photo © Naomi Stolow
Michael Soule On The Vanishing Wilderness
The following is an excerpt from an interview by Leath Tonino, The Sun Magazine – April 2018…
Tonino: Many of us have probably forgotten, if we ever knew in the first place, why biodiversity is important. What is its value?
Soule: I don’t know. All I know is that I spent a tremendous amount of time outside as a kid, wandering around, mostly by myself, and that I always felt at home in nature. And nature is biodiversity. It’s difficult to speak about this feeling of being at home — of finding solace in nature — because the experience is emotional. It’s the heart that falls in love.
Nobody else in my family shared my particular fascination. I lived near the coast in San Diego and was always out on the beaches, or on the cliffs above the beaches, or on the chaparral slopes, or in the nearby mountains. When I was a teenager, somebody told me I ought to go to the natural history museum; a bunch of kids who cared about butterflies and snakes and rodents hung out there. That’s how I found my people. There were probably twenty of us junior naturalists. We studied birds and lizards the way other kids memorized the San Diego Padres’ batting lineup and the makes and models of automobiles.
We loved the desert because it was full of reptiles. We would take field trips down to the Anza-Borrego Desert and Baja California. Our parents were nervous about letting their teenage children roam around Mexico totally unsupervised. We played a game while driving: Who could recognize a species of plant or animal in the distance and shout out its Latin name first? Our little competition helped us learn the scientific names of hundreds of plants and animals. That’s what got us excited. My mother must have thought I was strange, but she encouraged my pursuit. That support from her and from my friends was a blessing.
Tonino: But what’s the value of biodiversity from the scientific perspective?
Soule: I could talk about the integrity and resiliency of ecosystems and other principles you might find in a textbook, but that misses the point. People always look for the rational reason, the utilitarian argument, the economic justification. My interest in nature never had a payoff, except emotionally. When I’m in a place with many creatures, I feel good, and when there are no creatures around, I feel bad. It’s not rational. It’s a personal aesthetic. You just want to be around the things you love because they make you feel happy.
When I was with that group of kids, we never once talked about why we wanted to explore dry washes in the Borrego Desert, or why we wanted to study plants in the Cuyamaca Mountains. It was just so satisfying to be out there, flipping over rocks in search of creatures.
Species have an intrinsic value. They’re valuable simply because they exist. They don’t need our stamp of approval. Biodiversity doesn’t have to be of use. Almost everything important in our lives comes back to love, to what feels good, to the people and places we like to be around and the activities that stimulate us.
Tonino: Do you think that the urge to control carnivore populations has to do with a fear of uncertainty — a fear of the wild?
Soule: Wildness is uncertain, unpredictable. A lot of people in the agricultural community feel it’s their job to reduce the wild to virtually nothing: Sterilize the crops with pesticides and herbicides. String up fences. Kill the predators, one and all.
And wildness is diversity, too. Its opposite is a land simplified to the point of homogeneity. Sometimes I call the epoch we’re living in the Homogocene, because we’re making nature homogeneous. If you travel to any part of the globe with a Mediterranean climate — Southern California or South Africa or Chile — you’ll find the same plants growing. You’ll see date palms. You’ll see agave. You’ll see guavas. You’ll see various types of citrus. They’ve almost all been imported. In Hawaii, if you’re below a thousand meters, you’ll see the same plants you will anywhere else in the tropics: same flowers, same fruit trees. This is the Homogocene world. It’s boring and sad, but it’s understandable to us. We can control these species. We have some power in this reduced world.
Tonino: Sometimes people accuse scientists of reducing the world by summing it up with labels. What do you say to that?
Soule: The word scientistic is sometimes used to refer to that reduction of the world’s natural beauty and mystery. You’re being “scientistic” when you describe the world with dead symbols and use your intellect as a tool for dominance. But a naturalist who spends days and weeks in the field studying the particularity of some subject is not being scientistic. He or she is wondering, searching, asking questions.
I personally feel that classifying and naming organisms leads to the appreciation of difference. Naming something helps us focus on it and recognize it. When I see a side-blotched lizard, its name, Uta stansburiana, helps me love it in particular. If that lizard blends into all lizards, then I’m missing the joy of diversity. So I don’t see naming as a means of controlling the land.
I did my dissertation on side-blotched lizards. One of the reasons I like lizards so much is because they are different from me, but not so different that I can’t understand them. I’m familiar enough with some lizard species to intuit their behaviors. I can predict where they will be and what they will be doing at certain times of year and under certain conditions. Some might say that by predicting the lizards’ behaviors, I’m reducing the individuals to a kind of textbook category, but it’s really a nuanced appreciation, a relationship akin to love. When you intuitively understand another being, you enter into a kind of love.
Tonino: The writer Terry Tempest Williams says you recognize the intersection of biology and beauty as the miraculous.
Soule: That’s a wonderful way of putting it. Mystical experience is a moment of touching the miraculous. It opens you up to new insights that are beyond the me. Those kinds of openings come into your life the way an animal comes from the forest into a meadow, or the way a land snail’s white shell appears at your feet. Cleansing the world of wildness — as if that were even possible — would mean cleansing the world of this possibility.
Tonino: Earlier you said that the world is becoming less like the world you want it to be. How do you want the world to be?
Soule: To start with, I don’t think humans should be removed from the planet. I actually like people, some more than others. But, as my son used to say when he was three years old, too much of anything is not too good. Because there are so many humans, we’re losing biological diversity. I want to live in a world that is complex and interesting and miraculous. And that means wild.
Tonino: It strikes me that the tragedy of losing a single species is only a small part of the larger tragedy of unraveling ecosystems.
Soule: That’s right. And not all species are equal. Unfortunately the keystone species that hold ecosystems together are also the ones that humans often hunt for food and sport, and they require the most habitat, the most room to roam, which is increasingly hard to come by in the twenty-first century, whether you’re a bear or a whale.
As we speak, we’re well on our way to destroying the last of the oceans’ large fish, such as the tuna. On land we’ve nearly completed the project of destroying keystone species like elephants. The elephants in Africa and Asia today are being annihilated not only for their ivory but also because their feeding activities are incompatible with the large-scale agriculture needed to feed growing human populations. Elephants don’t pay any attention to property lines; nor do they have much patience for fences, which are spreading everywhere.
The few large creatures that remain will leave giant holes in nature when they finally do disappear. Some species will persist, particularly in the more technologically sophisticated countries. But in places where there’s a lot of poverty, which is much of the world, there won’t be much sympathy for wild animals. There are so many mouths to feed. Attempts are being made to expand agriculture, and when you expand agriculture, you cut into what little habitat is left for wild creatures. Wildlife habitat will be severely compromised in the next fifty years by agriculture. Maybe we’ll be able to back off before everything is destroyed. That’s my hope. But it might be too late.
For the full interview text visit The Sun Magazine:
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/508/we-only-protect-what-we-love
