lay in shaping public discourse, and I venture this holds true with this present endeavor.

Still, I question the wisdom of painting with a broad brush the fossil fuel industry as some kind of axis of evil. We need energy. Are our students willing to follow through and divest themselves of their cars and their electricity and take on an Amish likeness? We would do better to focus on the coal sector, our greatest polluter.

I still like our president–articulate in his efforts to assure health care access, social and economic equality, tax, immigration and drug sentencing reform. So far, he’s championed alternative energy efforts, sought restrictions on coal burning power plants, held out against the Keystone XL project, endorsed alternative energy efforts.

As for Keystone, he needs our support even as we must sustain, and grow our protests, to keep a fire under his feet. When I think of Keystone and the big money behind it–think Koch brothers–I get nauseous: the obscenity of it, given the perils of climate change; the stench of it, given its association with pet coke; the callowness of it, given its destruction of farmland, water aquifers, and wildlife habitat.

The President will presumably make his decision after this fall’s elections, but faces immense pressure, even in his own party. It isn’t a given he’ll opt for courage over pragmatism. In the end, it’s important we all get to the polls and endorse environmentally friendly candidates such as the courageous Gary Peters (D-MI), who hopes to succeed retiring senator Carl Levin (D-MI).   Peters has come out against Keystone, provoking the Koch brothers to contribute substantially to his Republican opponent, who now leads in campaign funding. Peters is our leading spokesperson on pet coke. (By the way, you can access online the Sierra Club’s political endorsements, which include Peters.)

If it came down to, say, an errant asteroid making its way to befuddle our planet as once happened, plunging the world into a rebirth of its pre-evolutionary darkness, then you can bet your life we’d all get off our bottoms and fight the good fight. Well, think of that asteroid as climate change.

–rj

 

 

 

Peter Matthiessen: Homegoing

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We lost a great writer, Peter Matthiessen, this past weekend. A co-founder of the renowned Paris Review and author of thirty-three books, both fiction and non-fiction, his supreme subject was Nature and, sadly, Man’s pervasive impact upon it:

Species appear, and left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climactic change, has ever extinguished another. (Wilderness in America [1959]).

Along with other environmentalists, I mourn his loss since his death silences a powerful voice of advocacy for what remains.

I think of the great writers of Nature who have borne sensitive witness to the fragile cocoon of Nature that includes ourselves that I have read across the years, works both of poetry and prose that have refined my sensitivity, shaped my priorities, and taught me awareness of the transience of all living things. All of them have been my teachers.

In poetry, I think of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, Frost, Jeffers, for example; as for prose–Thoreau, followed by Muir, Carson, Wilson, Dillard, McKibben and, of course, the most prodigious–Matthiessen.

Of all the books Matthiessen wrote, two stand out to me in particular as robust reads: Shadow Country, a novel featuring a desperado gunned down by his own neighbors in the lawless Everglades wilderness of the nineteenth century; the other, Snow Leopard, a non-fictional account of Matthiessen’s search for the elusive snow leopard in the Himalayas. More than a travel adventure, it depicts the author’s spiritual journey. As stimulating as it is beautiful, lucid in its prose and stunning in its imagery, it may just be one of the finest books to treat both Nature and the Soul ever written and deserves many re-readings.

Both Shadow Country and Snow Leopard won National Book Awards, our country’s most prestigious literary prize. (Matthiessen is the only writer to receive multiple National Book Awards.)

Matthiessen was not your ordinary person. A former CIA spy, son of a well-to-do family, initially conservative in his politics, he ultimately moved to the Left, championing American Indians, Cesar Chavez and exploited migrants, opposed the Vietnam War (bravely refusing to pay taxes) and, of course, became a committed environmentalist.

A deeply spiritual man, he embraced Buddhism following the death of his second wife in 1972, ultimately becoming a Buddhist priest. Snow Leopard reflects a Zen ambience throughout and its acceptance of the Now as the only true consolation we have in a transitory cosmos.

