And Then There Were None?

Once again this year, the Christmas wish lists of many young children reflect what Lydia Millet in her recent New York Times piece, “The Child’s Menagerie,” refers to as the “reinforcements” – stuffed animals, wooden animal figurines, books about animals, games with animal heroes, clothes covered with animal images. The “green recruits” called in to replace the outgrown, worn-out, ready-to-be-retired-or-reassigned troops of previous years.

Last night, I wrapped Christmas gift books for two young grandchildren. Among the  main characters were pigs, hippos, a bear, a moose, and a little bird. Another gift book – More Than Human, Tim Flach’s striking animal portraits – I’ve not yet wrapped because, frankly, Grandma is not done lovingly examining it.

All across this country, animals will make a showing in some form come Christmas morning. Domestic animals. Barnyard animals. The wild, more exotic and strange animals known to most of us only by way of photographs, nature films, and zoos. Animals with claws, dorsal fins, long necks, nimbus-like manes, odd spots and stripes. With thick-plated shell “houses” they carry on their backs, with pouches to transport their young. With long prehensile noses with which to smell, eat, drink, shower, pick up a nut or pull down a tree. Animals that comfort, invite dreams, fire imaginations, even if – especially if -- recruited into a house or apartment without dog or goldfish, hamster or cat.

In many children’s animal books, the stories are familiar to us adults: a bear goes to any extreme to find her lost cub, a moose learns to compromise, a spider inspires a pig. In other words, animals helping teach us how to be human.

Eventually, when long childhoods are over, our love of animals may shrink, becomes less important as we learn to favor the love of humans, are encouraged to privilege it above all others. Still, in adulthood, as Millet points out, animals – those “friends of our youth” – remain, if only in name, image, and iconography. Of, say, sports teams. Or of magazine ads – like the leopard currently invoked to help Cartier sell, though I’m not sure how, expensive jewelry. Or, more commonly, on movies screens. One highly-acclaimed holiday block-buster, “Life of Pi,” a book-to-movie adaptation, features the improbable shipwreck pairing of a boy and an immense tiger adrift in a small boat. The sort of tiger that in the real-life world is in peril of disappearing, joining the ranks of endangered polar bears, gorillas, coral reef fish, and, increasingly, elephants.

We are no strangers to animal extinction. Common to us all are long-gone dinosaurs that last roamed the earth 65 million years ago, creatures we can only experience by way of bones and fossil-based reconstructions. Even a young child intuitively grasps that no matter how gray or how whoppingly enormous her number of years, no grandmother is old enough to have ever encountered a dinosaur. Lesser known to them, however, is that a woman of my generation has also never lived in a world shared with vast herds of plains buffalo. Or with dodo birds or passenger pigeons. Gone to me is the possibility to encounter them in the wild anywhere on this planet.  

Over the past many years, I’ve had the good fortune to travel, and the lure of animals has often determined my destination. I’ve seen cheetah on the Serengeti savannah, hippos in the upper Zambezi, lions bringing down a water buffalo in the Okavanga Delta. In the early 1980s, I went to Kenya where the elephant population plummeted 85%  in that decade alone. Thanks to conservation efforts, particularly in Amboseli National Park where I saw my first elephant outside of a zoo, the population stabilized. Recently, however, even there, poaching has resumed. In some countries, it’s approaching slaughter levels of the 1980s.  Due to explosive, uncurbed demand for ivory in China and the Far East, it’s estimated that poachers, armed with high-powered rifles and other sophisticated weaponry like grenade launchers, are reducing Africa’s elephant population by 100,000 each year. One highly-regarded study estimates an elephant population of more than a million in all of Africa has fallen in the last 30 years to 400,000. Somberly, it projects that at current rates of extermination, elephants could vanish from the continent in 10 years.

Elsewhere, of course, melting ice caps due to global warming imperil polar bears, seals, and walruses. As recently reported in the New York Times, our deep oceans are no longer home to “What quiet, what silence, what peace!” as exclaimed by the protagonist in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The ocean depths have become noisy places thanks to military sonar blast  exercises, oil and gas exploration air guns, and the increasing number of loud commercial fleets – all of which are potentially calamitous to whales who depend on their acute hearing to locate food and one another. It’s not new news that many animals of our planetary home are endangered. To skeptics or the merely indifferent, it’s not even news.

But what does all this mean to the children of the future? If death tolls rise and beasts large and small disappear, will, or rather, how will they be missed? At some future Christmas, as a young child unwraps a plush polar bear toy or a book about an elephant, will a grandmother have to explain that, yes, polar bears once lived on long-gone Arctic ice floes? And that, yes, elephants freely roamed the African savannah? Will she add that one day, a last and largely unheard trumpet or roar was silenced?

Here’s what I know: fifty years ago this year, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring , bringing into public consciousness the insidious dangers of DDT, not only to humans but as the cause behind “a strange stillness in the sky” – the near demise of certain bird populations. Like the ospreys that every summer migrate back to nearby Heart Island, as I do to our Maine house, and in their aerial displays return music to the sky and without which I’d not feel I’d arrived back home, to a place that’s as much theirs as mine.

I also know this: a seal can evoke wonder from a young grandson, not by doing tricks for fish bits in a pool, but by merely popping its head out of the water as it freely swims near our kayak.

 And I know this: the population of gray whales, once doomed at a couple of hundred, has rebounded since hunting was banned in 1946.

 I have never seen a gray whale, nor do I need to in order to recognize how my life would be somehow diminished, the world a poorer, less wondrous place were they to vanish from the ocean. Of course many people would disagree. If you’re unlikely to ever see a bear in the Arctic or an elephant in Africa, and if, in times of recession, deficit and drought, something doesn’t create a job, put food on the table, balance a budget, pay off a student loan, why should it matter? What does such existence add to your life?

Ask the children. Ask the young children that I see on one of my favorite walks here in Chicago, my winter city home – north into the park, a loop around and through one of the city’s treasures: admission-free Lincoln Park Zoo. Excitedly pointing at zebra, lion or gorilla, the children’s faces portray both recognition and amazement, that a world vast and rich can contain such marvelous, strange and yet oddly familiar creatures as well as them, their hopes and dreams. Not foreclosed to them is the possibility, no matter how remote, of one day seeing these animals, possibly far from this zoo and their home. Such faces prompt me to ask: what generation might have to be the last to walk the earth with elephant or tiger? What generation may have to grieve the loss of creatures known to them, not creatures like dodo or buffalo already part of our collective memory, but of creatures, our partners, that lived, roamed the world, with us?

This Christmas, like Millet, I’m thankful I don’t have to explain to a young child the recent disappearance of large mammals or small Nemo-like reef fish, additions to an expanding pantheon relegated merely to book or screen. Wrapping my animal book gifts, I enclose with them my fervent wish. For peace, certainly. And for a life free of senseless tragedy. And also a wish that our family’s and the world’s children will, at my age, live in a place not poorer with absence, but still richly abundant with strange and beautiful animals – our fellow inhabitants, our essential companions.