Last Days for Nature as We Know It: Richard Pope Guest Blog

“Can humans transcend the view ingrained in them for more than two millennia that they have dominion over nature? The question burns because if even the plight of birds is ignored, what hope is there that humans will move to protect the rest of nature?” Flight from Grace

While the world’s attention remains monopolised by the sudden whirlwind of the COVID-19 crisis, the steady and ever-growing climate crisis continues in its destructive trajectory. In this week’s blog post, MQUP author Richard Pope reflects on the disastrous impacts of global warming and the unfortunate role humanity has played, and continues to play, in the destruction of nature.

In his new book Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds, Richard Pope traces human reverence for birds from the Stone Age and the New Stone Age, through the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, and Greece and through biblical traditions, up to its vestiges in the present. Suggesting that the replacement of an animistic worldview with a mechanistic one has led humans to deny their animality, Flight from Grace calls on readers to appreciate how our past relationship with birds might help transform our current relationship with nature.

If – as many think – COVID–19 is a zoonotic disease transferred from animals to humans like the Avian flu, then it is possible to regard it as part of nature’s revenge on humans, alongside things like Australia and California’s disastrous wildfires, the melting of permafrost in Canada’s Arctic, and the resulting release of carbon and sinking of dwellings into the ground.

Why revenge? What have we done to nature to deserve this?

Many of our most serious problems – open water at the north poles; the melting of glaciers, Greenland, and the polar icecaps; the fires, deforestation and the destruction of the rainforests; and climate change (specifically global warming) – are to a large extent the result of human activity. Humans have fundamentally altered the face of the earth (as can be seen from space) and disrupted and impoverished the biosphere to the point that many now accept the term Anthropocene to name the geological epoch in which we now live.

What an irony that our big brains and superior intelligence have allowed us to succeed as a species beyond what the planet can safely tolerate. How ironic that a single species – homo sapiens – which began as just another species of animal in the biosphere, should now have the power to impoverish that biosphere as it sees fit with little regard to fellow travellers in the plant and animal world.

For those who like irony, it is a marvellous irony that we have the power to destroy the whole world including ourselves if we wish!

A wandering albatross over the chaos of troubled waters. | Copyright Mike Hill, Stone Collection, via Getty Images.

In Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds I trace the slow change from human reverence for nature and acceptance of other creatures on the earth in the Early Stone Age to our current anthropocentric disregard for all but ourselves: nature exists for us to plunder it to our own ends.

Let us take one recent example (of many) as a metaphor for our disregard. It has recently come to light that in Canada we feed palm oil to our cows! I do not care what this does to the softening point of our butter. Nor do I give a hoot about whether this causes our cows to produce a bit more milk or slightly fattier milk or whether it saves producers a tiny bit of money. The question is why is it thought necessary to bring palm oil two-thirds of the way around the globe from areas where palm plantations have caused massive deforestation and the destruction of most of the world’s orangutan habitat in order to feed it to our bloody cows. Is the quality of our butter really so important that we can contribute to deforestation and the demise of a closely related fellow traveller? Sadly, the answer is apparently yes. How did we ever manage before palm oil? And this at a time when people are selling plots of indigenously owned land in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest on Facebook.

A blizzard of redbilled queleas with an elephant near a watering hole. | Courtesy of Antero Topp.

In my book I conclude that humans will survive the twenty-first century but nature as we know it will be severely impoverished by the extinction of a huge number of birds (3 billion already lost in North America alone in the last fifty years), animals, insects, and plants over the next fifty years before the human population diminishes enough to matter. The Sixth Extinction is well under way but there is a lot more to come.

Richard Pope, lifelong birder and naturalist, is a retired professor of Russian literature and culture. He lives with his wife in Cobourg, Ontario and is the author of Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds.