Well I have gone off-piste rather. This piece is not only late, but it fits none of my rules. It is not what I planned to write about either, and perhaps it is here because I am too scared of that.
I have been trying to write about decision analysis. I tried to switch saola conservation planning to a decision analysis framework. I failed and I don’t know if the problem was with the framework or with me. However there’s another story about decision analysis that I have to tell in parallel. Decision analysis doesn’t really work without embracing subjective probabilities and thinking about subjective probabilities deprives me of any solid ground at all.
It is dark, but for the street-light and my screen. The street-light draws moths and sometimes the moths draw bats. When I was a child, I was delighted by the bats. Now I am fearful for the moths; not because of the bats, but because of the light. Or rather, I was fearful. After weeks of writing this, I feel very little. That’s the problem, maybe.
The last post, as my father noted, was full of typos. It did not have a picture. The last post was hard to write. This post will be different. This post I am writing straight into the white window and drafting nowhere. This post is not based on an editing of old writing. I see the words come up and I run back and delete them; start over. I should get a typewriter; except there are so many typos, as my father says.
The first time I said I wanted to write a book, I was talking to my friend Sam Turvey, in a Bristol pub. Sam’s book - or one of his books - is called ‘Witness to Extinction. I said that the title of my book might be ‘Loser.’ It would be about the question of whether the saola is a loser in the game of evolution. Whether the idea of ‘loser’, has meaning, as opposed to ‘lost.’ A relic doomed to extinction as B- said in Tam Dao in 2008; following a script he did not write. B- was - and for all I know still is - caught in the trap of that idea of ‘primitive relics.’ In their 2000 book chapter, George Schaller and Colin Groves present the Annamites as a Lost World; preserving relics of a Pliocene biota that vanished elsewhere. The implication is that it will vanish in the Annamites too, unless we step in. I tried to stand up to B- over that idea in Tam Dao, but I didn’t last long:
“It’s not a relic, B-: nothing living’s a ‘relic.’
He turns a long gaze on me: “yeah, well…. it’s a relic.”
As I said: his tone meant ‘get real.’ Well I had other stuff to talk about and I had to pick my battles. Threats, actions to reduce those threats, obstacles to those actions; those are what seemed to matter, not evolutionary narratives. It’s also true, though, that “get real,” is a challenge I’m particularly vulnerable to.
But - very quickly - if you do believe in hopeless ‘relic’ species - if you were asked to name a species which was hopelessly doomed without human support - which one would you pick? Wouldn’t it be the adorable but hopeless bear that, despite being a Carnivore, has decided for reasons best known to itself to eat, of all things, bamboos? The black and white bear which is so useless at sex that it wouldn’t breed properly in captivity? Certainly you would not be alone in so doing; the Giant Panda has become a symbol, in conservation circles, of skewed conservation priorities: a boondoggle of a bear.
Unlike the only other bear that has abandoned omnivory. Nobody claims that the Polar Bear, which eats almost exclusively meat, is a stupid, wrong animal that has foolishly abandoned its evolutionary heritage. Is it, perhaps, because it has moved in a more macho direction? As for the sex life well, according to Schaller, when a female panda comes into heat in the mountain forests of Szechuan, she may climb a great tree and sit there roaring into the night. The males begin moving through the thickets towards her and must vie for her favour beneath the tower. They aren’t like female lions or tigers; hotwired to screw the beaus who have eaten their babies. For that reason, they can’t be relied on to swell the studbooks when locked up with a bureaucratically chosen partner in a box. Does that make their species unworthy to live?
Like the duck-billed platypus, the giant panda is an impressively innovative species; specialized in a superabundant food that is inaccessible to most other mammals, thanks to such adaptations as exceptionally broad skulls to anchor prodigious chewing muscles, a unique complement of gut bacteria and, famously, opposable ‘thumbs’ for grasping bamboo stems1. If they were the only weird mammal with opposable thumbs, they’d probably still be thriving across the broad range from Myanmar to Vietnam that they occupied until the late Pleistocene when…
…but here’s the problem. Look, maybe it was climate change. It’s always possible it was climate change. And historical climate change (far slower than what we’re going through now) is also a potential explanation for the saola being beaten back to the wet mountains. But climate can change one way and then the other: species retreat to refugia, then spread out of them again and that has happened over ages and over epochs. Something was different this time.
In one way of looking at it, it is rather wonderful that those huge cheeks - full of bamboo-chomping muscles - just happen to trigger a response in us that supports care of our own offspring. Pandas look cute and so we want them: they’ve cuckoo’ed us. Sure, it was entirely luck; they didn’t evolve the big cheeks for that. But nothing evolves anything for anything; it’s all luck.
