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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6.0 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

The World Is Not A Theme Park


By Ted Gup


    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.

    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.