"Diverting descriptions of flora and fauna lead into captivating lessons about biological principles, all of which are embellished with humor. A rousing read."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
Through personal stories of mishap and adventure, historical vignettes, and scenic detours, professor Eli J. Knapp dissects eighteen critical forces that lie behind the earth's sixth extinction. Drawing from experiences across the globe, Knapp peeks into odd and overlooked corners of natural history, showing how ocean–going tortoises and ghost deer can both instruct and inspire. Full of humor, hope, and self–effacing scientific savvy, Knapp's exploration of our home planet provides welcome respite in a deadly serious subject.
"Diverting descriptions of flora and fauna lead into captivating lessons about biological principles, all of which are embellished with humor. A rousing read."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
Through personal stories of mishap and adventure, historical vignettes, and scenic detours, professor Eli J. Knapp dissects eighteen critical forces that lie behind the earth's sixth extinction. Drawing from experiences across the globe, Knapp peeks into odd and overlooked corners of natural history, showing how ocean–going tortoises and ghost deer can both instruct and inspire. Full of humor, hope, and self–effacing scientific savvy, Knapp's exploration of our home planet provides welcome respite in a deadly serious subject.
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Overview
"Diverting descriptions of flora and fauna lead into captivating lessons about biological principles, all of which are embellished with humor. A rousing read."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
Through personal stories of mishap and adventure, historical vignettes, and scenic detours, professor Eli J. Knapp dissects eighteen critical forces that lie behind the earth's sixth extinction. Drawing from experiences across the globe, Knapp peeks into odd and overlooked corners of natural history, showing how ocean–going tortoises and ghost deer can both instruct and inspire. Full of humor, hope, and self–effacing scientific savvy, Knapp's exploration of our home planet provides welcome respite in a deadly serious subject.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948814409 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Torrey House Press |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2021 |
| Pages: | 324 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don't mind."
—Bernard M. Baruch
I never realized how badly I wanted to see a javelina until I drove through Big Bend National Park, in southern Texas. Javelina is another name for collared peccaries, or "skunk pigs," as Southwesterners call them. My van was full of six college students and my ten–year–old son, Ezra, and a horned lizard, that he'd caught at an overlook that morning. It was the last day of my monthlong ornithology course and we were headed back to pack up camp and head to the Albuquerque airport. Western New York, our home base, was calling. Summer jobs awaited my students. The saplings growing out of my gutters awaited me.
We had spent the previous six days camping our way through Texas, sleuthing out diminutive owls, glittering hummingbirds, and the Colima warbler, one of the rarest in the US. In the process, we had bumbled into bears and bobcats. Where, I wondered, were the javelina? How could sixty–pound pigs, that Texans swore were as common as deer, have eluded us?
"Javelina!" Ezra shouted.
"Where?!" I yelled.
"Right there!" I looked in my mirror and saw Ezra's palms on the right side of the window. His unbridled enthusiasm, and unhelpful directions, confirmed we shared sizable amounts of DNA. Sure enough, a squadron of javelina were angling off into the scrub. I pulled the van over on Big Bend's narrow shoulder and leapt out. My students did the same. These were my zealous students; the others—those boasting an affinity for sleep and common sense—had remained back at camp.
Unsurprisingly, this group took off, fanning out as they did so. Ezra, still clutching the wide–eyed lizard, bounded off with them. I stood in the road for a minute, watching them run. This was a national park. I was a professor. Now my students were chasing skunk pigs across the Chihuahuan Desert. Nothing had prepared me for this. I was horrified. Certainly, reams of rules and regulations prohibited whatever it was my students were doing. But standing there straddling the yellow lines brought another emotion too: pride. My students—and my son—were embracing nature like all too few do. They wanted to see javelina as badly as I did. They wanted to experience them with all their senses. If that meant hurdling cacti and ocotillo, so be it.
Growing up, I had marinated in all the battles of Gettysburg. The battle of Little Round Top captivated me the most. Jeff Daniels' portrayal of Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain stuck in my adolescent brain like a mastodon in a tar pit. Something about his bookish roots and his hesitance to rush headlong into battle struck a chord, subtly shaping me. Prone to metaphor and melodrama, I'd long compared cogent moments of my life to Little Round Top. Here was another. I was conflicted, now drawn in by the desertion of my troops. One thing I knew: leaders can't lead from behind. Decision made, I activated the van's hazard lights, slammed the door, and sprinted after my delirious battalion.