That’s one way of looking at it.
But evolution isn’t stopping. At the moment, the appeal to our parental instincts is fairly weak; easily subject to being overruled by cultural change. Let’s face it, humans aren’t as hackable as reed warblers; we aren’t going to feed the pandas over our own children. And anyway, if we do, won’t the cuter individual pandas be favoured, and the species change? It’s cultural ideas about ‘naturalness’, maintained by institutions such as IUCN that have stopped pandas becoming explicitly a domestic species bred for cuteness and manageability. What are the chances IUCN lasts a million years? Let’s get real.
What we are has changed the game forever; changed it by speeding it up. Some other species: brown rat, Chinese bulbul, gonorrhoea, might look like they’re winning right now, but is it really realistic that they’ll survive even another million years without our goodwill? A thousand, yes; civilization might collapse and technologies capable of wiping out all rats not develop unless another civilization emerges. But the idea that this will never happen in a million years: I find it improbable. Maybe if a doomsday cult uses a genetically engineered plague to wipe out humanity. Otherwise, no.
You can argue all around these ideas. And no, I can’t predict what will happen. I don’t know what natural selection is going to do to whom; I just know it isn’t going to stop. And natural selection works because there are losers. Losers who die. It is not something you can get away from. So, Barrie Juniper’s story, that there are palaeoliths and neoliths and the neoliths always win, can still make itself very comfortable in my mind despite the stories by James Scott or David Graeber and Wengrow which emphasize that history is full of human choices. Because, as far as I can see, those stories don’t say how the people making different choices could ever have won.
I’ve said all this before. This stuff is easy to say now. And I am supposed to be talking about things that are hard to say. Let me try to move on.
The other question of the book, as I told Sam in that Bristol pub, was not whether the saola was a ‘loser’, but whether I was.
I am staying at a holiday house owned by my family in a tiny castellate village in the valley where my grandfather was born. Most of the houses here are holiday houses, but they are holiday houses owned by emigrants from the valley and their descendants, who have returned to this place. So this makes it OK. We used to come here when I was a child and I love it here. It is a long time since I have been here in high summer. I am able to enjoy the afternoon storms (still), the fat little green figs, and Brintesia circe, the big black and white butterfly that still dances in the same place on the road where one landed on my mother’s back almost 40 years ago. B. circe is still a big butterfly, somehow, for me; despite being only knee-high to a Vietnamese Junglequeen. The first pink cyclamen are emerging under the hanging moss in the hazel groves that cover the abandoned terraces.
The writing, though, hasn’t gone so well. In the red mood where I wrote my campaign plan for this book, I envisaged spending 2 weeks here, while my family were on holiday elsewhere, to get 4 weeks worth of posts done and to get sunk into the material that would go towards part two of my book. As it was, last week, I managed only the one, pictureless, typo-ridden post and that did not actually get to my target point in time. As I said in my original post about the book; each week’s task was defined by reaching a certain point on the timeline. That point had to be specified in the previous post. It wasn’t; In fact, I missed an entire week. Nonetheless, I still had my original plan, which specified a point that last week’s post was supposed to reach. That was the end of the 2011 meeting of the Saola Working Group, where my presentation of the decision analysis scheme I’d worked out in Hong Kong was shouted down. It didn’t escape me that I was doing the same thing last week that I’d done in Hong Kong: leaving my family to go on holiday so that I could work on a writing project.
On one of my earlier posts for the book, my father wrote to me to say it contained too much self critical agonising for his taste; some of which would have been OK if it were not for a general sense of mea culpa. Well there’s a difficult balance there and there's going to be trouble reaching it.
Apparently, when pitching a book, you’re supposed to present it as a hybrid of two other books. I’ve got a copy of Jonathan Slaght’s ‘Owls of the Eastern Ice’ here with me. On the back there’s a quote from Isabella Tree: “If only every endangered species had a guardian angel as impassioned, courageous and pragmatic as Jonathan Slaght.” I’m not going to get praise of that kind and, if I were to write a book that garnered it, I’d have failed to tell a true story. Admittedly, this doesn’t mean I’m not jealous.
There’s already a book about the saola out there. It’s called ‘The Last Unicorn,” and the author is Bill de Buys. It’s apparently explicitly modelled on Peter Matthiesen’s The Snow Leopard, placing Bill Robichaud in the role of George Schaller. Bill doesn’t think he’s anywhere near as compelling a figure as George Schaller. I’m less sure myself because, in The Snow Leopard, Schaller comes across as supremely self-confident, and I don’t find self-confidence particularly interesting; I am drawn to rarities, after all. That said, except for the title, I do quite like The Last Unicorn. Well, except for the title and one other thing. There’s a point where Bill de Buys asks Bill R “How do you maintain hope?” and he shoots straight back: “What makes you think I do?” The author treats that almost as a joke; seems to assume he was denied a proper answer and must now figure out the enigma that is Bill Robichaud alone. I don’t know how Bill R felt about it - I rather wish I’d called him up at the time, actually. I felt a kind of loneliness by association. I’d have had to give the same answer, and I would have wanted my companion to hear it.
