The other night an old friend from LA was in town and came to dinner.  He’d just finished adapting a nonfiction memoir for the screen – that’s what he does for a living.  He said he was pretty satisfied with his work, and had “followed the Joseph Campbell hero stuff” carefully, so he feels the screenplay is structurally sound.

Coincidentally, I happened to be reading A Fire in the Mind, a biography of Campbell.  Campbell performed a vast cultural service in putting his arms around all world mythology and telling us that myths are the source of our self-realization — the observing ego needs a mirror by which to assess its progress, and myths provide it. He advocated deliberately seeing yourself as a main player in mythic time, and emphasized the utility of getting off the beaten path.  Myths give us the blueprint for the “hero’s journey” each of us must take, and in short surmise, this is how it goes:  the hero leaves home, undergoes an initiation, and returns.  Suffering and loss are involved and then insight and direction are gained.  The hero myth is a traditionally male thing and if you are biologically minded as I am, in it you can see the life history of many mammals simply being reenacted by homo sapiens.  The male wolf, for example, lights out for the territory (yes,  Huckleberry Finn follows the hero’s trajectory long before Campbell named it), finds new ground and a mate, and sets up shop, sometimes starting a new pack, and sometimes joining another one.

Probably one of the main big draws of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is that it’s a gal’s hero journey and the very first thing the narrator departs from is a marriage, which is usually where women end up at the end of traditional stories.  Very appealing to the modern American sensibility.  I just finished Where Did You Go, Bernadette?, which is a fun read, and it too is a gal’s hero journey; as of course is Wild, the subtitle of which:  “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail,” says it all. Women do seem to need to have a nervous breakdown to initiate their heroic journeys – what is up with that?

So…I’m getting old but frankly I’m finding this narrative redundant.  Okay it’s all fine and good but to me it doesn’t go far enough.  Personal satisfaction at the end of a hike up a mountain or around the world or a journey to Antarctica – well, so what? We have seven billion people and counting on this Earth and so what if each one of us finds our “bliss”?  (Campbell got it that people would misinterpret his directive to “follow your bliss” and later said you should “follow your blisters.”) Are all these books Campbell’s fault, I wondered? Shouldn’t story-telling push us farther than our own individual “potential”? Can we only tell stories this way because writer’s workshops and how-to guides like The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers have rubber-stamped what it is to have an identity and only those stories that fit this mold will be published or produced as movies?  Hasn’t this all become a contradiction in terms?

Aha!  Campbell got better and better at synthesizing and communicating his message and a great place to get a big dose of it is in The Power of Myth, which is a book-length conversation with Bill Moyers.  Campbell explains that in fact, we need new myths that reflect modern life, but he said things are changing so fast now it will take more time for those new myths to emerge. Campbell’s whole thing is that virtually all religion (another person’s religion is a myth to you and vice versa) tells the same intrinsic story (see hero, above) thus indicating a deep unity at the base of all humanity no matter what race or tradition.  The tribal thing gets in the way, he said.  When you condemn another tribe’s myth/religion you create trouble (and yes we see that everywhere in the world).  He said the next iteration of myth needs to incorporate the planet. Everybody into the pool:  it’s all one big story we are all in it together.  And maybe citizen science will give us a new format for telling stories about our Earth – saving nature together, reuniting the riven disciplines of art and science – citizen science puts its arms around the world like Campbell did, and goes even deeper than mythic time.  Citizen science is about evolutionary time.  Now there’s a story.

Marilyn Yalom proposes How the French Invented Love, giving us “Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance,” and then she brings us up to the present day, in which the French have seemingly lost the recipe.  Yalom is the prolific elucidator of many feminine-oriented fields of inquiry, including A History of the Wife and A History of the Breast.  Her book on love is an historic tour of the subject through a mostly literary lens, until it isn’t.  She starts with Abelard and Heloise and moves on through the centuries, covering La Princesse de Cleves, (her affection for which is very appealing), and on through such heavyweights as Moliere, Rousseau, Madame Roland, Stendhal, Balzac…of course Flaubert, Gide, Proust, Colette, de Beauvoir and Sartre, and pretty much finally, Duras.  This book is uniformly well-written and presents a useful time-line of mostly French literature.