Javelina, we discovered, are fast. Terrified javelina are even faster. They quickly outpaced us and would have melted into the desert if not for one thing: topography. A slot canyon ran parallel with the road and forced the javelina into a decision. None turned left. One chose straight and launched off the cliff. The others, Ocean's eleven, or in this case, Desert's seven, took a hard right. Realizing my bunch of deliriously happy and sunburned students were still on their heels, they bore down, spewing a dust trail as they went. My students cut the corner and narrowed the gap, two of them close enough to slap peccary rumps (which they joyously confided to doing not long after).
Watching the drama unfold from the rear allowed me to cut the corner more drastically and catch up with my heavy–breathing crew. Too exhausted for more, they stopped at the canyon edge. The javelina had found a way down the canyon and were now beating their way across.
"I try to live half–wild," J. Drew Lanham wrote in his memoir, "not judging, skirting convention and expectation." I have followed Lanham's lead, my feral magma often welling up just below the surface. Here in Big Bend, it had just fomented. Now, as the javelina melted into the mesquite, I fretted over my heedless indiscretion. Time to dial up whatever convention remained. So, I gave instructions. "We need to get back to the van," I said, as everybody started talking at once. Before we'd gone ten paces, another javelina burst out of a low bush. It was a juvenile, smaller and lighter. Outnumbered and bewildered, the javelina held its ground, spinning in a slow circle. Like a cornered cat, its hair stood up, instantly doubling its size. At the same time, an aroma fell over us, a scent somewhere between forsythia and boys' locker room. Now I understood the other colloquial name for javelina: musk hogs. Surprised and uncertain, we backed off. Seeing daylight, the petrified peccary gave up the charade and bolted after its brethren.
Our hearts in our throats, we resumed the forced march back to the van. I was elated. My students were alive, we'd seen javelina, and I knew they had an experience they'd cherish forever. Yes, they'd likely broken some rules. But they'd also garnered a really good story. One to tell and retell, their hearts for Big Bend and the creatures of the Southwest growing each time. The greater good, I gambled, would be a life spent closer to nature. A life in which they'd feel a distinct kinship with the earth. When the impetuous days of youth ebbed away, I reasoned, they'd err toward lives that questioned rampant consumption, veering instead toward conservation.
In the midst of these thoughts, after we'd just crested a knoll, I spied the national park truck. It was parked behind mine, its beacon lights flashing. My heart dropped into my shoes and I momentarily held up considering my options. Half of me wanted to turn tail and flee, disappearing into the scrub as the javelina had. But this was another Little Round Top moment, although it felt a lot more like Custer's last stand. Knowing I couldn't lead from behind, I lengthened my stride and started barking orders. "Everybody, act normal!" For this group of students, this was a tall order indeed. "You all haven't done anything wrong here. Well, very wrong," I added. "Let me do the talking!" Truth be told, I had no idea what I was going to say. No ranger would have the patience for listening to my long, convoluted argument about the importance of creating formative moments for my students. Nor would they understand my obsession for seeing javelina. Even I didn't understand it. To a park ranger or a border patrol agent, what I had done was clear: I had abandoned an anonymous white rental van on the shoulder of the road a hair's breadth from the Mexican border. Not only that, I'd abandoned it with the doors unlocked and the engine running.
"Ez, drop the ghecko!" I muttered under my breath. He was holding it out in front of him like you would a ball of hair you've pulled from a bathtub drain. The last thing we needed was yet another violation atop the sixteen others we'd obviously accrued.
"Dad, it's a horned lizard, not a ghecko! And these things can shoot blood out their eyes!" Ezra's pedantic reply did little to lighten my mood.
Surely, I was going to be arrested, fined, and maybe worse; blood seemed about ready to squirt out my eyes too.
Nobody said anything as we reached the road about ten yards behind the ranger's truck. I straddled the yellow lines briefly, feebly feinting responsibility as I played crossing guard, motioning my students safely across. The truck's beacon light went off and I expected a burly six–foot–five dour–looking man to step out with his hand on his police baton. But magic doesn't happen only at Disney; it happens in south Texas, too. The ranger never got out. He never even rolled down a window. Rather, he simply pulled back onto the road and drove off. Once the truck's taillights disappeared, I did the only thing that came naturally: a victory dance. Big Bend has surely seen victory dances before, but none as sincerely as the one I performed on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive that early June morning. This was the actual magic kingdom.
