We are the new Permian extinction
Nov. 19th, 2009 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI have just finished reading Last Chance to See, which (if you’re not familiar with it) was the write-up of Douglas Adams’s trips around the world in the late 80s in search of species on the edge of extinction. I picked up the book, incidentally, on the shelf at the Linthicum branch of the Anne Arundel County library system while looking for books about rain forests; it is stamped “Crofton” and the computer seemed to think that the only copy in the system belonged to Sterling Park. I just returned it a day overdue because someone else had placed a hold on it. Had I the space for more shelf space, I would consider adding a segment to our personal library on zoology and animal behavior.
At any rate, I’ve been going through aquarium volunteer training, which includes some rather high emphasis on conservation, as the National Aquarium is in the process of shifting their focus as an institution from being entertainment based to being conservation based with the visitor aquarium as their main outreach tool. I’m all in favor of this, although I’m faintly horrified at the ignorance amongst some of my fellow trainees (and in some cases the lecturers as well.)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grauwulf reminds me that I hold the world to too high a standard; I say that I just expect other people to know the things I knew in elementary school, such as the difference between “impetus” and “impetuous,” and not to throw their trash out the window or try to pet the coral reefs.
There’s also the huge divide that nearly everyone writes about, between the first world semi-educated tourists or naturalists who go out into the distant parts of the world trying to save animals and habitat and those who actually live there, and in general have very different priorities. And admittedly, when your subsistence income comes from growing sugarcane or other one harvest crops, or you only get meat by hunting in places where you might catch something there aren’t a lot of left, then I don’t really expect you to have the same kind of perspective on it as someone from the sort of country where a 10% unemployment rate is considered a national crisis. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the lines between what counts as going into other people’s countries and telling them what they can’t do about things, and what is our job because we’ve got (as a society) the leisure and resources to try to do a little bit about it. It’s also hard, being raised in an ecologically-conscious mindset in an era that’s growing increasingly aware of these things, to see anything other than trying to do something about it all as a reasonable course of action. Even if doing something is just donating some of your pocket change to an organization you can trust to do something for you.
I’m writing a book with two forests in it. One is the mythical enchanted Northern Woodland that was never actually found in Europe or America, virtually untenanted, full of vast old-growth trees, moss and ferns, and peopled by deer and boar and smaller woodland creatures, but not by any huge predators, because the people from outside have done away with them. Maybe the pigs have learned to hunt the deer population to keep it in check... The other is a thriving but densely (human-) populated tropical rain forest. My rather vague understanding is that many of the SE Asian forests (on which I’m loosely basing the ecology) have always tended to have rice fields and villages carved out of them, rather than the current amazonian approach of living mainly under the canopy. The Americas have done a great deal of this as well, of course, particularly in the more northern areas with the great temple cities you’ve heard so much about, but the most recent theories I’ve heard say that there’s a great deal of evidence that Amazonia was crawling with people like crazy, all settled and improving their soil with centuries of charcoal and fish heads and broken crockery (which works amazingly well, as it happens) right up until the diseases ran through and killed everybody off.
And because it’s YA fantasy (and looking like a trilogy, of increasing complexity and possible irrelevance to anything) I am coming to the realization that aside from setting up both my poor heroines to fall madly in love with princes they can’t possibly marry, I have somehow made it so that they are going to have to save the world. Possibly from problems stemming from a variant on God’s actions in Genesis, although I might be able to wiggle out of that one. But while the actions of their pseudo-medieval and relatively primitive societies are not currently endangering either of their forests, each forest contains one particularly special tree, of which there is only one in existence anywhere, and from which all the magic, or possibly all the life, in the world emanates. And one of them is in serious trouble, and has been for probably thousands of years.
I’ve always been rather put off by the descriptions of authors who write things with a “purpose,” or whose books are a constant argument for their personal issues with the world. I don’t read fiction to be lectured, and I don’t really believe that the majority of writers have the great literary plans made in advance that are later attributed to them. Some do, of course; I was horrified to read bits of Poe’s essay on how he wrote “The Raven,” starting with the length of poem he wanted to write, and the meter he thought would suit it and filling in the subject later on. I find that my novels tend to come together more or less as I would read them, although sometimes with a back cover sort of outline to them, and a few scenes planned ahead in the way I’d remember them as I re-read a book I’d liked before. But I do think that most if not all art is a definite window on how the author views the world; I have trouble watching the performance of actors I know personally, because where other people see clever acting, I just see the person behind the performance: “Oh, yes, that’s just Emily being Emily. She always has that tone when she’s in that mood...” or whatever. So I’m probably giving revealing clues about how my mind works, writing about teenage girls and enchanted forests and talking animals and princes and trees that grant you interesting powers when you eat their fruit and strange twists on religion. So far I haven’t got any labyrinths in, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
In Last Chance to See, there’s a bit about how the dodo is important, not just for the reasons it was important to the island ecology, but because it made people (“western civilization” people, anyway) see that yes, you really can kill something until there just aren’t any more of them. And they won’t magically come back, and it will have been your fault. In the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose (in the gardens of whichkittymaru recently took some lovely doll pictures) there is a little twig of Lebanon Cedar with a couple of cones on it, and a plaque beside it to tell you that this tree has not grown anywhere in more than two thousand years. (here, at the bottom of the page) The ancient people of Lebanon had great forests of them, which they became quite rich cutting down and selling, right up until the deforestation changed the water table and climate from temperate into desert, and now even were there any viable seeds to plant, the trees could no longer grow there. I have no idea what else once lived in the cedar forests of Lebanon, but whatever it was certainly doesn’t live there now, and I find it sad that the supposedly educated europeans of the 19th century needed the dodo to tell them what the once-fertile lands of the bible could have done, if they hadn’t needed a century or two of archaeology to dig up the lesson for them again. And then... where does that leave us, with all these lessons and more?
