The Noisy Winter before the Silent Spring

"Biodiversity COP15 runs from December 7 to 19 in Montreal."

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension 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, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1928

During the first year of Covid, I penned an essay for this blog about the unexpected pleasure of having wild dolphins join me on a morning swim. Once all the hotels had closed and tourists had been sent away, there was a kind of liberation of the natural world. I found myself on a spit of barrier island off the Yucatán Peninsula that should have been inhospitable to any without fins or feathers, but instead attracts thousands of migratory humans in season to sun themselves and gawk at flamingos and whale sharks. 

With all that taken away by a virus that attacked the two-legged invaders, a primordial world that had existed for millennia returned.

I came here not as a visitor but to dissolve into as pristine a part of nature as I could, to better cleanse body, mind, and perspective. Sheltering in a one-room palapa with a grass roof I am commonly awakened at night by visitors—mice, raccoons, bats—looking to get out of the rain and share the comfy space I’ve made from coconut wood, zapote and stone. I am afraid I am not very hospitable, rousing myself to chase them out.

But then I notice this phenomenon that doubtless many hunters experience. When I become aware of my prey, even though I have not moved or made a sound, they seem to also become aware of me. They sense my sensing them and pause. If I then move or make a sound they flee.

By what sense, I ask myself, do they sense me sensing them? Is it a sense I also have but suppress, or is it unique to their species?

I have been enjoying the latest book by one of my favorite authors, Ed Yong. He came to my attention with his unerringly accurate and prescient coverage of Covid for The Atlantic. After taking home a Pulitzer for that, he switched to an entirely different subject—how perception works differently for different species.

 

In An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Yong observes that a tick, “questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin.” That is the sensory universe that motivates her daily quest for food and reproductive success. “Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world,” Yong writes. “The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”

It is like that for humans, too. We rely on six senses, and occasionally some clever mechanical prosthetic inventions, to perceive the world as we go about our quests for food and reproductive success. We do not know what we do not experience. Other living things may lack our senses of sight, smell and hearing but they perceive through senses we lack—echolocation, ultraviolet or infrared vision, or magnetoreception. Bumblebees read the electrical fields of flowers. The platypus’s bill can sense both pressure and electric fields. Owls have asymmetric ears that pinpoint distant sounds to accuracies of 2 degrees. Horses resolve figures a mile distant. Zebra finches resolve sound in 1-millisecond bytes. The blue-throated hummingbird sings ultrasonic frequencies it cannot hear but the greater wax moth and Philippine tarsier can. Sharks can “smell” blood in passing currents in parts per million. Otters and seals can track the wake left by fishes 200 yards away. Pigeons, Bogong moths, European robins and loggerhead turtles “read” subtle variations in Earth’s magnetic field to navigate over long distances.

There is much left to be learned. The largest whales have a volleyball-sized sensor at the tip of their lower jaw. We only discovered that in 2012 and still do not know what it does. Rattlesnakes can “visualize” the body heat of their prey the way an infrared night scope might, but we don’t know if that is part of their vision or derived from sensors at the tips of their forked tongues. Treehoppers communicate by contracting their abdomens to produce vibrations through the branches on which they stand. Unless we attach a microphone to the branch, we would never know that. We still don’t know why Beaked whales strand en masse after exposure to naval sonar. There are thousands of mysterious communications going on around us—a world filled with conversation—that we are completely oblivious to.

The red lights of telecommunications towers annually kill some 7 million migrating birds that collide into wires or each other because of the light. Subjected to the din of global cargo shipping, humpback whales stop singing, orcas stop foraging, crabs stop feeding, and reef fish become easy prey. Noise causes prairie dogs to spend more time in burrows, owls to misjudge their glide path to prey, and sage grouse to abandon breeding grounds. Bathed in bright lights from parking lots and skyscrapers, flowers receive fewer visits from nocturnal pollinators and produce fewer fruit. Sea turtle hatchlings wander far in the opposite direction from the ocean.

Ninety percent of seabirds and nearly 100 percent of ocean fish contain forever plastics in their guts and tissues. Their olfactory senses masked by pesticides in the water, salmon can no longer detect their streams of birth. Species with slow lives and long generations can’t evolve quickly enough to keep pace with levels of light, noise, salinity and toxic pollution that double every few decades. There are whales alive today who may recall when they could hear songs of their pods at distances ten times the distances they can pick them out today. The din of ships, sonars, and cable buzz obscures. Their world has shrunken in their lifetimes, given up to the bipedal apes who seem now to be everywhere.

Yong gives the example of the Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay in New Mexico that flees from the noise of compressors used to frack methane. The jays spread the seeds of pinyon pines—a single bird can disperse 3000-4000 seeds per year—which are the foundation for a fragile dry ecosystem that provides food and shelter to hundreds of species, including indigenous peoples. The loss of the jay to fracking has meant the loss of three-quarters of these systems, with consequences for centuries.

We cannot hear them hear us. But they hear us not hearing them. 

As we rend the web of life we cut away the branch that we ourselves sit upon. Many of us understand this but feel powerless to change it. Biodiversity COP15 runs from December 7 to 19 in Montreal. Like Climate COP27 in Egypt, this COP is focused on the implementation of an agreement negotiated into international law at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. There were three major works arrived at in Rio: the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The conferences of the parties (COPs) bring together the national stakeholders to try to advance these goals. It is a slow process—lots of competing interests—and as with the other two treaties, biodiversity losses are proceeding faster than measures to combat it.

All sessions at COP15 will be streamed live at cbd.int/live and the main schedule is also available. Just as Loss and Damage was the sticking point for COP27-Sharm El Sheikh, GMOs are the blockade in Montreal’s roadmap. The UN has relabeled them LMOs— Living Modified Organisms. Safe transport, handling and labeling rather than elimination is being discussed. Apart from in the halls and cafes, there will be scant discussion of proposals to rewild a third, half, or two-thirds of the planet in order to save it. 

We could bemoan a lack of progress as we drift towards existential annihilation, the futility of toothless and waste-filled UN gabfests, or human nature, but what is our alternative? We must keep talking. The COPs set decade-by-decade goals in the hope that by 2050, the crisis will be contained and a different future will unfold. If you don’t think that is likely, you are not alone.

References:

Beston, Henry. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1928. (Holt Paperbacks 2003).

Damasio, Antonio, The quest to understand consciousness, TED 2011, Long Beach, CA (Feb 2011)

Yong, Ed. An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. National Geographic Books, 2022.

 

Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. One hundred twenty thousand Ukrainians have died from the war since February 2022. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are still 70 sites in Ukraine and 300 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

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The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.6 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. We set back our children’s education and mental health. We virtualized the work week until few wanted to return to their open-plan cubicle offices. We invented and produced tests and vaccines faster than anyone thought possible but then we hoarded them for the wealthy and denied them to two-thirds of the world, who became the Petri-plates for new variants. SARS jumped from people to dogs and cats to field mice. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talent as a species.

Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will change all that for planetary-ecosystem-destroying climate change?

As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.

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“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

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