Big Bend's lesson didn't dawn on me until several months later, when I was giving an ornithology talk at a small Methodist church near my home in western New York. My wife, Linda, and our three kids were there, meaning every few minutes my three–year–old daughter, Willow, escaped Linda's clutches and tackled my legs like an overmatched linebacker. I hardly noticed, of course, busy as I was regaling my audience how pupil size distinguishes male blue–footed boobies from females.
Such factoids find little favor with society at large, surely a good thing. Fortunately, this was the Allegany Bird Club, a group of self–marginalized eccentrics happy to squander a perfectly good Friday night to slide shows and bad bird puns. They hung on every word, nodding and smiling. Except for three people in the second row back. They looked decapitated, gravity gluing their chins to the chests. This cue, along with a few men overtly eyeing the dessert table, let me know it was time to wrap up. "How about one last question?" I offered, noticing a strong nod of agreement from the club's president.
Ezra, whom I presumed to be engrossed in a mindless game on Linda's smartphone, leapt off his metal folding chair. "You gotta tell the javelina story!" he exclaimed. Silence fell. The decapitated back row regained their heads, tepid coffee sloshing out of the Styrofoam cup of one. A man in flannel, already helping himself to brownies in the back, paused abruptly, eyeing me. My heart sunk just as it quickly as it had in Big Bend. To tell the javelina story—to really tell it—would require admitting some of my really bad decisions.
Odd, yes. But gathered here were some of the most considerate of the bird–loving world. These were folks who took injured animals to rehabilitation centers, generously donated to environmental causes, and put up bluebird houses as often as they changed their socks; not people who sanctioned wild pigheaded peccary chases in one of our finest national parks. Ezra, unversed in nuance and tact, hadn’t realized this. For him, bounding after javelina with a horned lizard was wild adventure, a jaunty yarn worthy of retelling in all its vainglorious detail. Selective storytelling, I realized, was utterly lost on the average ten–year–old. Innocently and earnestly, Ezra had exposed my hypocrisy.
In the field of conservation, too much selective storytelling seems sinful. Like Chicken Little never admitting he could be wrong. With skillfully chosen stories, I had presented myself as Saint Francis of Assisi, my arms tenderly outstretched to the birds while docile critters nuzzled my legs. Through every keynote and lecture, I had sanitized my interactions with nature, scrubbing out poor decisions while amplifying others. Surely, I reasoned, all speakers did it. But did this make it right?
Years of college teaching had taught me the art of the skillfully chosen story. Personal stories that would entertain and keep me well clear of environmental blacklists. The stories were true. So what, if I omitted a few incriminating details? The javelina story—the full story—didn't have just a few incriminating details, it had a load of them. I, master justifier that I am, had come to terms with the choices I made. But I doubted my audience would. It featured too much pursuit, too much boneheadedness, and too much harassment of nature. I had safer, more sanitized stories in my bag. My first book, The Delightful Horror of Family Birding, is testament to that.
I glared at Ezra. Why couldn't he act like other quiet, respectful kids? While Willow tackled me physically, Ezra aimed to take down my entire nature–do–gooder reputation. Here I was in a church. Why not preach on love and tenderness? No need to anger the congregation with a self–indicting, sin–laden zinger.
But something in Ezra's imploring eyes told me I couldn't. My audience was still none the wiser. I stood statuesque, two hands gripping the sweaty microphone. With a lighthearted redirection, I could still stuff the cat back into the bag. But then Ezra interrupted yet again, "You gotta tell it, Dad, it's the best!" Then he lifted off his seat and pointed at me. "Remember when the javelina jumped off the cliff?!"
Now the cat was out of the bag. I felt like a guy in a Walmart parking lot who notices an unpaid–for item in the bottom rack of my shopping cart. I hadn't arrived at this point willfully. But driving away would be willful. I groaned, cast a malevolent look at Ezra, and smiled weakly. Decision made. That night, in the old Methodist church, I gave up the charade and dove in. This motley crew of square pegs were my people. I couldn't betray them any longer.
Life's too short, the earth's resources too limited, to willfully drive away. We can no longer afford to focus only on the things we all agree on. The conversation needs widening; the brushy forest edges and thick impenetrable tangles need to be traversed; not just the sunny glades. I've edged around the thickest parts for long enough. Well–known author Michael Pollan has presciently written that an author's second book is more critical than the first. Why? It determines an author's trajectory, setting a path that becomes increasingly difficult to veer away from. Without alienating a readership, that is.
