Read an Excerpt
Prologue
Everything in a natural system is connected. This isn’t a platitude. It is the principle that explains how a mineral orb wheeling through the vacuum of space became wrapped in creatures—became a biosphere with mushrooms that glow in the dark, kaleidoscopic dancing spiders, puppies and kittens, six-foot-long salamanders that both bark and mewl, naturally cloned komodo dragons, jellyfish capable of reversing the aging process and existing forever, chimpanzees with 98 percent of the same genes we own making tools in an African woodland, and so many microbes that they outnumber the stars in the known universe. That’s life.
Microbes (short for micro-organisms, most of which consist of a single cell) produce a critical share of the Earth’s oxygen. They permeate the planet’s seas. They make weather: wafting through the skies overhead in unseen hordes that seed the formation of clouds. Billions pulse in each handful of the soil under your feet, manufacturing fertility. Trillions flourish in your gut and mouth and on your skin. You host trillions more in the form of ancient bacteria that evolved to become permanent residents inside each of your cells (and those of all other animals and plants), where they generate the chemical energy that powers everything we do—grow, move, feel, learn. • • •
On the top floor of his three-story family home, a boy sits at a desk in the light from a dormer window. As the eldest child, he was moved upstairs when younger children filled the second-floor bedrooms nearest their parents. At nine years of age—maybe ten now—he is old enough to have kissed a girl’s mouth on a dare, yet not so old that, alone in his loft on a windy, creaky night, he can completely ignore the possibility of monsters in the crawl spaces of the eaves.
The boy pitches for the local Little League baseball team. He mows neighborhood lawns and shovels sidewalks for pocket money. He hangs out with buddies in a garage loft clubhouse, joins them in exploring the steep bluffs on the edge of town, loves to blow stuff up with firecrackers, and gets into the occasional bloody-nosed scrap. For the most part, he’s a regular, rowdy kid. Yet, as he is doing now, he also spends hours by himself peering through a microscope. It is not from a Junior Scientist kit. This is an old, professional K&E (Kueffel & Esser) model with precisely calibrated lenses encased in finely machined brass. His father, a mining geologist, had used the instrument to examine mineral structures and passed it along as a gift. Each time the boy takes the microscope from its wooden carrying case and sets it out on the dormer desk, where the metal gives off a glow of reflected light, he feels a connection to scientists past and present, the Big League of curiosity experts.
There are three eyepieces of different magnifying power to choose from for placing atop the viewing tube. On a revolving turret at the tube’s base are four objective lenses of different strength that multiply the power of the eyepieces. The boy had peered through strong hand-held magnifying glasses before, marveling at the oddity of familiar objects like newsprint or the whorls of grooves and ridges on his own fingertips. But he had no inkling of what something would look like enlarged to 40, 100, or even 400 times normal size. He does now. • • •
At the start, he rummaged through the house and yard for anything that would fit under the lenses: salt crystals, cat fur, cereal, dirt, a leaf, a scab picked off his knee, beetle antennae … . Every familiar material he managed to bring into clear focus proved full of stunning details and promised to reveal more secrets under stronger magnification. When he tried that, though, even thin and fragile-looking objects merely turned into great dark lumps. So the boy crowded reading lamps around the platform, where the glass slide holding a specimen was placed. That helped—up to a point.
Soon, his father was driving him to a scientific supply house to get strong directional microscope lights and stains that brought out certain features of tissues and cells. The boy also brought home slides with a shallow bowl carved out in the center to hold liquids. At last, he could drop pond water on a slide and tour a globule of creation populated by miniscule squirmers and swimmers without them draining away when he moved the glass around.
Almost every day that he put his modest advances in microscope techniques to use, he encountered something entirely new, some form, process, or setting unlike anything he ever saw or could imagine before. This was mind-bending territory to be in. MoldLand: blotches of rot on bread, cheese, or fruit transformed into storybook forests; lollipop trees that seemed built from beads in one sample, a tangled filament jungle in the next. PollenLand: a smear of powder resolved into a galaxy of fertile sun-colored spheres, each with a perfect geometric pattern of golf ball-like dimples or urchin-like spikes—or both. BloodLand: the dab from a pricked finger became a flotilla of little round corpuscles—scarlet cells that looked like life rafts sliding past one another inside a slowly congealing swirl of organic magma. Often, the boy found himself holding watch over multitudes of different life forms at once within a fresh sample of water as they lashed, spun, squiggled, throbbed, and sometimes budded or pinched off spores or pumped out tiny eggs.
