Forty Six. Wild Ones by Jon Mooallem
2014, Penguin Books, 352 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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My favourite Douglas Adams book has nothing to do with space, or with holistic detectives. It is a diary of his adventures around the world, searching for animals on the brink of extinction, accompanied by zoologist Mark Carwardine. It’s called Last Chance to See.
It’s a bit unfair to start the review of one book by mentioning another, but I was reminded of Last Chance to See when I was reading Wild Ones, because they share several similar traits (also, since I’ve left my copy of Last Chance to See in another country, I will probably never have the chance to review it properly here). They both describe the attempts of highly intelligent, highly curious reporters, to track down the remnants of endangered species, brought to the brink of extinction by us, humankind, and the way we change entire ecosystems to support the way we want to live in the world. And through these attempts, both books bring up a deeper issue — the way that we currently are shaping the world, and the way we should leave it for our children and our unknown descendants — with at least the same variety of species that we received it with.
There are several differences, however. While Adams and Carwardine spanned the world in search of exotically weird endangered species, and ended up describing nine of them, Jon Mooallem has stuck to a more sensible list of three, and has constrained himself to just one continent. And all three of them are more accessible than the peculiar species that Adams and Carwardine went off looking for — polar bears, serving as the symbol not only for the book itself (a polar bear adorns the cover of the edition of the book I’ve read), but for the entire concept of endangered species; butterflies — specifically a species of which can be found only on a single set of dunes in California; and whooping cranes.
Mooallem uses these three species to indoctrinate us in a new and worrying aspect of the conservation of endangered species — we have already passed the point at which we can just return the ecosystems these species live in to a state in which they can again thrive. We need to actively make sure that their environments are safe and that they can still live in them, otherwise they, and the environments they live in, will disappear. We — humankind — have turned their ecosystems into such fragile contraptions, that the only thing maintaining these species alive, is our guilt. The polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba, who are affected by global warming, become the centre of a debate whether to provide them with food in order to prevent them from starving, and whether it would change anything, while their entire species becomes the centrepiece of an entire semantic discussion between government and conservationists, regarding what separates endangered from threatened species; the researchers and volunteers in the dunes at the city of Antioch in California, who count the remaining Lange’s Metalmark butterflies, fight to preserve the diminishing area that is their only habitat in the world, actively trying to hold the rest of the world at bay, so that the butterflies can thrive in what remains of their original habitat; and the whooping cranes, now being raised and nurtured in captivity, are being led by ultralights across the country, in order to learn how to migrate.
The picture Mooallem draws throughout the book’s three parts and two addenda is sad and sobering. It shows how dire the situation of many of the world’s animals is, as the changes we have inflicted on the world brings more species to readjust themselves to different, more difficult realities, or to parish. And part of these species’ attempts to adapt is to become, in some way, large enough bleeps on the radar of humanity, that we will jump into the pit we have helped digging, and fight with everything we have to draw them out.