Passion dies after Yalom’s appreciation of The Lover, the incandescent and elliptical novel in which Marguerite Duras exposes her autobiographical, quivering everything.  It runs into Michel Houllebecq, for one major amatory roadblock, though Yalom’s complete dismissal of his depressive reductions misses the poignancy to be found, for example, in The Map and the Territory.   Very oddly Yalom finishes up her book with a hard left turn into the ripped-from-the-headlines story of Dominque Strauss-Kahn.  Why conclude a book about literature with a real-life story of rape?  Certainly his is not the first story of a man in power exerting a savage indifference to others, and neither is his state-sanctioned violence against women original.  And what’s love got to do with it?

This sudden pothole in Yalom’s narrative got me thinking.  Apparently there’s no love left in France, or in the French imagination:  why not?  Though certainly not confined to the recombining of chromosomes and the whelping of resultant generations, love does have perhaps the most practical of all purposes, and that is procreation.  The French, of course, have been famously declining in numbers for some time, the population of the country bolstered with immigrants.  So…are there big love stories coming from burgeoning races elsewhere?  Not that I have heard of or know about, though of course I’m provincial and limited.  Is there a love literature alive anywhere?  It would seem not.

Does our 7 billion-plus Earthly population have anything to do with it?  We don’t need romantic love anymore.  We have more than enough people and our civilization runneth over.  Eros has done its job too well.  The French may have invented “romance,” but who will now invent or reinvent agape, which arguably includes reverent and protective impulses, and philia, which extends love outward to just about everybody?  Who invented compassion, or is the concept still on the drawing board?

It would seem that all animal species have deep totemic significance not only in indigenous cultures but in Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Eastern, and Western traditions as well.  And many original stories and beliefs about animals turn out to make ecological sense.  In his nifty book Vulture, anthropologist Thom van Dooren surveys this most fearsome bird’s place in both historic belief and in the ecosystem.

Naturally, since they feed on carrion, vultures are associated with death.  But much vulture lore puts them in the role of life-shaper as well as destroyer.  A Cherokee creation story tells how the animals, impatient to take up residence on a landscape just emerged from the seas and still drying, send a buzzard down to pave the way for them.  After flying all over the Earth, the buzzard gets tired, and his wings start to flap and strike the ground, making valleys and mountains.  The Egyptian hieroglyph for vulture came also to be used for ‘mother,’ invoking the association between birth and death.  This Egyptian hieroglyph has further associations with the Hebrew linguistic root R-H-M, linking it to ideas like ‘compassion’ and ‘womb/matrix.’

Life and death go together, after all, but finding some predictive control over the latter has bothered and preoccupied humans from time immemorial.  Vultures have been credited with this elusive ability to know the future; probably because of their uncanny ability to know where dead bodies are going to show up.  Milton, in Paradise Lost, has vultures arrive ahead of an eventual scene of battle:  “lur’d/with scent of living Carcasses design’d/For death, the following day….” The vulture’s ability to prognosticate is not always associated with death; Romulus and Remus chose the site for Rome based on the bird’s prompting.

Birds in general are credited with perceptions beyond human ken and often play the role of harbinger; the vulture gets star billing in this drama of elucidation.  Vultures are careful watchers of the landscape.  They can’t kill to eat, and many of them are “obligate carnivores,” meaning they don’t do vegetables.  So they have to wait for dead animals.  Vulture studies show most of what they eat is not downed by bigger teethed predators like lions or tigers, but they feed on ungulates (hoofed animals) that have died from disease and starvation.

And that’s not all they consume.  Along with the carrion flesh, vultures tuck away vast quantities of bacteria like anthrax, foot and mouth, and rinderpest, which are destroyed in the acid bath of the vulture’s digestive tract.  This service of running interference between disease carriers and the rest of us may have prompted the naming of one large genus of vulture Cathartes, the Greek root of which means to cleanse.  Van Dooren calls vultures “an ecological HAZMAT team” and adds that in addition to consuming the sources of infectious diseases, “the removal of the actual carcasses also prevent the build-up of rotting flesh that might foul soil, water and air.”

