I ride out into the countryside on my push bike four or five days a week. On my 2-5 hour rolls through our local urbanized environment, I see hawks, vultures, foxes, coyotes, deer, turkeys, possums, raccoons, owls and a host of other creatures. Is this the New Wild, that Fred Pearce writes about? Seems rather domesticated, but with lots of wildlife.
Meanwhile, coasting through the Anthropocene, so named by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, are we living through the Sixth Great Extinction? Elizabeth Colbert makes a compelling case. Will my kids grow up in a world without wild elephants, gorillas, rhinos and other charismatic mega-species? Probably. Will it matter? Harder to say. It feels rotten, but we still have plenty of nature around us.
Sylvia Earle says that 90% of the big fish in the ocean have been killed in the past ten years. I took my three daughters scuba diving in Cozumel last winter, and we saw some large animals -- turtles, sharks, eagle rays, moral eels, groupers (ever seen a fish as big as a Smart Car?) lobsters, tiny luminescent shrimp, and thousands of fish. Some of which looked quite tasty. But the famous sharks around Isla Mujeres are all gone, not counting the giant migration of whale sharks that cruises by every year, nose to tail in their fantastic enormity. This is a fish that could easily swallow a Smart Car.
I read a lot about nature and the environment. Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas, wow. Changed my view of the oceans forever. Every mouthful of seawater you swallow contains literally millions of bacteria and viruses. Your puny little bottle of hand sanitizer; it's more of a talisman against the evil eye than an effective shield against micro-organisms. Like an occult practice, not a science-based intervention. Good luck with that! It will work if you a) don't swim, ever; b) don't breathe, ever; c) don't touch anyone, ever. Reef in Time -- how can the world's largest living structure (puts Dubai to shame), the Great Barrier Reef, be threatened with destruction in our lifetime? Damn you, ocean acidification, and double-damn you, El Niñ0.
Dinner conversation in my house for six months -- E.O. Wilson and the Social Conquest of the Earth. Ants, bees, humans (he forgot about coral reefs, who only inhabit the ocean, not the earth). They are all builders. Ants and termites alone can consume your interest for years. When I lived in Africa, the tallest buildings in my village were built by termites, not humans.
Hah! Not to mention Nature Wars -- Jim Sterba. Why are there raccoons in your basement, coyotes in Manhattan, leopards in Mumbai, and gigantic wild turkeys in my front yard making my dog's head explode? Very large deer live in urban areas now, and a new species has evolved called the Coywolf that combines DNA from coyotes, wolves and large domestic animals like the Great Dane and St. Bernard. Perfectly adapted to cities and suburbs. They even know to look each way when crossing the street. The really nice ones pick up their own poop and put it in the trash cans.
I'm kidding about that last bit. But I'm with Fred on this -- nature is not what it used to be, something "out there" and untouched by human hands. Nature is all around us. Nature doesn't care about rhinos or ants; nature just is, and we are part of it. I'm thrilled to see the native owls on my dawn rides, but along the way there are hundreds of non-native species, from Eucalyptus trees to employees of Twitter, who are all part of nature. Somehow, we will survive the Anthropocene Era, whether as homo sapiens or as termites. Mother Nature could not care less; she has seen many millions of species come and go. Poor T-Rex, now reincarnated as a chicken!
Me, I'm rooting for the Coywolf.