Most Human

8/1/24 - Humans, animals, and the transformed world

Mollie the collie / all photos by author

Hello everyone:

When Heather and I lost our sweet old collie two and a half years ago, I put together this essay exploring what our relationships with pets might say about our larger relationship with the living world. Heather and I are still dogless (though we frequently talk about adopting another dog), and I think the writing here still speaks to the world we’re making amid the world we’re unmaking. It first went out to a much smaller group of readers; I’ll be interested to hear your comments now. As always with these older pieces, I’ve edited and updated it as necessary.

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 makes a connection between our love for animals and our capacity for making art:

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 1) who are humble enough to acknowledge their uncertainty in the face of life’s difficulties, and 2) who do so while finding fellowship in the presence of the animals we love. After all, who among us hasn’t looked our pets in the eye and said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Certainly my wife Heather and I, over a wonderful 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 then Mollie died, and we were bereft. Every room in the house was emptier, every hour of the day had less purpose. There was no head to pet, no ears to rub, no thick beautiful (constantly shedding) coat to brush, and no toothy mouth to feed. There was no long, sweet, pointy face to talk to, even though she stopped hearing us long before she died. Most of all, we missed the exchange of affection.

In her final months, Mollie 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. Then, suddenly, odd neurological symptoms developed, and 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. During her final two nights I stayed up until 4 a.m. before waking 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. Finally, we knew it was time to let her go.

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

I wrote recently about biophilia, so I won't launch that ship again now. And anyway, I'm not entirely sure that our deep attachment to pets speaks to a love for life that actually translates into action. If the affection for and obsession with our pets had larger ecological implications, then wouldn't the century-long trend of better pet care have translated to much better care for the wetlands, coral reefs, grasslands, and rainforests that are being erased from existence? Certainly our love of pets hasn’t translated well into an awareness of the needs of animals more generally, given that the exotic pet trade is worth $15 billion a year and has brought thousands more 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, how we lived within it, 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, as children we're drawn inexorably to animals, but as adults that feeling isn’t enough to protect them and their habitat from our civilizational bulldozer.

As for pets, we’ve bred dogs and cats into odd shadows of their former selves and have isolated other wild creatures – like fish, lizards, turtles, and birds – in tanks and cages that empty them of their psychological integrity, social cohesion, and evolutionary purpose. As Heather and I see it, a bird in a cage is as sad as a polar bear in a zoo or 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. That hormonal bonding that occurs between pets 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 revisiting childhood than reinhabiting 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 diverse array of dog breeds includes a spectrum of "working dogs" (like collies) who no longer work and a parade of decorative creatures who, 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. 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.

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 virtual 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 flattening landscapes, igniting billions of years of stored carbon, genetically modifying 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 where is the line between flint-knapping a spearhead, breeding a frost-hardy tomato, 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 humanity, and beyond the sexual slavery that still destroys millions of lives each year.) The campaigns for abolition, for animal rights, for environmental protection, and now for climate action 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 human history 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 manipulating 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 burden of civilization to our domesticated 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 deeper sense of empathy that moves them to assist others in need, whether human or animal or botanical. 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 society. 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 for all of us is to continue broadening the circle of empathy outward through all human forms of justice, and then beyond us to our domestic animals, and finally 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 shape 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, and they’re arriving fast.

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.” This act of imagination is a reminder not of our power over life 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 the lives you and I are living right now, in this Anthropocene crisis rooted in our worst self-serving tool-making impulses, it’s easy to offer a cynical answer. But Muldoon clearly leans toward optimism, identifying us as “most human” when we are humble and aware of our limitations. And certainly through most of human history and across the great range of cultures we have more often been something quieter on the planet than we are now. We were animals who breathed the land into being.

On the days when we’re not sure how to return to such wisdom, 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:

If you read nothing else here, read this deep and thorough analysis of the future of food in a hotter, more turbulent world, from David Wallace-Wells at the Times. While he offers a faint glimmer of hope, it’s brilliantly written and deeply troubling, as this summary of the “quadruple squeeze” faced by global food systems makes clear:

First, the problem of productivity and hunger. Second, the risk to ecosystems, under threat from fertilizer runoff, deforestation, and other pollution. Third, the challenge of nutritional deficiency, as those foods we are growing more of are generally getting worse for us over time. And finally climate, which is driving a “fundamental change across most breadbaskets on the planet,” he says. “It’s pretty complicated,” he admits. “And the scary part is that we have to solve them all.”

Also from the Times, “assembly theory” is meant to help science distinguish between living molecules and non-living ones. If nothing else, reading the article is a good reminder that life is still very much a mysterious product of the physical laws of the universe.

From Bigelow Laboratories here in Maine, a thoughtful op-ed from a marine scientist about the need to carefully but thoroughly explore the potential of ocean iron fertilization as a means of large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. Too much is at stake in a rapidly warming world, he says, not to fully test such an important possible solution:

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was at the current concentration — nearly 3 million years ago — sea level was more than 20 feet above the current level, meaning unless we do something now, we can expect such a rise to happen again… The climate crisis presents a daunting challenge, and we will need all the data we can get to make informed decisions about the hard choices coming our way.

From David Roberts and Volts, a conversation about perovskite semiconductors that explains what the next generation of much more efficient solar cells will look like.

From Anthropocene, a meticulous, decade-long study of logged tropical forests finds that the greatest conservation value may lie in protecting both the least logged areas and the most logged areas. Biodiversity drops off significantly during the first 30% loss of forest, and during the last 30% as well. In between, the diminished biodiversity is relatively stable.

From the Post, the rapid increase in wildfires around the U.S. also means an increasing risk of contaminated drinking water. At least 60% of Americans get their drinking water from forested areas, and when those forests burn more intensely and more often in the heat of the Anthropocene, green forests and healthy soil are replaced with ash. Burned, ash-covered soils increase flooding from run-off, and increase contamination of reservoirs.

From

Rebecca Wisent

at Fearless Green, another installment in her excellent Five Things of Beauty series. These are good news items, commentary on an unusual fear, and a poem. Take a look.

One of Rebecca’s things of beauty is an online magazine that I also love, Hakai, which for years has produced really great stories and articles on environmental and social issues from the world’s coastlines. I’ve often highlighted them in the Field Guide. But Hakai will no longer publish after the end of the year because of a loss of funding. It’s a magazine that helps keep us connected to the living world, and it deserves to be supported for the long term. Anyone want to provide a home for a great magazine?