On to the contemporary thwacking of the natural order of things.  Vultures are endangered everywhere, their numbers in steep decline.  To the usual culprit of habitat fragmentation, there is added poisoning by the inflammatory drug Diclofenac, used widely on cattle in India.  Millions of vultures have died in India by this route, leaving the famed holy cow carcasses to rot on the landscape.  In addition to festering diseases that the vultures would have dispatched, street dogs and rats tend to proliferate in response to this bonanza of carrion.  Street dogs and rats do eat the dead, but not as efficiently as vultures do, and they don’t contain disease and contamination the same way.  And…dogs bite more than 17 million people in India a year.

Losing species of course has these kinds of horrifying effects on human well-being.  Not least of which will eventually be the loss of the best metaphors for human travails.  Van Dooren quotes Melville’s description of Ahab’s obsession with the whale in Moby-Dick:  ‘God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.’

One of the real privileges of having written a book is getting to talk to people I  wouldn’t ordinarily have the occasion to meet, and recently I had a great time conversing with Charles Heller, host of the radio show Liberty Watch.  Charles likes guns and hates the federal government, and feels that this whole climate change thing has been debunked.  Otherwise, what a sweetheart!  On his website he endorses our conversation as “this is what radio can be without the shouting,” and I concur.  He also did me the favor of writing this very articulate and nuanced review of my book, below.  You can listen to our conversation here: http://www.libertywatchradio.com/listen

Review by Charles Heller:

Mary Ellen Hannibal is a book editor, author, and environmental researcher. The book is about an initiative to unite “biodiversity corridors” via the Rocky Mountains from Mexico to Canada, but it is far more than that. It seeks to tell the story of the damage man has done to nature via development, and especially roads as well as climate change, to wildlife, habitat, and ecosystems.

Hannibal’s claim is that, “human development has made islands out of our largest nature reserves, stranding the biodiversity within them.” She introduces readers to a monumental effort to unite those regions, the brainchild of scientist Michael Soule, who is a contemporary of Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb) and E.O. Wilson. NGO’s and private citizens, as well as some universities are involved in this effort. Many of the pieces of “The Spine of The Continent,” sound remarkably similar to the United Nations “Agenda 21,” especially in relation to “biodiversity corridors.”

Soule is the creator of the “Wildlands Network,” an organization which attempts to link other wildlife advocates into coalitions to solve the problems they perceive with the management of the environment. Hannibal spent a lot of time with Soule for research of this book.

The book is a serious study of the topic, albeit from the left, but fairly probative of several issues, taking two and a half years of research and writing to accomplish this tome. Though you may well learn some sesquipedalian (Latin for a foot and a half) words in this book, Hannibal breaks down the terms of scientific art to “shirt sleeve English,” as her career in book editing and her BA in English cause her to do.

Surprisingly, the environmental side of this work is not in opposition to the “hook and the bullet,” in wildlife management, and there are some rather stunning examples of creative cooperation in the book between ranchers, NGO’s, and state and federal wildlife management agencies. One of the examples of that is the “High Lonesome Ranch,” run by attorney and wildlife conservationist Paul Vahldick. The author spent time at that ranch doing research not only of the topic, but also of the researchers themselves. She observed some of the scientists, hunting. Yes, some of them are hunters, surprising to some.

Clearly, Hannibal’s love of nature come through her work, but not in a way that overpowers or subtracts from her narrative – rather, it enhances that narrative in a way that informs and fills in what might otherwise be gaps in the readers’ understanding of the work. She weaves in an underlying assumption that global warming is a problem (referring to it as “climate change”) but surprisingly does not seem to include any evidence about scientific proof either of the cause, or the controversy on the topic. One supposes that it would have been a much longer book, were that the case.

While Hannibal clearly has her bias about environmental issues, it does not detract from the fact that the reader could learn a lot about the issues from reading it. If nothing else, it might serve as something of a road map (now becoming a quaint term in and of itself, in the era of GPS) to an understanding of how the other side thinks. It might also be something of an unwitting manual of what pedagogies for the property right side, to oppose, and with which it might seek common ground.