Though he fought ardently for conserving nature, he was troubled by the exponential excesses wrought by anthropocentric interests. As he would lament, “I can hardly point to a victory that we ever won as conservationists that hasn’t been overturned.”

Not all was lost, however:

 …we won some, too — there were long-lasting victories. And if nothing else, we stalled — stalled them off, the developers and exploiters.

All of us Greens will miss him, and yet there remains the fervent advocacy of his many books championing justice; respect for other species and their habitat; the simple life lived mindfully, free from material desire; the valuing of each other.

There couldn’t have been a finer man.

–rj

 

 

 

 

The UN Panel Report on Global Warming: Is anyone Listening?

Credit: ReutersStringer

If you’ve been keeping up with news about the environment, you’re perhaps aware of this week’s biggest news event, not the elusive search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, or the status quo of Ukraine, or the achieved pinnacle of 7 million enrollees under the Affordable Health Care Act, but the dismal impact studies just completed of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  At least this is as it should be, though you’d never know it, given the paucity of TV coverage of the Panel’s exhaustive findings (32 volumes summarized in 49 pages).

Turns out that yesterday’s coverage of the Panel’s released findings by news cable giants CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was virtually absent, according to media monitoring service, TV Eyes, scanning Monday’s coverage between 6 a.m. and noon: CNN, 40 seconds; MSNBC, 20 seconds; and no surprise, Fox News’s total silence.

Only new comer Al Jazeera America zeroed in on the report, featuring an in depth analysis of the substantial effects of global warming on Bangladesh, which has been battling rising sea levels.

One of the Panel’s projections deals with emerging migrant hoards seeking refuge in other countries.  I didn’t see Al Jazeera’s footage, but I’m aware that India is feverishly building a wall to stem the influx of Bangladesh refugees. (By the way, if you like your news unbiased, al Jazeera is your best bet.)

This sad scenario of media indifference mirrors the largely disturbing absence of the American public’s concern with the issue of global warming, humanity’s greatest threat to its survival since its inauguration into the nuclear age in 1945 and the subsequent threat of nuclear proliferation.

For many, it comes down to jobs vs. environment, or the prioritizing of entitlement interests when the fact is that poverty is likely to grow, not diminish, and affect even the richer nations as global warming’s exponential effects take hold in the guise of drought, record heat waves, forest fires, fierce storms, reduced food production, disease and social violence. Global warming’s incipient effects are already impacting plants and animals and acidifying the oceans with deadly consequences for marine life.

Humans are the primary instigators of global warming, with carbon emissions continuing to rise, and China, the U. S., and India leading the way. Here in my state of Kentucky with its coal slave mentality, the state government has just cut annual coal mine inspections down from 6 to 4.  Sadly, I live in a state where many cars sport specialized plates, bearing “Friends of Coal,” and power companies wage incessant scare propaganda equating coal reduction with rising energy costs and job reduction instead of implementing focused research on clean coal technology.  As I write, a Kentucky coal ash plant has been caught by hidden camera dumping coal ash into the Ohio River and is being sued by the Sierra Club and Land Justice.

Again, Kentucky isn’t alone, but part of a mind-sweep that embraces America. For example, initiatives to promote recycling by outlawing plastic bags are continually defeated even in more friendly environmental places like Seattle.  (I have to confess I feel conspicuous, a seemingly rare upstart, when carrying my cloth bags into Krogers.)

In drought plagued California, swimming pools still adorn Malibu, ball parks sport well manicured grass, and golf courses like Pebble Beach and Cypress Point Club nurture their resplendent greens, even as farmers curtail their crops and California’s biggest cash crop of almond and walnut groves lie in dusty peril.

Golf interests say water consumption amounts to only 1% of California’s total, but omit a plethora of other environmental burdens like fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which contribute to contamination of groundwater aquifers and surface waters.

