Most Human

2/10/22

Mollie the collie

Hello everyone:

Please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s essay:

In his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts, a 1997 collection of poems about animals, the poet Paul Muldoon wrote that

It seems that in poetry, as in life, animals bring out the best in us. We are most human in the presence of animals, most humble, and it is only out of humility, out of uncertainty, out of ignorance, that the greatest art may be made.

To the extent that art resembles life, then, the best lives are lived by those who are humble enough to acknowledge their uncertainty in the face of life’s difficulties, and who do so while finding fellowship in the presence of other species. After all, who among us with pets haven’t looked them in the eye and said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Certainly my wife Heather and I have, over the last few years, had our lives enriched by the presence of Mollie, our sweet old collie. She became our responsibility, then our constant companion, as we unexpectedly found ourselves caring for Heather’s mother at the end of her life.

And now Mollie has died, and we’re bereft. Every room in the house is emptier, every hour of the day has less purpose. There’s no head to pet, no ears to rub, no thick beautiful (constantly shedding) coat to brush, and no toothy mouth to feed. There’s no long, sweet, pointy face to talk to, even though she stopped hearing us some time ago. Most of all, we miss the exchange of affection amid our shared existence.

In recent months, Mollie had slowed down to a glacial, if cheerful, pace on walks, the gray showing more in her face and the stiffness more apparent in her legs. Two weeks ago, odd neurological symptoms developed, and finally we spent an intense few days doing round-the-clock care, not sure if we were working toward a diagnosis and treatment or delaying the inevitable. The last two nights I stayed up until 4 a.m. and then woke Heather for the next shift. We showed Mollie as much love as we could, comforting her in the confusion and exhaustion that accompanied her condition. Even now I can feel her soft face as Heather and I felt it then, cradling and rubbing her to help her find some peace. By Thursday we knew it was time to let her go.

This loss, and our abiding love for animals at its root, are my starting points this week.

I wrote recently about biophilia, so I won't launch that boat again now. And anyway, I'm not entirely sure that our deep attachment to pets really speaks to biophilia, or to a version of love for life on Earth that actually translates into action. If the affection for and obsession with our pets spoke to a devotion to life, then we wouldn't have had a century-long trend of more pets and better pet care while wetlands, coral reefs, grasslands, and rainforests were being erased from existence. Certainly our love of pets hasn’t translated well into an awareness of the needs of the natural world, not least when the exotic pet trade is worth $15 billion a year and has brought thousands more exotic big cats into the U.S. than exist in the wild.

It's possible that there's an empathy curve here that leads eventually to an enlightened relationship with the natural world. After all, it's not that long ago that dogs rarely entered the home or received complex medical care, and it’s increasingly true that when we have time to pay attention to wildlife we become more engaged.

But it's just as possible that our increasing empathy for our animal companions is actually part of our increasing disconnect from the natural world. We feel better about drifting away from field and forest into boxed and digital lives because we're bringing friendly fragments with us. A dog, a cat, a few house plants: that’s all we need, right? Meanwhile, as a species, we suffer from a deep ecological amnesia about how the natural community of life lives and what we’ve done to it.

One of the key characteristics of the Anthropocene is that far, far more often than not, we want nature in small doses. For proof, just look at the tiny number of protected ecosystems compared to the vast array of human-distorted landscapes, or look at the rapidly increasing percentage of humans living in cities. Yes, we love forests, but not too deep, too dark, or too often. Yes, we love an open view over grasslands, but a small park will suffice. Yes, we're drawn inexorably to animals, but often not enough to protect them and their habitat from our civilizational bulldozer. As for pets, we’ve bred dogs and cats into faint shadows of their former selves and have isolated wild creatures – like fish, lizards, or birds – in ways that empty them of their psychological integrity and evolutionary purpose. As Heather and I see it, a bird in a cage is as sad as a polar bear in a zoo and a dog bred to fight.

And I think we all know, or at least acknowledge from time to time, that keeping pets is a little weird. What makes us feel so incomplete or uncomfortable in our own company that we need cute servants at our feet? The roles they play in our homes – replacement child, comfort in isolation, exercise partner, or neglected afterthought – are inconsistent, but in all cases we’re the “owners.” Pets are our companions, our friends, maybe our “fur babies,” while we are some hodgepodge of parent, playmate, and indifferent boss who disappears eight hours a day. Pets rarely show up of their own accord. We shop for them like any other kind of property, and they have no legal rights.

Even if we’re scratching some biophilic itch, some urge to stay deeply connected with the natural world, then we should admit it’s not a particularly strong itch. A cat in the lap is not a hunt on the savanna. In the case of cats and dogs, anyway, maybe we should also admit that we’re junkies looking to reduce stress with a daily hit of oxytocin. The bonding that occurs between dogs and owners as we look each other in the eyes is like that of mother and child, so maybe the itch we’re scratching is more about us than the wild.

Mollie was sweet and soft, and smart in her own cute ways, but like millions of other dogs she was brought into the world to be the equivalent of a comfy piece of retro furniture. She was bred to be shown – winning a few prizes in her youth – and so even more than most dogs she had an existence as aesthetic and ornamental as it was social. The last vestige of Mollie’s farm dog genetic origins emerged every time a large bird flew overhead; she barked furiously and “chased” it away, her furry pantaloons jogging across lawn and field as we laughed and praised her in turns.

The incredibly diverse array of dog breeds includes a spectrum of "working dogs" (like collies) that no longer work and a parade of decorative creatures that, from a practical perspective, now amount to little more than a palette of paint colors. Or, to be a bit more generous, many breeds are nostalgic cultural creations that also happen to provide us with unconditional love.