In particular, I—sure, I was this kid—remember my first success at keeping the semi-transparent wanderings of an amoeba in view at high power for a while. That single-celled organism brushed up against a smaller one and slowly, relentlessly enveloped it. I watched the captive swimming through the protoplasm of its captor until the amoeba dissolved the creature’s outer membrane and absorbed the streaming broth inside, turning everything that had been a separate existence into more oozing amoeba. Not long afterward, this predator twinned by slowly dividing itself into two roughly equal blobs. AmoebaLand: where it couldn’t be more clear that you are what you eat.
After pulling my eye away from the K&E, I puzzled over whether amoebas today might be descended unchanged from the very first one on the planet or possibly were that first one, which had been feeding and splitting through the ages. Many replicates must have died, but many lived to divide and copy themselves again and again. Could an amoeba be sort of immortal this way? What were the amoebocytes that our household encyclopedia described roaming the bodies of a variety of larger animals? The encyclopedia said they distributed food or got rid of wastes in some species, changed into different types of cells to build structures in other organisms, and protected many more by attacking harmful microbes. And what gave rise to the amoeba-like type of white blood cells that defend the human body by engulfing and devouring infectious “germs”?
Like the creatures I observed, my questions grew and took on different forms and proliferated. Although I was pretty sure that real scientists had worked out answers, I didn’t know how to look them up in professional journals and couldn’t make a whole lot of sense of the few technical explanations I did manage to find. But I liked trying. My usual concerns still ranged from trading comic books to raiding leftover dessert from the fridge before my brothers got to it, yet when the brass K&E stood lamp-lit and ready, I would travel again to unexpected realms and uncover more “lands” and more questions.
In retrospect, the best thing about those boyhood hours at the microscope is that they were powered purely by fascination. I never felt obligated to do what I was doing. I never had a purpose. And, as a pre-pre-teen, I was too young to care whether anybody thought spending so much time staring at mega-magnified stuff was geeky. My notions of what actually existed around, underfoot, and inside me were getting reconstructed as I began to absorb a core fact about life on Earth: most of it is invisible.
Through nearly all of human history, nobody understood the real scope of nature, simply because no one suspected that the vast majority and greatest variety of organisms sharing the world couldn’t be seen with normal vision. But the K&E Kid had his magical gadget, and with it experienced the astonishment felt by the first people to ever peer through microscopes three centuries earlier. His world changed. The smaller the scale of lives and activities the boy looked at through the lenses, the more alive they made the everyday settings that hold them all seem. • • •
By the time I reached my early twenties, I was still propelled by this yearning to focus on nature and stay amazed. But I was ready to try doing it from a fresh vantage point. I’d always been drawn to books about naturalist-explorers, fossil-hunters, anthropologists, mountain-climbers, cavers, and just about anybody else whose career mixed adventure and discovery. I loved hiking and camping and dreamed all through high school and undergraduate college of being able to spend more days roaming the outdoors. Way more days, and way farther outdoors. And now the K&E sat in storage while I looked through the lenses of binoculars instead, studying mountain goats in the soaring upper reaches of Montana’s Rockies.
Sharp-horned, shaggy, snow-white, and more nearly related to musk oxen than to true goats, these master climbers dwell higher and steeper year-round than any other large mammal in North America. Not a great deal was known about their natural history. To learn about it in detail, I spent seven years following herds along the crown of the continent. It was hard, cliffy, often risky going, especially through the winters. But the settings were wild and powerfully beautiful, and I had never felt so free.
What was the best way to survive among those peaks? The longer I stayed there watching mountain goats and their neighbors—blue grouse, elk, wolverines, hoary marmots, nighthawks, cutthroat trout, and grizzly bears—the more I came to see how each species’ physical traits and behaviors combined to form the right answer for that question. I experienced the same sense of being privy to wonders that I’d had while looking at creatures through a microscope. I just needed to shoulder a heavy pack and cover a lot more ground to keep my current subjects in view.
