The Noisy Winter before the Silent Spring

Biodiversity COP15 runs from December 7 to 19 in Montreal.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1928

During the first year of Covid, I penned an essay for this blog about the unexpected pleasure of having wild dolphins join me on a morning swim. Once all the hotels had closed and tourists had been sent away, there was a kind of liberation of the natural world. I found myself on a spit of barrier island off the Yucatan Peninsula that should have been inhospitable to any without fins or feathers, but instead attracts thousands of migratory humans in season to sun themselves and gawk at flamingos and whale sharks.

With all that taken away by a virus that attacked the two-legged invaders, a primordial world that…