"The world cannot be understood without numbers," Hans Rosling wrote in Factfulness, "And it cannot be understood with numbers alone." Any book about extinction can be crammed with numbers, dreadful statistics of decline and doom. I've shied away from them here, preferring the power of story instead. Most of these stories are personal. But others, too fascinating to be overlooked, have been cherrypicked.
Cherrypicked but unwashed. One can't write without enduring criticism. My first book taught me that. But one criticism I hope to blot out here is my tendency toward hagiography; boasting personal stories that aren't, in fact, personal. To make amends, this collection features the lesser cherries, the wrinkly, moldering ones well–meaning people wrinkle their noses at. All students of nature know that trees don't only produce shiny, lustrous fruits. And while the unsavory castoffs may not reflect well on the tree, they can be useful, too. They drop and melt into the ground. Maybe later, if the alchemy is right, they sprout into something beautiful.
Lesser fruits may be a euphemism. These stories may be more akin to maggot–ridden roadkill. Liken my journey to that of New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, who, after years of denying steroid use, came to the podium in 1986 and finally came clean. A quick glance at my author photo will convince you I've never used steroids. But like Pettitte, my story wasn't complete. Baseball players and college professors both know that the richest, most memorable learning emerges from mistakes. And while I delight in schadenfreude, the ecological mistakes herein are unfortunately my own.
I know I'm not alone. We hunters wound deer without recovering them. We bird lovers watch our housecats systematically annihilate the very birds we lure to our feeders. Other birds collide with our windshields and our Windex–scrubbed living room windows. We drive around in monstrous RVs. We pave our driveways. We live on high fructose corn syrup. We spray Deet on our bodies. We leave lights on. We let faucets run. We plant nonnative plants. We don't carpool. We don't know the origins of our food. We consume too much. We throw out too much. We eat Poptarts.
Just by living, all of us are sullied somewhat. And we all have stories to boot. My guess is just that mine are dumber than yours, like the night I shot a bear with a bow from the living room window (skip to chapter sixteen, if you must) or paraglided into an acacia tree. The best stories in life feature redemption, a glaring lack of which has appeared in mine. Sensing this, I've stepped back, tilted my head, and tried seeing them anew. Separately, they still seem wanting. But together, in just the right light, helpful insights emerge. Not because of your delight in my incompetence as a nature snoop. Rather, because of nature's inherent ability to captivate even the most disinterested of audiences.
Here's my first confession: this book isn't a selfless act of nobility. There's nothing noble about it. Read it instead as a desperate cry from a Lyme–ridden, balding man in midlife. Why? Because I've hit that ethereal time when you suddenly realize your days for staining the deck are numbered. A time when you no longer exercise to get in shape, but simply to slow down your decline. My fingers are haplessly jammed in the dike, vainly trying to delay the inevitable. But my internal paradigm shift is real. Lately, I've been driving by cemeteries a little more slowly, wondering which would be most convenient for my kids to drop my corpse into.
So yes, midlife has made me keenly aware of my mortality. I expected this. What I didn't expect was how it has sensitized me to the mortality of my fellow creatures, too. Not the mortality of individual creatures; the mortality of species, the extinction of entire flora and fauna from right under our nose. And while I'm fascinated by the mass extinctions of the past, I'm more fascinated—borne of sheer panic—for the one we're in now, the one of our own doing. As Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Kolbert has made clear in her eponymous book, we're smack in the heart of a sixth extinction, a spate of extinctions rivaling anything the earth has endured before.
Kolbert's masterwork adds to the shelves already sagging with heavy tomes about extinction. Why, pray tell, write another? For one all–important reason. Each and every one of them made me gloomy. Catatonic even. In his book A Walk Through the Year, renowned naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote about a squirrel snatched by a cat right in front of his startled eyes. Rather than fight back, or try to escape, the squirrel went instantly limp. It laid down on the grass immobilized in shock.
We've heard about extinction ad nauseum. We know it's happening. We even know we're to blame. But you can only hear about the imminent demise of the world so many times without growing numb. You can only see "extinction is forever" bumper stickers so often before you fail to see to see them anymore. You can only hear about the loss of the rainforests so much before you lose the will to fight back. Yes, we care. But we're catatonic; overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem and yet still uncertain how it's unraveling.
That's why I've written this book: herein is the happiest book about extinction you'll ever read. Eighteen anfractuous chapters from now, you'll understand extinction through the misadventures of a guy who loves javelina a little too much. Why eighteen chapters? Well, since my first book was designed for visits to the loo, this one is for a visit to the golf course. One chapter per hole for your nongolfing spouse. Golfing aside, eighteen happens to be the number of important points made by an ecological savant named Michael Soule, unknown except in nerdy conservation circles. Too often in life, important events happen without the world noticing.
