Reposted from Defenders Magazine.
Robert Michael Pyle
Our concern for the absolute extinction of species is highly appropriate. As our partners in Earth’s enterprise drop out, we find ourselves lonelier, less sure of our ability to hold together the tattered business of life. Every effort to prevent further losses is worthwhile, no matter how disruptive, for diversity is its own reward. But outright extinction is not the only problem. By concentrating on the truly rare and endangered plants and animals, conservationists often neglect another form of loss that can have striking consequences: the local extinction.
Local extinctions matter for at least three major reasons. First, evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection operates intensely on “edge” populations. This means that the cutting edge of evolution can be the extremities of a species’ range rather than the center, where it is more numerous. The protection of marginal populations therefore becomes important. Local extinctions commonly occur on the edges, depriving species of this important opportunity for adaptive change.
Second, little losses add up to big losses. A colony goes extinct here, a population drops out there, and before you know it, you have an endangered species. Attrition, once under way, is progressive. “Between German chickens and Irish hogs,” wrote San Francisco entomologist H. H. Behr to his Chicago friend Herman Strecker in 1875, “no insect can exist besides louse and flea.” Behr was lamenting the diminution of native insects on the San Francisco Peninsula. Already at that early date, butterflies such as the Xerces blue were becoming difficult to find as colony after colony disappeared before the expanding city. In the early 1940s the Xerces blue became absolutely extinct. Thus local losses accumulate, undermining the overall flora and fauna.
The third consequence amounts to a different kind of depletion. I call it the extinction of experience. Simply stated, the loss of neighborhood species endangers our experience of nature. If a species becomes extinct within our own radius of reach (smaller for the very old, very young, disabled and poor), it might as well be gone altogether, in one important sense. To those whose access suffers by it, local extinction has much the same result as global eradication.
Of course, we are all diminished by the extirpation of animals and plants wherever they occur. Many people take deep satisfaction in wilderness and wildlife they will never see. But direct, personal contact with other living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experience can never replace.
I believe that one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live. We lack a widespread sense of intimacy with the living world. Natural history has never been more popular in some ways, yet few people organize their lives around nature, or even allow it to affect them profoundly. Our depth of contact is too often wanting. Two distinctive birds, by the ways in which they fish, furnish a model for what I mean.
Brown pelicans fish by slamming directly into the sea, great bills agape, making sure of solid contact with the resource they seek. Black skimmers, graceful ternlike birds with longer lower mandibles than upper, fly over the surface with just the lower halves of their bills in the water. They catch fish too, but avoid bodily immersion by merely skimming the surface.
In my view, most people who consider themselves nature lovers behave more like skimmers than pelicans. They buy the right outfits at L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, carry field guides and take walks on nature trails, reading all the interpretive signs. They watch the nature programs on television, shop at the Nature Company and pay their dues to the National Wildlife Federation or the National Audubon Society. These activities are admirable, but they do not ensure truly intimate contact with nature. Many such “naturalists” merely skim, reaping a shallow reward. Yet the great majority of the people associate with nature even less.
When the natural world becomes chiefly an entertainment or an obligation, it loses its ability to arouse our deeper instincts. Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, who has won two Pulitzer prizes for his penetrating looks at both humans and insects, believes we all possess what he calls “biophilia.” To Wilson, this means that humans have an innate desire to connect with other life forms, and that to do so is highly salutary. Nature is therapeutic. As short-story writer Valerie Martin tells us in “The Consolation of Nature,” only nature can restore a sense of safety in the end. But clearly, too few people ever realize their potential love of nature. So where does the courtship fail? How can we engage our biophilia?
Everyone has at least a chance of realizing a pleasurable and collegial wholeness with nature. But to get there, intimate association is necessary. A face-to-face encounter with a banana slug means much more than a Komodo dragon seen on television. With rhinos mating in the living room, who will care about the creatures next door? At least the skimmers are aware of nature. As for the others, whose lives hold little place for nature, how can they even care?
The extinction of experience is not just about losing the personal benefits of the natural high. It also implies a cycle of disaffection that can have disastrous consequences. As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat.
So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections. This is how the passing of otherwise common species from our immediate vicinities can be as significant as the total loss of rarities. People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?