Despite the author’s lean, she is no ideologue, neither unaware nor deaf to points of view other than her own. There is no bombast in “Spine of The Continent,” only a lot of research and background on an important issue. An interview of her is located at  http://i.b5z.net/i/u/1219065/m/11_18_25_Mary_Ellen_Hannibal_FTP_49.53.mp3 , for the readers’ enjoyment.

Charles Heller
www.libertywatchradio.com/listen
charles@libertywatchradio.com

This morning Minneapolis Public Radio interviewed me and Kenyon Fields about The Spine of the Continent.  Saving ‘The Spine of the Continent’  

Kenyon is Strategy Director for Wildlands Network, the main hub organizing more than 30 NGOs to forge protected areas along the Rockies.  I would say that Kenyon is my Virgil, if that didn’t make me Dante, but it’s fair enough to say that the conservation world he guided me through has a lot in common with the concentric circles of h-e-double-toothpicks and is indeed its own Divine Comedy.  Kenyon is one of the dashing young men of conservation, kind of an outdoorsy-scholarly type, and he has a serious weakness for gorgeous blondes.  I met him at a wilderness conference in Berkeley, and it was pouring rain.  He was heading to Utah, to go camping by himself.  I said, “but it’s snowing there.”  He said, “I can’t wait.” Seems if you burrow in the snow properly it’s quite warm– right.

And Wendy Francis is Executive Director of Yellowstone to Yukon.  This last month she won major recognition from the Wilburforce Foundation:  http://www.wilburforce.org/funding-areas/conservation-leadership-awards/cla-recipients/wendy-francis  She also just won the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal — wow!  (Y2Y is headquartered in Canada.)  Francis is a petite firecracker nature-saver, and she has been at this game for decades.  The world of conservation has historically been as sexist and masculine-dominated as the harder sciences, and among Francis’s many achievements are her persistence through those particular concentric circles.  Y2Y is the most fully achieved part of the Spine of the Continent.  A note of interest is that Karsten Heuer, who physically trekked the Y2Y region and wrote a best-selling book about it, Walking the Big Wild, is becoming president of Y2Y in January.  He’s a biologist by training but his day job is pretty much successful writer.  This meeting up of the literary and the ecological has the potential to help widen the context of what saving nature is all about.

I spent the last few days at a “controlled burn” conference in Lake Tahoe, and it was pretty fascinating. First of all, fire is cool. Or hot. A controlled burn is a fire set on purpose and not by a kid in the backyard. The reason fire ecologists say we have to have more controlled burns is that for thousands and thousands of years, the landscape evolved with fire methodically set by Native Americans. Native burning promoted crops like acorns and in general took up a functional role in the long-run seasonality of what grows, where, and when. Fire became a key part of the agricultural cycle, and the rest of the ecosystem evolved along with it. Lots of bird species, for example, are “fire adapted,” and depend on scorched ground for habitat. Periodic fires act like a booster shot or a cleanse or some other metaphoric equivalent of a reboot to the system.

Along the same time-frame we spent assiduously wiping out wolves and grizzly bears, from the 1800s til even now, we have with equal determination suppressed fire on our landscapes. This doubly wrong-headed idea contributed to catastrophic big fires, like the one Tim Egan so entertainingly tells about in The Big Burn. When you suppress what have become natural cycles of fire on the landscape, what the ecologists and firefighters call “fuels” accumulate – deadwood and underbrush – and it gets so bad that when these fuels do ignite they go ballistic. Many will tell you that we have suppressed fire for too long and are at a point of no return – our fires now will burn too hot, destroying the ecoystem instead of rejuvenating it. The fire ecologists and land managers and fire fighters I listened to in Lake Tahoe don’t think we are beyond hope in the matter, not at all, but they do passionately argue that we have got to get burning. They admit it’s hard to get the public to put its mind around fanning flames, and indeed, controlled burns can “escape,” their term for going out of control.