This may seem off the subject, but there’s a new movie in town, Noah, that’s been drawing crowds, grossing $42 million in its initial weekend viewing. I bring it up because in my youthful days of religiosity I remember it took the biblical Noah a year to build the ark and round up the selected progeny of animals (although it escapes me as to what happened to the plants, since there’s no clear indication of their inclusion, though all the animals taken in were herbivores).

Anyway, the guy must have seemed some kind of crazy.  After all, the earth, nourished by mist, hadn’t ever experienced rain before. The gospel of Luke (17:25-27, KJV) makes analogy to Noah and his time, saying

As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

Looks like Hollywood missed a golden opportunity of transforming an ancient saga of environmental survival into a film of contemporary relevance.

–rj

 

Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Mayhem Alive and Well

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Despite President Obama’s spirited pledge to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor, his administration has been covertly involved in negotiating a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement whose potential fallout would only exacerbate, not lessen, the economic divide, consolidating what is essentially an oligarchy of Wall Street interests.

You may be unfamiliar with the TPP, as it’s not played up in the media, unless you’re a rare aficionado of the marketplace.  Briefly, 14 nations bordering the Pacific, controlling 40% of the world’s GDP and 26% of its trade, have been at work for more than a year, hammering out the final details of a complex agreement that would eliminate tariffs on goods and services.  Composed of 29 chapters, its scope would include not only the area of finance, or banking, but telecommunications (i.e., the Internet), and even food services.  It would have devastating consequences for those of us committed to environmental concerns that include global warming.

Ominously, it includes proposals that would curtail consumer protection across a wide spectrum.  According to Republican Reports, leaked TPP negotiation documents reveal the Obama administration’s attempts to stymie other governments from implementing financial regulations, believing they could mitigate another bank collapse.

These leaked documents (see citizen.org) indicate proposals allowing corporations to sue governments under the auspices of “foreign tribunals,” thus circumventing domestic courts and local laws.  Corporations could even demand financial compensation for “tobacco, prescription, and environment protections” that undermine their profits.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren–I like her more everyday–warns, such provisions allow “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place without the cameras rolling and the lights on.”

Alarmingly, even without the TPP, over $3 billion has already been paid out to foreign investors under current U.S. trade and investment agreements, with another $14 billion pending, “primarily targeting environmental, energy, and public health policies” (citizen.org).

Representing the U.S. in the negotiations is Obama appointee Stefan Selig, a former Bank of America investment banker nominated to become Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce.  Since his nomination, he’s received $9 million in bonuses.  (He had received $5.1 million incentive pay the previous year.)

Slated to join him in the negotiations, pending Congress’ approval, is Michael Froman, presently U.S. Trade Representative.  He received $4 million from CitiGroup as an exit payment in addition to $2 million in connection with his holdings in several investment funds.

This practice of banks lining the pockets of their former cohorts upon joining government is pervasive in the banking industry, pocket money for establishing influence in contexts affecting public financial policy.

Unfortunately, for all the pretty rhetoric coming out of the White House, the oligarchy of the one percent remains entrenched, and even abetted, while the TPP, added to its already formidable arsenal of financial peddling, poses a potent means to intimidating the common citizenry, here and abroad, opposed to its hegemony of privilege.

It certainly doesn’t contribute to economic parity.  According to a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as reported in the Washington Post, the economic gains would largely accrue to the wealthy.

–rj

China Destroys Ivory Stocks: Too Little too Late?

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I’m pleased again at another good omen for the environment in learning of China’s destruction yesterday of six tons of seized ivory ornaments and tusks.  This is exciting, since China has been overwhelmingly the prime market for ivory, where it’s turned into trinkets and statuary, and it’s the first time China has done this.  Hopefully, it won’t be the last.  This comes on the heels of Tanzania’s recent destruction of four tons of ivory, adding up to about forty slaughtered elephants.  In addition to Tanzania, Kenya and Gabon have recently destroyed large caches of ivory.