The year 1983 is a case in point. The US invaded Grenada. A massive famine in Ethiopia claimed four million lives. Microsoft Word emerged along with the world's first mobile phones. If these events didn't capture you, then surely The Return of the Jedi did. Or the debut of Mario Brothers, for Nintendo. If you were alive way back then as I was, I'm sure of one thing: you didn't notice a little essay by Michael Soule.
Like me, Soule was a college professor who loved wildlife and ecology. Perhaps in a midlife crisis, Soule grew weary of the endless academic cycle of research, grading, and department meetings. No more. He quit his post at the University of California at San Diego, gravitated to eastern religions, and entered a Zen Period, replete with ample meditation. Fortunately, his wandering was more spiritual than intellectual. His interest in conservation held. Sometime during that span—in 1983—Soule wrote his crowning achievement, a straightforward essay entitled "What Do We Know About Extinction?" His conclusion: not much. But he did list eighteen things we ought to know; a laundry list, as unadorned as a leafless December maple. Okay, here goes:
Rarity – Low Density
Rarity – Small, Infrequent Patches
Limited Dispersal Ability
Inbreeding
Loss of Heterozygosity
Founder Effects
Hybridization
Successional Loss of Habitat
Environmental Variation
Long-term Environmental Trends
Catastrophe
Extinction of Mutualist Populations
Competition
Predation
Disease
Hunting and Collecting
Habitat Disturbance
Habitat Destruction
If you just skimmed these, you're in good company. Outside of a cadre of likeminded conservationists, nobody noticed Soule's eighteen points. I wouldn't have noticed either, had I not devoured David Quammen's girthy The Song of the Dodo, a book that at the very least could knock out a goat. But even Quammen gave them cursory treatment. Probably wise, as heterozygosity and hybridization tend not to quicken the pulse.
I'm gambling they can. Hidden in a leafy salad of improbably true stories, I've tried to transform Soule's ideas into zesty, crunchy croutons. I've shoehorned Soule's eighteen points into a convenient chrysalis of misadventure and redemption. Roll your eyes as you read. Judge me. All I ask for is patience. Let each story twist and turn and pupate. By the end, I'm betting Soule's points will send your eyebrows up like they did mine, emerging in a dazzling new understanding of ecology, natural history, and extinction.
It's a tall order. If Catholicism required ninety–five theses for any sort of reformation, eighteen seems hardly sufficient. Indeed, it isn't. But it's better than zero. And there's another reason, too. Understanding these eighteen points, and doing so optimistically, might lend us motivation. If we all act locally, as the cliché instructs, while thinking globally, perhaps we can curb the loss. Or at least buy us time for a tourniquet. "The only hope for the species still living," E. O. Wilson wrote, "is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem." I'm with Wilson. We can't afford to be immobilized out of shock or despair any longer.
That's why, at Ezra's urging, I gripped the microphone anew, and told the true javelina story, all of it. "If you tell the truth," Mark Twain wrote, "you don't have to remember anything." He's right. There's catharsis and freedom in confession. And sometimes, it's accompanied by a willingness to change.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 No Risk It, No Biscuit 11
Rarity (Low Density)
2 Goodness Snakes Alive 29
Rarity (Small, Infrequent Patches)
3 Worms on the Piano 49
Limited Dispersal Ability
4 The Green Fire 69
Inbreeding
5 Mona-Sha-Sha 87
Loss of Heterozygosity
6 Duck, Duck, Goose 103
Founder Effects
7 A New Dog in Town 115
Hybridization
8 Then I Do So Declare It 129
Successional Loss of Habitat
9 What does the Fox Say? 143
Environmental Variation
10 A Quadruped of the Clawed Kind 157
Long-Term Environmental Trends
11 Hog Wild 171
Catastrophe
12 How in Haleakala? 189
Extinction or Reduction of Mutualist Populations
13 The Cardinal Rule 205
Competition
14 The Lunatic Express 219
Predation
15 The Keys of St. Hubert 237
Disease
16 A Shot in the Dark 253
Hunting and Collecting
17 Batwoman 273
Habitat Disturbance
18 Meltdown 287
Habitat Destruction
Conclusion 301
Acknowledgments 309
About the Author 313
About the Cover Image 314
For Further Reading 315