At any rate, I’ve been going through aquarium volunteer training, which includes some rather high emphasis on conservation, as the National Aquarium is in the process of shifting their focus as an institution from being entertainment based to being conservation based with the visitor aquarium as their main outreach tool. I’m all in favor of this, although I’m faintly horrified at the ignorance amongst some of my fellow trainees (and in some cases the lecturers as well.)
grauwulf reminds me that I hold the world to too high a standard; I say that I just expect other people to know the things I knew in elementary school, such as the difference between “impetus” and “impetuous,” and not to throw their trash out the window or try to pet the coral reefs. There’s also the huge divide that nearly everyone writes about, between the first world semi-educated tourists or naturalists who go out into the distant parts of the world trying to save animals and habitat and those who actually live there, and in general have very different priorities. And admittedly, when your subsistence income comes from growing sugarcane or other one harvest crops, or you only get meat by hunting in places where you might catch something there aren’t a lot of left, then I don’t really expect you to have the same kind of perspective on it as someone from the sort of country where a 10% unemployment rate is considered a national crisis. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the lines between what counts as going into other people’s countries and telling them what they can’t do about things, and what is our job because we’ve got (as a society) the leisure and resources to try to do a little bit about it. It’s also hard, being raised in an ecologically-conscious mindset in an era that’s growing increasingly aware of these things, to see anything other than trying to do something about it all as a reasonable course of action. Even if doing something is just donating some of your pocket change to an organization you can trust to do something for you.
I’m writing a book with two forests in it. One is the mythical enchanted Northern Woodland that was never actually found in Europe or America, virtually untenanted, full of vast old-growth trees, moss and ferns, and peopled by deer and boar and smaller woodland creatures, but not by any huge predators, because the people from outside have done away with them. Maybe the pigs have learned to hunt the deer population to keep it in check... The other is a thriving but densely (human-) populated tropical rain forest. My rather vague understanding is that many of the SE Asian forests (on which I’m loosely basing the ecology) have always tended to have rice fields and villages carved out of them, rather than the current amazonian approach of living mainly under the canopy. The Americas have done a great deal of this as well, of course, particularly in the more northern areas with the great temple cities you’ve heard so much about, but the most recent theories I’ve heard say that there’s a great deal of evidence that Amazonia was crawling with people like crazy, all settled and improving their soil with centuries of charcoal and fish heads and broken crockery (which works amazingly well, as it happens) right up until the diseases ran through and killed everybody off.
And because it’s YA fantasy (and looking like a trilogy, of increasing complexity and possible irrelevance to anything) I am coming to the realization that aside from setting up both my poor heroines to fall madly in love with princes they can’t possibly marry, I have somehow made it so that they are going to have to save the world. Possibly from problems stemming from a variant on God’s actions in Genesis, although I might be able to wiggle out of that one. But while the actions of their pseudo-medieval and relatively primitive societies are not currently endangering either of their forests, each forest contains one particularly special tree, of which there is only one in existence anywhere, and from which all the magic, or possibly all the life, in the world emanates. And one of them is in serious trouble, and has been for probably thousands of years.
I’ve always been rather put off by the descriptions of authors who write things with a “purpose,” or whose books are a constant argument for their personal issues with the world. I don’t read fiction to be lectured, and I don’t really believe that the majority of writers have the great literary plans made in advance that are later attributed to them. Some do, of course; I was horrified to read bits of Poe’s essay on how he wrote “The Raven,” starting with the length of poem he wanted to write, and the meter he thought would suit it and filling in the subject later on. I find that my novels tend to come together more or less as I would read them, although sometimes with a back cover sort of outline to them, and a few scenes planned ahead in the way I’d remember them as I re-read a book I’d liked before. But I do think that most if not all art is a definite window on how the author views the world; I have trouble watching the performance of actors I know personally, because where other people see clever acting, I just see the person behind the performance: “Oh, yes, that’s just Emily being Emily. She always has that tone when she’s in that mood...” or whatever. So I’m probably giving revealing clues about how my mind works, writing about teenage girls and enchanted forests and talking animals and princes and trees that grant you interesting powers when you eat their fruit and strange twists on religion. So far I haven’t got any labyrinths in, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
In Last Chance to See, there’s a bit about how the dodo is important, not just for the reasons it was important to the island ecology, but because it made people (“western civilization” people, anyway) see that yes, you really can kill something until there just aren’t any more of them. And they won’t magically come back, and it will have been your fault. In the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose (in the gardens of which
kittymaru recently took some lovely doll pictures) there is a little twig of Lebanon Cedar with a couple of cones on it, and a plaque beside it to tell you that this tree has not grown anywhere in more than two thousand years. (here, at the bottom of the page) The ancient people of Lebanon had great forests of them, which they became quite rich cutting down and selling, right up until the deforestation changed the water table and climate from temperate into desert, and now even were there any viable seeds to plant, the trees could no longer grow there. I have no idea what else once lived in the cedar forests of Lebanon, but whatever it was certainly doesn’t live there now, and I find it sad that the supposedly educated europeans of the 19th century needed the dodo to tell them what the once-fertile lands of the bible could have done, if they hadn’t needed a century or two of archaeology to dig up the lesson for them again. And then... where does that leave us, with all these lessons and more?