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- ESSAY, Page 76The World Is Not A Theme Park
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- By Ted Gup
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- China's former leader Mao Zedong once declared war
- against sparrows, believing they were a pest and a nuisance. In
- response, millions of Chinese took to the streets, banging on
- woks and pans to terrify the birds. The idea: force them to stay
- aloft until they dropped dead of exhaustion. They did just that.
- The campaign was halted after an infestation of caterpillars,
- now freed of their feathered predators, devoured the crops,
- enveloped the trees and rained down upon pedestrians. In that
- same grand tradition of meddling with nature, Alaska has
- declared an air war against hundreds of wolves in an effort to
- boost already abundant populations of caribou and moose. And all
- to impress hunters and tourists. Never mind that when herds
- swell, starvation is often close by. Even as Alaska prepares to
- wage its wolf war, conservationists in the Lower 48 mourn the
- absence of wolves and seek to reintroduce them.
-
- Chalk another one up to mankind's micromanagement of
- nature. Recklessly arrogant and myopic, Alaska's decision is
- rooted in special-interest economics, not biology. It's all the
- more distressing for what it tells us about ourselves as a
- species and our estrangement from nature. Alaska's folly is the
- product of a theme-park mentality in which nature exists for our
- amusement, to be enhanced by adding one species and subtracting
- another. An indiscriminate assault will kill off pack leaders,
- leaving wolves in hierarchical disarray, and harm eagles, foxes
- and wolverines, which dine upon the carcasses wolves leave
- behind. Such contempt for natural order is nothing new, though
- it comes at a time when many Americans belatedly question both
- nature's recuperative powers and the human species' claim to a
- divine right of subjugation.
-
- So long as our species behaves like a spoiled only child,
- allowing parochial economic, political and leisure appetites to
- define the landscape, nature will deny us the thing we crave
- most -- a sense of belonging. To extend Groucho Marx's line, we
- would not join any club that would have us. Rarely accorded a
- standing of its own, nature is forever cast in anthropocentric
- terms, reduced to a prize in the simplistic consume-or-conserve
- debate. There is nature as the winsome obstacle to development,
- as the romanticist's favored tableau, even as the butt of
- ridicule by sophisticates who fault it for a lack of subtext or
- irony -- contrivances of the human mind. What value nature has,
- and it is not our place to say, may be that to its dying day it
- will be oblivious to our attentions.
-
- Even as we consume and alter, we erect stage sets to mask
- the loss. Many Americans today mistake as wilderness the ersatz
- version to which they have become accustomed. Where once there
- were forests, now there are tree farms, transmogrified by
- science into monocultural stands of uniform height and genetic
- stock. In a word, a crop. Many anglers cast into rivers and
- lakes devoid of native fish. Stocked European brown trout and
- transplanted rainbows ply our streams, with native brook and
- cutthroat trout in retreat. Bighorn sheep and other game herds
- are shunted about for the hunter's delight.
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- There is no end to our effrontery. In Arizona a mutant
- Chinese grass carp, the sterile triploid amur, has been released
- into the ponds and water hazards of golf courses to keep the
- water free of entangling weeds lest golf balls be lost or the
- scenery spoiled. An African fish, the tilapia, cruises
- irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the
- water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish.
- Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century
- ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader
- of Shakespeare bent on sharing with the New World every species
- mentioned by the bard. Today millions of starlings consume and
- defile our crops and terrorize native bluebirds. So too, we have
- inadvertently unleashed an invasion of plants, among them,
- kudzu, hydrilla and water hyacinth.
-
- Yet the more we monkey with nature, the more we seek
- assurance that somewhere it is beyond our tinkering. To a world
- idling in traffic, "Alaska" strikes a primal chord. Our longing
- expresses itself in mail-order catalogs full of the
- back-to-nature look and in the popularity of films like Dances
- with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans and A River Runs Through
- It, viewed by urban audiences sitting elbow-to-elbow in the
- dark. Most will never know what it is to be dwarfed by an
- old-growth forest, spy brook trout sipping mayflies or hear a
- wolf howl. For many, such subtle communion has been replaced by
- the stridency of environmentalism, a full-blown crusade, and by
- dire appeals on behalf of distant rain forests and a bestiary
- of endangered species. In these alliances, those remote from
- nature draw comfort that though embattled, the wild still
- exists.
-
- But that struggle will be won or lost closer to home,
- within human beings themselves. To progress from nature's
- despoiler to its custodian, we must first redefine our place in
- -- not over -- nature, accept the role of resident rather than
- architect and resist the temptation technology affords us to
- mold a world responsive to our whims alone. Alaska, which once
- sanctioned the shooting of polar bears from the air, now dreams
- of creating a second Serengeti, fulfilling the fantasy of those
- who begrudge nature its sparseness and exquisite balance. This
- is more than bad biology, and it is sadly fitting that it should
- befall the wolf. A majestic symbol of the wild and a victim of
- man's relentless efforts to eradicate what he cannot control,
- the wolf is the very embodiment of our conflict with nature. In
- the skies over Alaska, when the rifle barrels slide out the
- helicopter windows and take aim at the first frightened wolves
- below, mankind will once again demonstrate its awesome power,
- and yes, its ignorance as well.
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