Out of Eden

"This is a delightful book by Alan Burdick. It has the subtitle “An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion”. Burdick is talking about invasive species throughout the world. My favourite is the story of the brown tree snake. The brown tree snake has invaded Guam. The theory is that it got there in the undercarriage of a light aircraft during World War II. These snakes came from Indonesia where they live in a balance with the rest of the creatures because they evolved there, and so have natural enemies and natural controls. In Guam there was no such thing and they are everywhere on this island. They are impossible to remove, they have decimated the bird population, they are eating other invasive species like cane toads and rats, and they’re eating each other. There is no end to them! The great fear is that they will get to other islands like Hawaii. Every plane leaving Guam is closely inspected because this snake has a propensity for crawling into tight little places and secreting itself. Twice they have been discovered in airplanes coming into Hawaii. They were exterminated because otherwise a disaster of unknown proportions could have occurred. In the last chapter, Burdick talks about two species of bacteria that live nowhere on this planet except in the absolutely sterile jet propulsion labs in Pasadena, California. We have created these through natural selection. They used to be able to super-heat these things to get rid of bacteria but now, because of the delicate computers and so on, they have to use a strong bleach in order to kill bacteria. As we know from our hospitals, that never kills off everything, just the ones that are weakest. So, living in the labs now are these invasive species, known nowhere else in the world. Well, when you consider that our only purpose in life is to procreate and die then nothing matters whatsoever. Everything is irrelevant. The conservatives took this line. I don’t know if you recall, but America was controlled by a group of evangelical thugs for eight years.They took the line, in opposition to any environmental reforms, that anything is natural – plastics, DDT, atomic bombs – because an animal created it. I think this is rather specious reasoning. If the earth goes on for another three-and-a-half billion years, I can’t quite figure out how old I’m going to be then, but the conditions that gave rise to our species are rapidly being eroded and there is going to be some kind of catastrophic collapse for our species. I don’t think it’s going to be in the too distant future. We see global warming and the catastrophes it’s causing, as well as the fight for resources that’s going on now throughout the world – tribalism and all this crazy shit that we’re descending into. It all looks pretty bleak. That’s correct, of course, and our intervention is natural. We are animals. But when the world was a smaller place and we didn’t have jet planes and this promiscuous interplay between people around the world, things would have evolved in isolation and creatures wouldn’t have seen one another. It probably doesn’t really matter that the polar bear will be extinct in 50 years. The polar bear was a breakaway from the grizzly bear, and now they are meeting once again because the polar ice cap is disappearing and the polar bears are forced to come on land to forage. Maybe they could even still mate, who knows? We’ll have hybrid species. Unfortunately, we are eliminating so many species unique to their ecosystem that we will have a much more degraded world in which rats and pigeons will be throughout the world, while songbirds will be gone. To somebody in 100 years’ time, maybe that won’t matter because they won’t know any different. For our grandchildren, tigers and lions will be like dinosaurs – gone. But if you value nature then you might try to do something about it. If you don’t, you’re right, it’s all part of the natural process and we can’t control it."