I was riveted at the conference by two presentations from Miriam Morrill, who works for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. You would not think a fire-head would have such trenchant things to say about how to use visuals and social media to tell a story, but I put Morrill’s presentations up there with the famous Robert McKee’s advice on how to write a screenplay. Emotions, narrative structure, back story, conflict, resolution – all applied to fire. Let’s face it, most people preoccupied with narrative structure want to tell a story so other people will know how they feel, how they see things, what’s going on in their heads. The idea that we can purpose all the tools we have honed for ever more careful calibration of our self-obsession and communicate about a process that helps keep life on Earth going – well, that makes me happy. And frankly, I have always wanted to know how to conduct a controlled burn.

The artwork above is made by the multi-talented Ms. Morrill, and shows how life rises from the ashes.

It’s fun to win awards, of course, but beyond that they do serve an important purpose. A few days ago I found out that with Emeline Ostlund and Joe Riis, I won the Stanford Knight-Risser Award for Western Environmental Journalism. The three of us contributed the main components of a suite of articles on the Path of the Pronghorn for High Country News. We also won a National Association of Science Writers Science and Society Award for these features. Emeline and Joe get (and deserve) higher billing than I do on this roster. They spent about two years each, separately and together, actually trekking the Path of the Pronghorn – a 6,000 year old migration route over about 100 miles in Wyoming – with the animals. Joe’s photos are so amazing partly because Emeline was able to cue him about where they would be crossing rivers, fording streams and so forth. He used a motion-activated camera trap to capture the beasts in media res. They don’t know they are being photographed; they don’t see some Homo sapiens with a piece of machinery stuck to his face and wonder what the heck. They are just in their own lives and he gets that – check out his work at www.joeriis.com.  (You may notice my book cover uses the same photo HCN uses for this issue — well, it’s a good one.)

My piece is “Protecting wildlife corridors is more theory than practice,” about the lack of political will (surprise surprise) to actually do what’s right by nature. For several decades we have had thoroughly vetted widespread ecological knowledge that for nature to persist, it has to be able to move. Plants and animals need to be able to get where they are going, to fulfill ancient migration imperatives like that of the pronghorn, and to mix with others of their kind so they don’t inbreed and die off. Climate change is prompting biodiversity to pick up stakes and move on. Habitat disruption caused by human settlements and gas and oil and all that are also interrupting animal movements – that’s part of the pronghorn story. Since human development proceeds apace, we need to legislate corridor protection so that important linkages for wildlife are preserved as we add more McMansions, shopping malls, and oil wells to the scene.

The difficulty in getting political consensus has of course to do with the perception that protecting any part of nature will titrate someone’s potential profit-making. Blah blah blah – why don’t these people worry about losing their entire net worth the next time a big weather disaster strikes and there is no biodiversity left to mitigate the damages or help the landscape recover.

Researching this topic led me into the historic face-off between the western states and the federal government. One reason it’s hard to legislate protection for wildlife is that both levels of government 1)want to do the rule-making themselves; 2) passionately desire that the other entity does not get to do it. This enmity is residue from the homesteading tradition of the west, the betrayal of state’s interests by the federal government, real and imagined, especially when the railroads scorched and burned the territory. I write more about this in my book, The Spine of the Continent, but the subject deserves a book or at least a long article in itself. In many ways we are still homesteading in the West.

One of the great dimensions of the pronghorn story is that enforceable protection has in fact been achieved for this stretch of land. That’s an inspiring tale of scientists, bureaucrats, grass-roots activists, regular people, even oil and gas executives, holding hands across their private Idahos (or Wyomings as the case may be) and doing the right thing. It’s a model for how we can get more biodiversity movement protected.  Winning an award puts a spotlight on a subject, and this one deserves the attention.

The connections between art, science, and detective work are no more apparent than in the field journal.  Through the mostly hand-written notes recorded by botanists, novelists, and police officers, the raw materials of who, what, when, and where are documented over time so that eventually patterns can be discerned and the big questions of “how” and “why” find some kind of answer.

In his introduction to Field Notes on Science & Nature, E.O. Wilson once again hits all the bases and brings the biological-emotional connection home:  “If there is a heaven, and I am allowed entrance, I will ask for no more than an endless living world to walk through and explore.  I will carry with me an inexhaustible supply of notebooks, from which I can send back reports to the more sedentary spirits (mostly molecular and cell biologists).  Along the way I would expect to meet kindred spirits, among whom would be the authors of the essays in this book.”

