The end of the animal world.
A lot has happened recently but I don't feel I can really talk about it yet. So here's something I mostly prepared earlier.
This is a double-page spread from a book my great aunt Nancy gave me as a child. It's called Animali del Mondo (animals of the world). You can see a snarling snow leopard right in the centre. There isn't any saola, of course; it hadn’t been discovered. Today, if such a book could still contain such a map, there's a good chance it would include a picture of a saola, standing tall enough for the International Space Station to crash into its chest. However I do wonder if such maps are still being produced. I couldn't honestly draw one myself.
This was what the world looked like to me as a child in my imagination. For me, it wasn’t ‘Animali del Mondo’ but 'Il Mondo di Animali.' Animals - big animals like these ones - were what the world consisted of, they were the ground of it. I did not actually think that a 4-million foot tall moose towered over Eastern Siberia but it seemed unquestionable that such an image represented accurately the importance of Moose to what the world actually was. Or Elk, if you prefer.
I knew other kinds of maps existed, of course: the ones with flat colours pooling inside pencil-thin borders. I had nothing against them and I liked learning the names of the countries but I knew they weren't real. You didn't see German pink switching to Swiss turquoise when you looked out the window of a plane.
I did love looking out of the windows of planes. I think the word 'treasure' most truthfully referred to the brightness and intricacy of the view from those windows. The Earth from space is a jewel, I’ve heard but from a plane it’s a treasure. By the time I got to travelling between England and Vietnam, I'd be faced with the clash between the landscape I saw and the one I had long held in my mind. I saw fields. I saw roads and towns. So much of the land was fields - at either end of the journey nearly all of it was. At night it was worse because of the lights. Once I remember seeing the India-Pakistan border, perfectly straight and floodlit in the night - the only thing visible from the window. Those things weren’t supposed to be real.
There was one time when we took another route over the far northern coasts of Russia and I drank in the view of seemingly endless tundra; the only lights were those that flashed from rivers and pools and the long ray like a compass needle that lay in the grey sea and in the scratches on the perspex windows. I'd heard of methane in the permafrost at that time but it didn't seem like a real thing - it was distant in the way that nuclear war had come to seem distant since 1991. Russia, the nation state, was already a thing to worry about even then but that too seemed distant. I think that was the last time I was back in that watercoloured world that existed under the animals' feet in my childhood picture books. The last time with my eyes open, at any rate.
The human population collectively weighs hundreds of times more than the combined weight of all wild land mammals put together and that's not even thinking about all the cows and the pigs. Anthropocene fun fact time. Sure there are people who will still be shocked by that, and people who can never had to feel miserable looking out of plane windows. I think that most readers will either have heard it before or will not be surprised. And probably people who envy my naivete for not living in the obvious truth of collapse. I’m still not really sure what’s going to happen.
When I was at Oxford, Jared Diamond came to talk. His narrative about Easter Island as “the clearest example of a civilization that destroyed itself,” still seemed revolutionary and exciting. Knowing this was no longer the case, I decided, the other day, to catch up it up to a podcast-listener level. There’s a 2-part summary here which seemed pretty convincing; though others may know more than me. Apparently recent scholarship has contested both the idea that the islanders destroyed their forests and the idea that it was the destruction of the forests which led to the collapse of Rapanui society. The second point seems pretty certain; Rapanui’s society was all but destroyed through contact with Europeans, not deforestation. It’s grim. I’m a lot less convinced by the first point, though. Seems rather more likely that the people did destroy the forest but that afterward they… well they managed. Actually it seems they created a lush and fertile farming system on the deforested land. That’s my podcast-listener’s understanding at any rate.
And here? When there are no more tigers to hunt, hunt pigs, no more pigs, hunt porcupines, no more porcupines trap moths and sell them to collectors. After that go and work in a factory. Seems to be working so far. A lot of mess and a lot of misery but no apocalypse yet.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. It’s a good point, well made but it’s talking about the world I’m sitting in now. Where I’m typing at my laptop with a glass of peach tea next to me and a fan to dispel the heat. There are calico cushions on the chairs in front of me which say “Be not afraid of greatness. Shakespeare” and “When nothing goes right, go left.” This is Vũ Quang town, where the WWF expedition would have stopped 30 years ago to complete paperwork before heading up to the isolated villages in the shadow of the mountains. The ones I just passed over in a boat. John MacKinnon had seen the mountains from a plane, he told me.
This is where science discovered a pair of horns on the wall of a hunter’s hut and science, or at least John MacKinnon, initially didn’t know what to think. That distant lost world which I read about in BBC Wildlife magazine age 12 - this cafe is there.
At least the potted plant’s real.
Sorry, I got distracted… What I mean is that the end of the world now means the end of our world. Collapse means collapse of civilization, not ecosystems. The world that I believed in as a child is already lost. In the 1980s, extinction was the loss of a pillar of the world. In the early 2000s, it was as if a great and ancient book had been callously torn from the shelves and burned. Now it's just a background gurgle, a ‘canary in the coal mine’, a ‘warning for the future’. Our future, that is. The future of things like economies and nation states, things which ought to be abstractions. What I feel, honestly, faced with this, is horror that it isn’t the end of the world full stop. It should be.
I don’t know when the world of animals ended but people pick dates for the Holocene Anthropocene boundary so I will pick a year for this. I think it was 2006, when the Yangtze river dolphin was lost and nothing much changed. Also the year I first came out to Vietnam to work on saola so…
Or…am I seeing only the loss of my childhood, and a childhood bathed in colonial fantasy at that?