Natural Sadness

“Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

(From the essay “Marshland Elegy” in A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold)

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What shall we do for timber?
 The last of the woods is down.
...
There's no holly nor hazel nor ash there,
 The pasture's rock and stone,
The crown of the forest has withered,
 And the last of the game is gone.
(Anonymous.  Translation by Frank O'Connor)

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No moa, no moa
In old Ao-tea-roa.
Can't get 'em.
They've et 'em;
They've gone and there ain't no moa!
(New Zealand song)

Is there anything sadder than natural history? To read, to take just a prominant example, E.O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life is delightful until just about the half-way point, when suddenly we plunge into a section titled "The Human Impact". Slowly our smile of wonder turns to a grimace of indefineable, dark urgency as page follows page, chapter chapter, detailing the contemporary catastrophe of a defenseless, precious natural world in competition with roaring, slurping, gobbling humanity.

My words, of course: Wilson is much more polite. Still, you can almost hear the catch in the throat of his writing, but bravely he finishes the book's sad catalog. And soon, weary but driven, he will start a new book...

We ordinary readers, though, don't have the heart to keep hearing this bad news. What can we do about it, after all? So we turn to upbeat stories about the latest marvelous gadgets, or open an historical novel. We try not to dwell on the gloomy fact that our children will never have what we had: a sense of a non-human world, terrible and magnificent.

Now we are rescuing polar bears from ice floes, counting the tigers in the shrinking Bengal forest, and having gathered up the last few California condors, are breeding them for release into the "wild". The few hundred—or thousand or so—blue whales, instead of simply existing as a glorious but inaccessible reality, are way too few, so must be tracked and fussed over.

And let's not even talk about the Amazon.

Three hundred years into the Industrial Revolution the world has become one big zoo, haphazardly run. The wilderness is gone: there is no place, however remote, where one might not find a soda can. And only a handful of spots are far enough from the great glow of civilization to have a night of real darkness—the night of fairy tales, the night of old.