The story I do have to tell makes me miserable. It makes me miserable because the saola hasn’t been saved, it makes me miserable because I haven’t saved it, and it makes me miserable because I wonder if the second reason is more important to me than the first. I don’t like the idea of being a loser, but I’d rather be a loser than a fraud.
Except… except if I’m a loser or a fraud or both, then I can give up; and I do so want to give up. I mean, honestly, don’t you?
Except…
Except there’s still that potential mother of that potential calf on that mountain; uncollapsible wave-form of a mother. There’s still a certain method that has not been properly tried. And there’s still the drums…
At lunch on Sunday, I was talking with one relative who operated at quite a high level in business. She talked about the experience of working on boards, the need to achieve consensus. IT people don’t like being on the board, she said; because it’s frustrating for them. It’s different from the way they solve problems in their own work, and different from the conversations they have with their colleagues. People fresh out of university, very bright perhaps; aren’t necessarily that good at working with people. They want to come up with their own system, which makes sense to them, and then they want it to be implemented as they envisioned it. Life’s not like that, she said. Companies increasingly like women to preside over the board, she said, because women tend to be more focused on achieving consensus than on implementing their vision. Also they make good scapegoats and the men can come back in as saviours when things go wrong. I’m paraphrasing.
As we walk back from the restaurant I try to justify to her - but really to myself - why there’s any value in my trying to tell this story that she’s seen a thousand times already: an educated young man comes up with a perfect scheme for solving an organization’s problems and is bewildered when the relevant committee fails to snap it up. “It’s different here,” I said, “Because the fate of a species depends on it. It’s as if…” I look for a metaphor that will convey my feelings, “as if you were asked to audit the accounts of an angel.” OK that wasn’t it; she laughs. It’s just that something that grand shouldn’t depend on something that silly; I feel that something’s screwed up with causality.
It’s a peculiarly Western hang-up, I suppose. Vietnam’s had a long time to get used to the idea that the mountains, rivers and forests are administered by a bureaucracy, because heaven itself was a bureaucracy, and vulnerable to monkeys. I’m still working, maybe, from the assumption that the world’s the initially perfect creation of a perfect God.
The mountain is bald. I go walking on the bald, gold top of the mountain with my cousin. We go up there in his jeep. My cousin is not bald - not that I’d expect it - it’s just that I’ve suddenly thought he looks like a young St Paul, which is odd, given what he is saying. He is saying that he is further from Christianity than he has maybe ever been. Donkeys, horses, sheep and cattle keep the grass short. Huge, solar-blossomed thistles spill over it, tiny pink pipes of wild thyme push through. When we leave the path, the grasshoppers pour away from our feet, though the grass is not any longer. The grasshoppers are banded in khaki but their wings are crimson or cyan. It’s a dazzle effect; so we lose them when they land. It’s a treasured memory of my childhood also.
My cousin says that it is the idea of sin that he finds most poisonous. He has reasons - good ones - it’s not the offhand comment which that ordinarily is. Nonetheless I still say my old bit; I say that Original Sin always seemed like the best part of Christianity. I find it harder than expected to articulate why.
Our culture has become Humanist instead, I say, and we’re expected to praise human potential where for me it seems that human potential is a terrible, destructive force. Creation myths from all over - though not all of them, of course - suggest that something is deep down wrong, not only with the universe, but with humans specifically. It’s not unique to Genesis. I recount one that was important to me at Oxford, where the pinnacle of God’s creation is an antelope - I never worked out what species of antelope. In this story, at least as I read it, God takes all his other children and flees the first man because of what He has seen that he can do. He took his children and he ran from us. Some reached the legendary city and those are the ones whose forms are unknown to us. They are safe.
The problem with Christianity, I say, is that the sin is too limited. God doesn’t really care about non-human creatures; it shows in the Decalogue. There are interpretations in that direction, sure, but it’s definitely secondary. The thing is, really, that it presumably has to be physically possible to live a sinless human life because Jesus did. So either there is no sin in killing to eat, or actions can’t be inherently sinful. So sin becomes very remote from the world, as Eden has already done. And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? God made the world and then death came along later because humans sinned. But death made our world - is the knife that carved it. We know that now. Unless you are at least a little bit gnostic, Eden has to be some kind of previous draft of the world and it’s hard to think of a way it doesn’t look like a worse one2.