And to be a bit more generous to us, I’ll say this: humans have always been gardeners of one kind or another. Since long before the Anthropocene, we’ve been modifying landscapes. Recent evidence suggests humans deliberately modified parts of Africa with fire over 90,000 years ago. Similar evidence has been found in Australia (50,000 years ago) and Borneo (40,000). The forested Eden that Europeans found throughout the Americas was often a carefully managed array of ecosystems altered by fire and agriculture to better provide for the peoples who knew the land intimately. (This discussion has implications for defining the Anthropocene, but that’s for another day.)

When I say that humans are gardeners, I mean that we will alter anything in nature if we think the result will be to our advantage. There’s a direct link between those 90,000 year old fires in Malawi and the absurd fantasy of terraforming Mars. The thousands of potato varieties cultivated by the Inca are, broadly speaking, cousins to the hundreds of dog breeds. The digital pets, animatronic sex dolls, and android companions that somehow seem inevitable in this bizarre future being constructed for us are the result of the same imagination that turned a wolf into a Pomeranian.

Whenever I spend some time thinking about this fundamental human capacity to reimagine nature for our purposes, I end up at the same dark place. History teaches us that our tool-making nature is so deep-rooted and hard-wired that it often bypasses whatever compassion and ethics might restrain us from converting landscapes, breeding plants and animals, and enslaving each other. These are differences of degree on the tool-making spectrum rather than differences of kind.

Mentioning slavery in this context seems a stretch, I’m sure, but it’s empathy rather than logic that finds differences on the tool-making ladder from flint-knapping a spearhead, breeding a frost-hardy tomato, genetically engineering mice for experimentation, working a horse until it drops, trapping a sow in a gestation cage for much of her short life, and controlling another human to acquire their free labor. Aren’t modified animals and plants and entire monocultured landscapes enslaved to our purposes? (I’ve broadened the definition of slavery here well beyond the history of chattel slavery that still poisons America, and beyond the sexual slavery that still destroys millions of lives each year.) The campaigns for abolition, for animal rights, and for the environment have brought remarkable successes as we push back against our worst tool-making urges, but these successes come slowly and fitfully.

We “garden” everything because the history of the human species – a relatively weak, hairless, top-heavy ape – has been an experiment in surviving by cognition rather than by physical adaptation. We’re by no means the only species to thrive via modifications of the environment – ants are a fascinating comparison – but we’re the only species to operate at this scale. We’d have to look at, say, the cyanobacteria that filled the early Earth atmosphere with life-giving oxygen for a comparison at scale.

One of the things that makes the time we’re living in so extraordinary is that the Anthropocene is the point in the human cognition experiment in which our survival depends on rewriting the moral imperative of our intelligence. We have to be smarter to solve the problems we’ve created, but we also have to reimagine our own purpose rather than the purpose of the life around us. We must learn to protect and sustain, rather than erase, the world that has embraced and nourished us. Most of all, we need to learn restraint.

All of this is a lot to put on the fuzzy shoulders of a collie, but haven’t we always yoked the weight of civilization to our animals?

I’ll close, then, with a return to the light. Heather and I grow a lot of our own vegetables, and I’m very much aware that gardening, when done right, is as much about care as manipulation. And of course the world is filled with people who love their pets, who know that love in all its forms is essential to making a better world, and who are deeply devoted to reversing the Anthropocene tide. Pet owners often have a deep sense of empathy that moves them to assist others in need, whether human or animal or forested. These relationships we tend breed networks of compassion, not least the quiet army of volunteers around the U.S. and the world working to rescue animals from the dark corners of human life. And then there’s us, the even larger army willing to bring these animals into loving homes. I’m thinking also of the veterinarians who knew Mollie well, and who shed tears with us as Mollie’s euthanasia was administered.

The task at hand here is to continue broadening the circle of empathy outward through all human forms of justice and beyond our domestic animals to the rich and complex community of life. When it becomes common sense to believe that other species – even nature itself – should have legal rights, then we’ll be on the path to reuniting our cognition with the world as it is. Or, put another way, we need to remember that the best use of our powerful imagination is not to crush the natural world for our purposes but instead to live intelligently, respectfully, and beautifully within its limits. In the end, we won’t have a choice. Limits are limits.

To do so, we can imagine that the world was “breathed into being by human consciousness,” as anthropologist/ethnobotanist Wade Davis writes in a chapter in Memory called “Ecological Amnesia,” but as a reminder not of our power over it but of our responsibility to it. Davis is referencing indigenous cultures but addressing us:

What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through time and ritual a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle intuition – the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. They do not perceive mountains, rivers, and forests as being inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination, sustained by memory.

What does it mean to be “most human,” as when Paul Muldoon writes that “we are most human in the presence of animals?” Judging from this point in time, this Anthropocene crisis in which we have amplified our worst species-specific impulses, it’s easy to be cynical. But Muldoon clearly leans toward optimism, identifying “most human” as humble and aware of our limitations. And certainly through most of human history and across the great range of cultures we have been something quieter on the planet than we are now, something that breathed the land into being.

On the days when we’re not sure how to go about this now, we can always look our pets in the eye and say, “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Thanks for sticking with me.

In curated Anthropocene news:

A great New Yorker profile of the brilliant sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose recent work dramatizes the hard work of science and policy-making in facing up to the climate crisis.

From The Atlantic, “This is No Way to be Human,” an article on our increasingly nature-less lives.

From the Bigelow Laboratory here in Maine, a short article on the surprising biodiversity of the deep ocean regions that are being targeted by deep sea mining.

From NPR, the good-news/bad-news of how new methane-detecting satellites are finding massive amounts of undeclared and often deliberate methane emissions from pipelines and other petrochemical infrastructure.

From Mother Jones, the news that koalas have finally been listed as endangered.

From The Atlantic, the cobalt rush comes to Idaho.