Throughout this period, geneticists and molecular biologists using new laboratory technologies were uncovering more and more evidence of pervasive bonds between humans and other life forms, including the thousands of different species dwelling inside each person’s body and influencing its workings at almost every level. But the scientists’ breakthroughs weren’t what first led me to see the human world and the natural world as indivisible. Months-long spells of living out of a tent or a little open space under a tarpaulin strung between trees, contending with the same weather and seasonal changes as every animal and plant around me, did that.
Yet other forces intruded on the backcountry in the meantime. Each year, newly bulldozed roads brought vehicles, heavy equipment, logging operations, fossil fuel exploration, and hunting pressures farther into what had been remote strongholds for the native flora and fauna. The combination was proving too much for the mountain goats, which, like the trees at upper elevations, grow and reproduce slowly in their extreme environment. The herds were in widespread decline. Grizzly bears were in worse trouble, having been pared down to less than 2 percent of their former range and numbers south of Canada. Together with findings from researchers elsewhere, the data I gathered helped spur wildlife managers to scale back hunting pressure on the goats. I also played a minor role in gaining protection for the grizzlies under the Endangered Species Act. Once I wrapped up my research in the Rockies, it was time to look into other possibilities. But can you picture the job opportunities awaiting someone whose sole entry under experience on a job application is “high-altitude goatboy”? No? Me neither.
Because I was still fired up about the rate at which wildlife and wild places were dwindling, I found myself writing on this subject to let the public know more about what was going on out there. My articles were mostly for nonprofit conservation publications. They paid so little that my writing career was pretty much nonprofit too. This was a non-problem, though, because Karen Reeves kept food on the table. During summer, she worked as the fire guard at a mountaintop lookout tower. In the cold months, she tended bar at the one saloon in the setting where we lived—a sixty-mile-long river valley running between two ranges of peaks. Lacking utilities and serviced by a two-lane dirt road, the area was also home to the lower 48 states’ densest remaining population of grizzly bears. Karen would watch them for hours on end in the bottomland meadows each spring.
You’re darn right I married Karen. Eventually I also lucked into paid assignments from National Geographic magazine and other popular publications to report on the natural realm, often in distant parts of the world. Whenever I returned to western North America, I kept going out to watch grizzlies in my spare time. I didn’t think much about why. Although I hoped to understand more about their behavior and the obstacles to their survival, the main draw for me was witnessing their indomitably wild spirit—one that, after more than a century of persecution, still reared up to say the hell with you two-leggeds and your whole tamed-down, fenced-in, crowded-up version of progress. • • •
Wherever I went around the globe, human populations were growing and spreading like a flood tide. Around the time of Christ, Earth held 190 million people and scattered environmental problems. Today, we total close to 8 billion and face an entire biosphere in crisis. Reliable indicators point toward a much greater share of the planet’s species and resulting biological stability vanishing before the current century is out, quite possibly derailing our own future. This destructive pattern probably won’t change until the way we think about nature in relation to ourselves does.
All of us want to one day make sense of life in a way that will deliver answers to the BIG questions: Who am I? Where am I going? What does it all mean?
A good start toward answering the first question would be for people to better understand the microbial, genetic, and behavioral connections they already have with the living world. These natural qualities define who we are; both human and considerably more than that. Drawing from advances in the scientific knowledge of the recent decades and from my own experiences, I want to illuminate what goes into the making of our greater selves.
My other goal in this book is to address the question a lot of us ask almost daily when faced with the endless discouraging news about what’s happening to the global environment and our fellow Earthlings. What can any one person do right now that’s going to make a meaningful difference?
The answer is plenty. Among the later chapters, you’ll find examples of helpful changes individuals can make in their own lives. You’ll also find descriptions of large-scale, transformative conservation plans that are hands-on practical, well underway, and proving to be the kinds of models for success anyone might be motivated to draw from.
While most chapters can be read as stand-alone essays, they are arranged to build upon one another. The nature of nature is a huge subject to take on. This book is by no means intended to cover every base. It is meant to blend fresh information and ideas together with the kind of hope we need to keep us company on a new path guided by an adapted golden rule: Do unto ecosystems as you would have them do unto you.
Nurture, sustain health, allow to flourish.
Over the years since I took up writing, I sought out more places where I could keep grizzlies in view. These bears have always been particularly good at helping me figure out when to stay quiet and watch carefully, and when you’d better make some noise and get ready to move. Like NOW.