It might seem like I am not talking about the saola at all any more. The point is that the acid eats into pillars of morality as well as pillars of fact. Decision analysis would like me to have a Goal, which reason can reveal but cannot create, and derive a utility function from that goal and assemble the powers around it, express uncertainty about their strength. But uncertainty eats into the utility function too, and into the goal. My culture is founded on a religion wherein it is certainly a widespread view that there is an absolute barrier between human beings and all other creatures; that only human beings have souls. And that foundation stone, seemingly so stable for so long, is now shifted, which is both good and bad.
Because maybe I only believe that extinction is so terrible, because I believe somewhere deep down, that the world gets further away from Eden with each extinction.
And maybe, again, I only say these things to keep myself dissolved and inactive. Maybe the devil’s tactic is to get me to doubt everything. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Mea culpa is where I come in on this particular writing project but there’s an older theme for me when I encounter - or rather don’t encounter - the saola: uncertainty. It was the theme of my PhD but, it being a PhD, I kept the uncertainty bounded within its pages. It’s not bounded in my life, though; everything can be undermined; can be undetermined, in fact.
In my dream in 2015, the Greeks planned to gang-rape Penelope and that meant catching saola with dogs. Odysseus went along with it. Some of the first people I told the dream to were my friends Sarah and Simon. A few years before, they had documented the death of Vietnam’s actual last unicorn. Now they were living in Cambodia and, just few days after I had that dream, they took me on a trip around the country - a genuine jolly - to see temples and vultures and the giant ibis. I distinctly remember telling Sarah about the dream and feeling disgusted about how the words sounded. As I said in the Dark Mountain piece, I felt this whenever I spoke about it; because I would either sound proud of having made a hard decision or proud of having had a meaningful dream. It depended on the worldview I was speaking from at the time. Thinking within the bounds of what’s normally considered ‘science’ led to ‘hard decision,’ thinking outside those bounds meant ‘meaningful dream.’ There was another reason I was ashamed, though. I said that I was sure Penelope was the saola and the Greeks were us, debating what to do with it. She asked “who was Odysseus?”
“I think everyone in that room was Odysseus,” I said, but not before wondering if that was right. Was Sarah actually asking if I thought that only I was Odysseus; that I had a special relationship to the saola and that I was a special person because I felt especially bad about it?
I had read the Odyssey (in translation!) the whole way through about a year before and I’d done it in order to tell the story to Bernard’s class. They were “doing the Greeks.” It went well - really well, I thought; I’d worked out a blisteringly-paced version of the story which, sadly, had to drop the sirens and Phaecia but was full of action, monsters and last chances; great for six-year olds - a blast. I relished particularly the gasp of shock when Odysseus is alone on a reef and in sight of salvation and is found, not by any queen or monster, but by Poseidon himself. The thrill when a story goes over well is like - it’s like bodyboarding in the surf and getting caught by just the right wave for the first time in the summer. It’s never happened with the same story twice; I suppose because it has to exceed expectations for me to really feel the rush and, after the first time, expectations stay high. I can think of maybe five or six times in my life that one has sung through as well as that. I wonder what it’s like to actually stand up on the board.
The first time I felt carried along by that kind of power in a story, it was 2005. It wasn’t the Mwanamizi story that obsessed me in that year; it wasn’t a traditional story at all; it was a potted history of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and I told it to the participants in Joanna Macy’s residential course at Monkton Wyld.
It seems that I will now have to tell that story in order to get where I’m trying to. I’m being led a merry dance here!
It is often claimed that the panda’s ‘Carnivoran’ gut is inefficient for digesting bamboo, as it can’t digest cellulose well. This is because it’s being compared to bovids and other artiodactyls which have the famous four stomachs and a huge host of other adaptations, accumulated over far longer spans of time, to a vegetarian diet. And yet, are any of them making a living off bamboo? Maybe a bear’s bite strength, reaching arms, and ability to see off predators despite having a slow metabolism (and living in thickets) count for more here than cellulose digestion. Anyway, the artiodactyls descended from animal-eating ancestors also; all mammals did.
well - a less grand one.
Can't have death without life. Nothingness, yes, but not death.
No typos, but there were never all that many. Death might be the driver of evolution but it would be nothing without the equally strong, or even stronger drive for life; this drive finds a way to follow the chance pre-adaptations that each species has ‘prepared’ to evade a particular cause of dying. It is an equilibrium, however unstable an equilibrium. Life and Death locked in an eternal struggle for supremacy, with many surprising results. It’s just much harder to contemplate when the main source of the death is us, rather than a meteorite or catastrophic volcanism.