Wilson is not alone in his ability to communicate love and biological observation at the same time.  He is joined by 13 “kindred spirits” in this book, mostly renowned researchers, all of whom have filled their share of field books with in situ observations of life from butterflies to birds to dinosaur bones and shark teeth.  Among them are Bernd Heinrich, author of the classic The Mind of the Raven and George Schaller, author of The Mountain Gorilla and The Serengeti Lion.   These scientists, who also happen to be successful authors, credit the taking of notes in the field as the first layer in the process of forming an eventual narrative.

Those of us always reaching after ways to make concrete the intuition that even human consciousness is an extension of the natural world can reflect on the words of Anna Behrensmeyer, a paleoecologist who says that “in recording fieldwork [I am] creating my own time capsules.  Studying paleoecology gives me a fundamental appreciation of the transmission of information across time – whether it involves fossils of extinct organisms or written passages conveying ideas or descriptions…..”

There are many layers to the observations and discussions in this physically gorgeous book, which is replete with reproductions of pages from a wide assortment field guides.  Some of these are pages of hand-written numbers; something about handwriting even when you don’t know the whys or wherefores of the subject is entrancing – why?  Maybe personal sensibility comes through in handwriting; different people sure have different styles.  Most of the scientists contributing here praise digital tools and photography as immeasurably helpful in keeping accurate records, but also note something each of us has directly experienced, which is that technology is great on amassing but not so good on organizing and making sense of things.  Pages of Jonathan Kingdon’s drawings of a “caracal cat” flagging its ears and head are ample illustration that physical drawings convey dimensions photography just doesn’t capture.  One of the most beautiful pages in the book is a page of Meriwether Lewis’s journal, made on February 24, 1856 while the Corps of Discovery was in Oregon.  His finely detailed drawing of an Eulachon fish is flanked with careful script noting his observations about the specimen.  This not only gives us the fish in its time and place, the page gives us a glimpse into American history up close and personal.

Editor Michael Canfield, who teaches at Harvard, reflects that “myriad approaches to field recording balance certain common variables…[a] tension between fact and theory, data and narrative.”  Sounds to me like consciousness unfolding, fully immersed in the natural world.  The second best thing to filling in your own field journals is delving into this volume.

When I first visited the Bay Area more than 25 years ago, my future husband, a San Francisco native, took me around to the sacred spots. There was the site of the Mabuhay Gardens, several Chinese restaurants, Land’s End and Ocean Beach. In Berkeley, there was the university itself, and the sanctum sanctorum….the original Peet’s Coffee. I am from New York but I had never dreamed of such a taste. That coffee epitomized the Bay Area: organic in the sense of rising naturally from the cultured and good intentions of the singular inhabitants here. REALLY GOOD. Now it looks like I’ll be switching my brand.

Peet’s is on-line to be acquired by Joh A. Benkiser (JAB), which among many other holdings has a 10% stake in Reckitt-Benkiser, the maker of D-Con. D-Con is an anticoagulant rodenticide the EPA has been trying to get off the market. Among other ill effects, EPA asserts that between 1999 and 2003, more than 25,000 children under six had poisoning symptoms after exposure to D-Con.

Peet’s says there is no substantive connection between JAB and D-Con. The company asserts its commitment to the environmental and social health of the communities in which it operates. Peet’s asks those concerned to take their issue directly to Reckitt-Benkiser, with which it claims to have absolutely no ties.

Rats that eat D-Con experience induced internal bleeding, and can eat up to ten times the lethal dose. Larger animals higher up the food chain, including dogs and cats, eat the rats and are felled by the concentrated poison. Hawks and other raptors, which can help keep rodent populations in check naturally, also die from D-Con. Casualties thus far include the mate and several offspring of Pale Male, the Central Park Red-tailed Hawk immortalized by Marie Winn in her wonderful book, Red-Tails in Love. 

The chain of connection evidenced by nature and the food web has another green corollary: the money trail running from big company down to medium company down to new acquisition. Money flows from Reckitt-Benkiser to JAB and now to Peet’s. Where does the money come from? