Ivory and Horn.
Am I actually getting back in my lane and talking about the wildlife trade? Nope.
Sorry! I forgot what time I’d scheduled this to go out and I was still editing the middle of it. An earlier version went out that made a sudden jump - but the jump actually looked like it was deliberate. It wasn’t I promise!
…OK…
For context, I have been talking - at some length - about whether the story of Eden and the Fall of Man is useful for responding to a mass extinction and, if not, whether myth is any kind of a useful guide in this predicament. For me, the problem is not that the myth gives humans license to empire; it’s that this myth has been shown to be so thoroughly misleading as a guide to Earth’s past, it seems unwise to rely on it for any understanding of Earth’s future. To talk about this is inherently tiresome because it brings up a struggle we are all tired of: science vs religion, and particularly the extreme version of Young Earth Creationists vs Richard Dawkins et al. I was already tired of this when I started my undergraduate degree in the department where Dawkins was still teaching. However, being bored of a conflict doesn’t resolve it. It’s come up again.
Also, for context, before I started - for some reason - talking about that, I had just got to the place in my own story where I started writing - about the dream I had involving Penelope, wife of Odysseus, in the Odyssey. In my dream, Penelope represented the saola. The council of Greek captains plotting to rape her in order to win and end the terrible war, these represented the saola working group planning to capture saola with dogs in order to set up a captive breeding programme. Penelope, in the dream, was similar to the saola in my life in that she did not appear, but was only talked about. When I sent the story of this dream to Charlotte DuCann at Dark Mountain, she asked me a question about it, which I hadn’t thought of before and ended up with me remembering another dream and a lot more of the story.
Those two things: Penelope and The Fall aren’t obviously connected, to each other or to the conservation of an endangered species. I have already mentioned one surprising way in which the Odyssey and Christianity and the saola came together for me. Remembering that in my cluttered and comfortable study must make me scared of too much theorizing. Perhaps I am not scared enough. Or perhaps I need to do my little best to build a new raft while it’s quiet. It’s not as if I’m actually on solid ground now.
The myth of the Garden and the Fall engenders responses to our current crisis which, it seems to me, are founded on a false dream. It seems like a man trying to relate to an ideal woman, maybe the ideal of ‘the girl that I married,’ and not the woman he lives with. That’s a bit general and high-handed, isn’t it?
OK, more specifically, I was talking about decision analysis as a way of approaching the problem of saola conservation. The cool thing about decision analysis, for me, was that it acknowledged uncertainty and allowed it in. It didn’t insist on eliminating it first. I came in with the idea that ‘first we need a study so we know where saola are; then we can protect them in those places.’ When we talked about using local knowledge, or biologists’ expert guesses, to make a probabilistic map of where saola were, the common response from the ecologically trained was ‘that is not reliable information; we need a study.’ However, if you put this into a decision analysis framework where everything was about the probability of moving towards the goal of saving saola, it became clear that there was nothing special about that particular uncertainty, uncertainty about the map. The uncertainty about what to do when we had the map was just as important, if not more so. Efforts to reduce snaring in Vietnam to date had been complete failures so how could we assume that we could do it? If we could make assumptions about that based on expert opinion, why wasn’t expert opinion good enough for deciding where saola were. Was it not just because tradition led us to consider one of those a matter for professional expert opinion, and the other a matter for scientific study?
But decision analysis starts from a goal and a goal starts from… somewhere. It’s not clear. Science has openly acknowledged limits when it comes to goals. Since my undergraduate days I - and I think most conservationists - have struggled with the constant pressure to justify our goals. This does not apply to doctors or development workers, for example. These people may have to justify their paradigms and approach, but almost entirely against people who believe that they don’t have the right approach to helping the sick and the poor. They don’t often face people who believe that they shouldn’t be trying to help the sick and the poor at all. Conservationists face this sort of thing all the time; especially western conservationists who work on charismatic megafauna, like the saola. People like us can either shift to environmentalisms more obviously geared to benefiting human wellbeing, or we can accept that we are pushing a product; one previously marketed by the big game hunters and still popular as an ornament of empire. If we don’t do either of these things, we can simply avoid thinking about it and medicate ourselves against the constant drain on our motivation (coffee and tea production threatens some truly lovely forests) or we can look back to the voices that told us in the first place that humans matter and animals do not.
If we do that, though, it brings up another problem. We can very happily and easily throw out the stuff about Homo sapiens being the image of God and ordained to rule over Creation but the same story looks rather suspiciously like it’s the origin for a lot of the ideas we do hold dear. We talk, for example about ecosystems having ‘function,’ of extinction leaving a ‘gap in nature,’ as if there were some kind of design. We know, however, that whole magnificent worlds and all their denizens have been vanishing in cataclysm and compost since ever life was and the size of it staggers us. It can happen slowly and it can happen quickly but it cannot happen unnaturally, whether fast or slow, because ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ have no meaning. What we are doing is probably faster than the Great Oxygenation Event and certainly slower than the Chicxulub impact. Whether it is any more avoidable than either is a matter for professional opinion, which is not reliable.
With this particular myth, we would certainly get a lot of support from outside of our own disciplines in denouncing it and in trying to go back to before it was ever conceived. But that ends up meaning choosing another myth instead; maybe one with a goddess in it. It seems there’s another version of the Fall in that: the Fall is the story of the Fall itself. In other words, the point where it all went wrong was when we started telling stories about the point where it all went wrong. Apart from the obvious paradox, you don’t have to look very hard at the environmental history of non-Abrahamic cultures to see that that isn’t simply true. Maybe the Fall of Man story has provided license to some, but it isn’t what made us a devastation. I’ve said that before. I mean maybe there is some effect, but my suspicion is that it’s simply a case of the grass being greener.
No. We don’t need allies, not as scientists. As conservationists we certainly do, but as scientists we are powerful enough. Can we not simply say that an ancient myth like this is simply old baggage, and dangerous at that? We should look for our morality in purer places. Well maybe. But if we get rid of all those horrible hairy old dangerous stories, why can’t we also get rid of those horrible hairy old dangerous animals? The logic is really the same. It’s just that the stories really can hurt us, even if we live far from any wild forest or ocean and do not keep any sheep.
So, again, I am doing my best to describe a trap.
It was half term and we went up to Norfolk. We stayed by the sea and, on a couple of mornings, I sat out in the cliffside shelter with two genial old boys and we scanned the waves with our telescopes, seawatching. Many of the birds you see above the sea are ducks and geese still moving: traipsing brents, dutiful scoter and bullet-crazy goldeneye as well as the lifting flocks of wigeon. This is the bird which Linnaeus identified with the Penelops, the obscure waterbird for which the queen of Ithaka is named. I am not sure but I suspect the identification is based on the whistling voice of the wigeon, as the Penelops was said to have a sweet voice. However, it might be worth remembering that the voice of the wigeon is rarely heard alone. The same is true for all migrating ducks and geese. The music is in their numbers and the light they move through - the slant of it - is their weaving in and out of the little lit part we live in.
It seems, also, that Anas penelope was the vector for bird flu to Europe.
Where I am now, it sometimes seems that all this can be terribly beautifully meaningful and it sometimes seems that finding such meanings is just a way to avoid the meaning that you don’t want to know about.
Before it was half term, when I was writing the stuff that went out last week, I had this conversation with my son:
“I dreamed that we had PE today.”
“Well you do have PE today.”
“Oh, well that was a true dream.”
Sometimes it is that simple. I’m not saying there isn’t any mystery; I’m just saying that it can be had to tell between mystery and fudge. I don’t think anyone’s above a bit of fudge, not even if they have really heard the breath of God.
So - well - it’s complicated, I suppose. And I think - though I’d have to do a lot more work to back this up - I think we’ve tried to solve the complication by separating the warring parties that looked like they could be called ‘religion’ and ‘science.’ And I don’t think that separation works. I don’t think, as I said last week, that it can simply mean nothing in the spiritual world that evolution by natural selection is how we were made. On the other hand, I’m not prepared to take the other approach: ‘the spiritual world’ is a nothing, a fancy. So - well - it’s complicated.
A certain lady is reported to have said that there are dreams that can be trusted and dreams which cannot. That some pass through the gates of ivory, and they lie, and some pass through the gates of horn, and speak truth. She was talking about her own dream that her lost husband was alive. In fact her husband was alive and listening to her speaking; we don't know if she suspected. She tells him that she suspects her own dream was a lying, ivory dream. It might have been some kind of test, or a tease, or a genuine cry of despair. It might have been all three, I wouldn’t put it past her.
How would she react if she were told that the dream was still true, even if her husband was at the bottom of the sea. It is true because her husband in the dream is not really her husband, or his being alive doesn’t mean that he is really alive; or rather he is alive - even if he’s at the bottom of the sea - but only from a certain point of view?
I can see her face, her eyes are full, dark and liquid. She would never raise an eyebrow at a guest but there is a slight flare to the nostrils. She has another day to hold together her house - her house with the robbers still in it. This could be the day her son gets himself killed. You have a story to tell her but it isn’t a very probable one and it differs completely from the stories that other people have already heard you tell to them. Why should anyone trust you about how you got here - you of all people?
That’s not how it works, is it? Instead you’ll say something vaguely reassuring and leave her to get on with her day. And, if you both survive that day then maybe, much later she will tell you she has moved the thing which was rooted, and you will say… “What? No you have not.”
Bewilderment, not anger. Not “how dare you say that?” or “well, that’s not my belief” but “what are you even talking about?” That’s the difference between what happens when someone tells me “religion’s just lies” or “conserving endangered species is just a kind of consumerism” and what happens when someone tells me “living things were created perfect by God in their various kinds, and death came with the Fall.” Not. “No!” but “What?”1
And then she says: “Oh my soulmate and saviour and lord, sufferer, wanderer, fish that has slipped through the net when the net was the sea, come back and rule over my island, I'll yield it and welcome, it's rightfully yours. Now stop gaping like an idiot and come up to the bed which is still where it was and… by the way… I got you, you bastard. How’s that for a trap?” What scientist could help being a little in love?
What just happened? I was writing about “Christianity and Evolution.” Apparently. And I wrote all that.
OK here’s my proposition. This “Fall” tryptich, this story that the world went wrong somewhere: sure, we can keep it in the house if it seems important. Just because I don’t necessarily get it, it doesn’t mean it’s no use. Heaven knows, I don’t like throwing stuff out. But can we just move it out into the corridor for a while? And maybe take the ‘functioning ecosystem’ papers too? And all those books and pamphlets about what’s at the heart of our cultural crisis and indigenous wisdom we’ve overlooked and stuff. Could we just see what the bedroom looks like without them maybe? What’s still in there after we’ve cleared those things out. Can we do that?2
Charlotte’s original question was “what does the saola - what does Penelope - have to say about this?” I imagine my two childhood faiths - the Christian and the Darwinist - standing beside me, columns of smoke and eyes. Their hostility flickers the world around me baby to bathwater, figure to ground. In response to that question, though, they both just say “What?”
Tell me I’m wrong.
Maybe they can explain themselves; as I can explain how whales are actually fish after all, and the explanation will make good - slightly disappointing - sense. When people tell me that the spiritual truths encoded in Christian orthodoxy are utterly beyond assault from what we might learn about purely material things, I am angry and that might mean I’m frightened. When they tell me that Eden was a real place or the Fall a historical event, I am bewildered; it cannot be so.
While we’re at it, what about this skull with the one big eye hole? What’s that even from? To be honest, I’d forgotten it was in the room. It’s like we’ve decided not to talk about it.
Ok this has cleared up quite a bit thank you.
I originally had something more to say about this but I think I just have to go away and think about it a lot more.
Just to say again that I apologize again for the way this post went out. I had to copy it as a new draft and then send it again. When I did that, nothing appeared to happen (nothing arrived in my own inbox and the post's stats on Substack were all set to N/A. So I did it again and then got two versions of the updated email as well as the original incomplete one. Overall a bit of a mess! Hope that you could find your way to the right place to comment.