Still, China has a long ways to go.  As reported in the NYT on Monday, The Wildlife Conservation Society says that there may be as much as forty-five tons in the total ivory inventory in China, not including Hong Kong.  Let’s face it:  ivory can be lucrative, fetching $1000 a pound.  In poverty stricken Africa, poachers in the field rarely command such profit, pocketed by sophisticated  black market smugglers, but minimally still incentive enough.  Elephant poaching is further exacerbated as the continent’s many warring factions use ivory sales to purchase arms.

What shocks me is our own large stash of ivory, with six tons of ivory destroyed last November.  I guess I shouldn’t be so naive.  We have a large Chinese immigrant community, especially on the West Coast, where demand for ivory, rhino horn, tortoise and shark fin can ratchet up lucrative profits.  In fact, we’re downright hypocrites.  The good old USA ranks second to China in consumption of illegal animal products, including not only those I just mentioned, but even tiger bone!  Nothing is sacred; nothing off limits for crime syndicates operating internationally.

Unabated, the trade will peter out in about ten years.  We’ll simply have run out of elephants, rhinoceroses, sharks and tigers.

But just maybe the window’s opened a bit with China’s move, offering a new vista of hope.  As China’s legacy of ancient wisdom has it, “The longest journey begins with the first step” (Lao Tzu).

–rj

A Conservation Hero: Greg Carr and Gorongosa National Park

Greg Carr
Greg Carr

Sometimes I find it terribly painful to hear the news or surf the net for the latest on environment, earth lover that I am.  It’s gotten so bad that I even toss a lot of my mail from cherished environmental organizations, unopened, to ward off grief.  Still, I can’t live in a bubble.  It changes nothing.

Last night, the sobering Guardian report on climate change with its catastrophic scenario of a 7.2 F/4C temperature rise by century end, rendering life in the tropics virtually impossible.  Then the just released Intergovernmental Panel Report on Climate Change, indicating human activity as “the likely cause” for global warming, or 95% certain.  Hey, is anybody out there listening?  Meanwhile, business as usual:  Boeing announces its plan to double its new North Charleston, SC, facility, which includes filling in 400 acres of wetlands.

ThIs explains my elation on discovering the story of efforts to restore Mozambique’s once iconic Gorongosa National Park, since such good news is a rarity these days, or akin to say a medical breakthrough in remedying a chronic disease.

Gorongosa Park, founded by the Portuguese in 1960, used to be famous for its teeming wild life that even included nearly 2000 elephants.  But then came the long struggle for Mozambique’s independence in which armies sometimes ravaged the Park for food and ivory.  Like today’s Mali, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, independence (1975) then gave way to protracted civil war, lasting 17 years.  By then, poachers and subsistence farmers had settled in, decimating virtually all wildlife, apart from the Park’s crocodiles.  As one example, only 50 buffalos remained of an original herd of 14,000.

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The new government (1992), finding itself cash-strapped, was looking for new resources, among them eco-tourism through restoration of Gorongosa National Park, but it lacked investment capital. That’s when American businessman Greg Carr, who had made his fortune offering Internet services, stepped in, setting up a foundation and pledging $40 million over the next 30 years to finance the project.

Thanks to his herculean efforts, the Park has been steadily regaining its pristine splendor with  herds of elephants, African buffalo, hippopotamus, warthogs and antelopes now grazing its savannas in growing abundance.  Further good news:  in 2010, the government enlarged the Park to include Mount Gorongosa, so essential to the year round flow of the Park’s rivers and  preservation of its unique megafauna.  Were the rain forest gone, there would no longer exist the capacity of the mountain to release monsoon rains gradually and long term, sustaining life in the dry season.  As is, subsistence farmers have reduced the rain forest at its summit by a third over the last decade.

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Like all such noble schemes to preserve environment, hard choices often pit habitat vs jobs.  You can’t simply ask these settlers to leave.  Poverty is just so immense, with the per capita annual wage $310, according to World Bank, and a life expectancy of only 40 years. The trick is to create new industries for them.