In teaching about butterflies, I frequently place a living butterfly on a child’s nose. Noses seem to make perfectly good perches or basking spots, and the insect often remains for some time. Almost everyone is delighted by this, the light tickle, the closeup colors, the thread of a tongue probing for droplets of perspiration. But somewhere beyond delight lies enlightenment. I have been astonished at the small epiphanies I see in the eyes of a child in truly close contact with nature, perhaps for the first time. This can happen to grown-ups too, reminding them of something they never knew they had forgotten.
We are finally discovering the link between our biophilia and our future. With new eyes, planners are leaving nature in the suburbs and inviting it back into the cities as never before. For many species the effort comes too late, since once gone, they can be desperately difficult to reestablish. But at least the adaptable types can be fostered with care and forethought.
The initiatives of urban ecologists are making themselves felt in many cities. In Portland, Oregon, Urban Naturalist Mike Houck worked to have the great blue heron designated the official city bird, to have a local microbrewery fashion an ale to commemorate it, and to fill in the green leaks in a 40-mile-loop greenway envisioned decades ago. Now known as the 140-Mile Loop, it ties in with a massive urban greenspaces program on both sides of the Columbia River. An international conference entitled “Country in the City” takes place annually in Portland, pushing urban diversity. These kinds of efforts arise from a recognition of the extinction of experience and a fervid desire to avoid its consequences.
Houck has launched an effort to involve the arts community in refreshing the cities and devoted himself to urban stream restoration. When streams are rescued from the storm drains, they are said (delightfully) to be “daylighted.” And when each city has someone like Mike Houck working to daylight its streams, save its woods and educate its planners, the sources of our experience will be safer.
But nature reserves and formal greenways are not enough to ensure connection. Such places, important as they are, invite a measured, restricted kind of contact. When children come along with an embryonic interest in natural history, they need free places for pottering, netting, catching and watching. Insects, crawdads and tadpoles can stand to be nabbed a good deal. Bug collecting has always been the standard route to a serious interest in biology. To expect a strictly appreciative first response from a child is quixotic. Young naturalists need the “trophy,” hands-on stage before leapfrogging to mere looking. There need to be places that are not kid-proofed, where children can do damage and come back the following year to see the results.
Likewise, we all need spots near home where we can wander off a trail, lift a stone, poke about and merely wonder: places where no interpretive signs intrude their message to rob our spontaneous response. Along with the nature centers, parks and preserves, we would do well to maintain a modicum of open space with no rule but common courtesy, no sign besides animal tracks.
For these purposes, nothing serves better than the hand-me-down habitats that lie somewhere between formal protection and development. Throwaway landscapes like this used to occur on the edges of settlement everywhere. Richard Mabey, a British writer and naturalist, describes them as the “unofficial countryside.” He uses the term for those ignominious, degraded, forgotten places that we have discarded, which serve nonetheless as habitats for a broad array of adaptable plants and animals: derelict railway land, ditchbanks, abandoned farms or bankrupt building sites, old gravel pits and factory yards, embankments, margins of landfills. These are the secondhand lands as opposed to the parks, forests, preserves and dedicated rural farmland that constitute the “official countryside.”
Organisms inhabiting such Cinderella sites are surprisingly varied, interesting and numerous. They are the survivors, the colonizers, the generalists—the so-called weedy species. Or, in secreted corners and remnants of older habitat types, specialists and rarities might survive as holdouts, waiting to be discovered by the watchful. Developers, realtors and the common parlance refer to such weedy enclaves as “vacant lots” and “waste ground.” But these are two of my favorite oxymorons: What, to a curious kid, is less vacant than a vacant lot? Less wasted than waste ground?
The number of people living with little hint of nature in their lives is very large and growing. This isn’t good for us. If the penalty of an ecological education is to live in a world of wounds, as Aldo Leopold said, then green spaces like these are the bandages and the balm. And if the penalty of ecological ignorance is still more wounds, then the unschooled need them even more. To gain the solace of nature, we all must connect deeply. Few ever do.
In the long run, this mass estrangement from things natural bodes ill for the care of the Earth. If we are to forge new links to the land, we must resist the extinction of experience. We must save not only the wilderness but the vacant lots, the ditches as well as the canyon-lands, and the woodlots along with the old growth. We must become believers in the world.