Nature writers these days increasingly trade in elegy. This is not a new realm for them, to be sure. But the pace of change is itself changing, and we elbow what was out of the way at an increasing clip.
I have been working on the Joshua tree book for ten years. If I had knocked it out in one year, it might have resided in that other great genre of nature writing, the paean. There were threats to the tree in 1997, to be sure, some of them dire. But more has changed in the last three years than in the previous seven. Driving last week across the western Mojave, I saw that the great, wide-dispersed Joshua groves near Boron might not last much longer. Near the road at least, on in four or five had been stripped of their bark like cork oaks. A few years back Todd Esque and colleagues found that antelope ground squirrels, gophers, jackrabbits and other mammals in Joshua Tree National Park were eating the bark for food and moisture in dry years, with significant mortality to the trees. Animals in the Boron area have evidently learned the trick. Or perhaps the damage is done by human vandals, which would be worse news. I’ll need to get out of the car next month to check.
It might be difficult to find Esque et al‘s study trees in Joshua Tree NP for comparison: thousands of them burned in 2005 and 2006.
Perhaps ten years ago I was talking with a fellow writer about a local natural history magazine published by a local science museum. The editor of this magazine, my friend told me, insisted that nothing smacking of environmental advocacy would see print in his magazine. This was a publication devoted to science, after all, and so an article on the salamanders of the Sierra Nevada could describe the animals ranges, appearance, behavior and ecological role, but not their impending doom by subdivision, grazing, or acid rain. In extreme cases, I gather, a species could be referred to as “threatened with extinction” or some such, but any description of who it was doing the threatening was out of bounds. (To be fair there were special issues of the magazine, one of which I wrote for, for which the rule was suspended.)
It would be a lovely thing to be able to find a natural subject that did not risk either elegy or bowdlerizing. To be able to write about the isbjorn, for instance, talking about their ferocity, their resilience, their occasional counterintuitively gentle play with sled dogs, without mentioning Kyoto and the Bush administration and the likelihood that the vast majority of isbjorn face horrible deaths by drowning when their traditional habitat becomes unfrozen open ocean.
I would love to be able to do that without feeling irrevocably ashamed of myself.
With paeans you run the risk of being trite, but that’s true of most forms. I tend to find them less trite when they have a bit of elegy stirred in, when the thing being described has met adversity and prevailed somehow. But that which prevails is prevalent, and what is prevalent these days? Paeans to rats and starlings are edgy, true enough, but for those people who are not A-list bloggers or their regulars, edginess gets old in extremely short order.
And don’t get me wrong. I like rats. I even, truth be told, like starlings, at least one at a time. But writing paeans to the weedy species that currently prevail is, at its root, as much a lie as failing to mention the looming extinction of the polar bear. Put a starling on the dais and you guarantee an elephant in the room. The starlings of the world prevail, but at whose expense?
So elegies are honest. And yet they are soul destroying, taken en masse. It’s a noble sort of destruction, an emotional martyrdom, but burnout is the same whether it strikes Saint Joan or synagogue arsonists.
That burnout comes especially quickly when the elegies you write reach no one. We live, here in the US, among those who could not distinguish a dusky seaside sparrow from an English sparrow, and thus see no change in a landscape where the first is replaced by the second. One cannot love what one does not know. One cannot defend what one does not love. And so our elegies fall for the most part to the ground, unheeded among the handbills littering the street.
We can resort to jeremiads, that third and growing genre of nature writing, but jeremiads, like Cuban cigars, are best indulged in extremely sparingly. The world looks at the smoke coming from you and mutters under its breath. Fury is deprecated these days: one really ought hide one’s rage in a cloak of sarcasm, or better yet a brittle veneer of fake civility, so that the world can nod politely and get back to its business of dismissing you.