Again, Carr has proven to be visionary in providing economic incentives, creating rain forest seed nurseries, schools and medical clinics below the rain forest line, hiring guards, and expanding tourist facilities offering comfortable amenities that are increasingly attracting European and North American visitors, initiatives now employing more than a thousand workers.

While things are off to a good start, the Park’s ongoing fate depends on two key factors: a stable democratic government and tourist dollars.  With regard to the latter, once again, good news, with visitor tallies rising from an initial 1000 to over a current 10,000.  Eco-tourism is obviously essential to making Carr’s bet pay off.

If Carr’s project works in Mozambique, it can work elsewhere in Africa as seems the case in Botswana, providing ecological preservation linked with economic well-being.

This is, indeed, good news!

–rj

Do Elephants Think?: And Why it Matters

Elephants stroke and lay brush on a dead friend
Elephants stroke and lay brush on a dead friend

I stopped eating meat on Thanksgiving Day, 1996.  I wish I had done it earlier.  I did it for ethical reasons, not health issues.  It’s always struck me that vertebrate animals have consciousness and, as sentient creatures, feel pain.  I’ve been around them enough to know they feature personalities from somber to gregarious, suspicious to fawning.  Despite what you hear about sheep, I had one that was quite the bully.  I’m not censuring those who eat meat. It’s simply a personal decision I made born of compassion, though eventually I might have arrived at the same decision for the sake of the earth, or even for better health.

I love all animals, though most of my life I’ve been a dog person.  I just lost my Bichon buddy several weeks ago after twelve years and though I know time softens grief, he’ll always be somewhere in my thoughts and, certainly, every Bichon  I come across will rekindle memories of my faithful, gentle friend.

In a wider scope, there are undomesticated animals that utterly fascinate me, particularly for their remarkable intelligence, emotion and sensitivity; for instance, apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants.  We know that elephants can weep, mourn for their dead, have long memories, and practice a complex social life.

If elephants have consciousness, and other animals as well, shouldn’t it change how we treat them? Our dilemma stems from our walling ourselves off from them, since anthropomorphizing them, or using words projecting human parity like “love,” “sorrow,” and “regret,” brings them disturbingly close and imposes guilt.  Accordingly, the Canadian government dubs that nation’s annual seal pup clubbing via neutral words like “cull,” “harvest'” or “management plan.”  It’s been said many times that vegetarianism would prosper were we to consider that what we eat may once have possessed a face.

Of course there are those who regard ameliorative efforts to change the lot of animals from prey and product to fellow creatures and companions as an attack on humanity’s rightful role to primacy and a romp in sensitivity.  After all, they’re “simply” animals and we’ve been eating them from prerecorded history, though it begs the question and may point to our ecological follies in substituting anthropocentrism for a rational alternative underscored by climate change.

In an extended, informative analysis, “Do Elephants Have Souls?,” published in The New Atlantis (Winter/Spring 2013), ” managing editor Caitrin Nicol prodigiously uncovers evidence that elephants indeed think with all its implications.

Elephants are among those few animals (dolphins, the great apes, magpies, and man) who recognize themselves in a mirror.

While they may not have refined tools like we do, they’ll employ grass to clean their ears; can dig ponds, subsequently camouflage them with bark and grass.

Nicol tells us that domesticated Asian elephants are known to plug their bells with mud to slip past their human sentries at night and fetch banana treats.

As I mentioned earlier, elephants often bury their dead.  Coming across skeletons, they’ll  hold a vigil.  They’ve been known to react to humans wearing ivory bracelets.

The latter is fundamental to why they’re disappearing so rapidly.  We like them for the wrong reasons.  Sadly, they’re being poached in record numbers from guarded sanctuaries like those in Kenya and South Africa, not just for ivory anymore, but to raise money for terrorists to buy arms.  Recently there have been instances of hundreds of elephants killed in one go.  Even more hideously comes the recent discovery in Zimbabwe’s largest national reserve of cyanide poisoned water resources that take out not only elephants, inflicting lingering, agonizing death, but cause the demise of a vast number of other animals.  Man’s satiety for cruelty breaks the heart.

One thing we can do is to stir the consciences of the Chinese and Vietnamese, who enjoy a large trade in ivory trinkets.  But in our business as usual world of dulled sensitivity and engrained cultural mores, this isn’t likely to happen, though every day we delay contributes further to sealing their doom.

We also need to undertake rewarding villagers who protect the herds with not only money, but daily staples.  Poverty  is so universal in Africa that a relatively few coins at the bottom level makes for an enticing motive nearly impossible to break.  One pair of tusks can easily command  $15,000 on the high end market.

Currently, an estimated 25,000 elephants are poached every year.  At this rate, these glorious, intelligent creatures will vanish into memory within a decade.  Just two centuries ago, twenty-six million elephants roamed Africa’s savannas.  That number has dropped some 98%, says Nicol.

As I see it, it’s not only poaching that threatens, but exploding population as well, with seven children per family now the average in sub-Sahara Africa.  Roaming creatures with gargantuan appetites, elephants are likely to be increasingly viewed as competitors for grazing land that could be used for cattle and farming.

On the plight of animals in general, Nicol movingly quotes the naturalist Henry Beston who in Outermost House (1928) wrote, “We need another and a wiser and perhaps  a more mystical concept of animals….In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” 

As is, we are witnessing an undiminished tragedy of huge proportion affecting not only elephants but other sentient creatures like whales, sharks, and rhinos that, unstopped, ultimately impoverishes all of us and lasts forever.

–rj

 

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Ransacking nature: Deforestation in Indonesia

indonesia

When we hear of deforestation we’re apt to think of Brazil with its persistent denigration of the Amazon jungle.  But an equally bad scenario is that of Indonesia, with half its rich forest tapestry now gone and complete decimation a mere decade away, all for the sake of plantation (usually for palm oil) and logging profits.

A heartless calamity in the making, it has consequences ultimately for all of us.  Consider, for example, that Indonesia ranks third in species diversity after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  More specifically, it’s home to between 10 and 15 percent of the earth’s known plant, mammal and bird species.  It’s also residence for tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants, increasingly refugees from a reduced or degraded habitat.  Soon the unique orangutan and Sumatran tiger may vanish into memory.

orang

While the central government in Jakarta has tried to impose a moratorium on logging, it goes on unabatedly in many distant local areas where law enforcement is rare.  Consequently, Indonesia is now the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which promote temperature rise.

Financial incentives topping a billion in U. S. dollars are now underway, but their success remains in doubt, given widespread political corruption.

What’s going on in Indonesia affects not only many of its citizens displaced by plantations, but the global village as well.  Indonesia’s vast peatlands store an estimated 35 tons of carbon.  Burn or drain them and you release their warming carbons into the atmosphere.

Several weeks ago the UN’s updated report on global warming made headlines.  While deliberately opting for a subdued, or conservative report, to avoid ridicule as alarmist, it warns of an approaching irreversibility in limiting global warming if we continue at our present pace of carbon emission.  As the UN report panel’s co-chair warns, “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time.”

Unfortunately, there still exists a minority of skeptics even among scientists, who primarily proffer up the now recognized slowing-down of temperature rise over the last fifteen years.  The truth is that no one really knows why.  While acknowledging this, the report suggests it may be a matter of variability, or simply a cyclical pause, or staircase effect.  In the long term, however, it suggests tides by century end of up to three feet.  (Other reports put it at five feet.)

Regardless of the debate, the fact remains of our witnessing forest carnage in places like Brazil, Indonesia, and the Malayan archipelago with resultant permanent ecological loss and diversity reduction with unknown consequences for all of us.

If we could invest in humanity’s ultimately viewing its relationship with nature as one of dependence rather than exploitation, then we would surely find our way out of this morass; but this is an unlikely hope, given our seeming inveterate instinct to pursue self-interest rather than collective good, abetted in turn by ignorance and indifference.

–rj

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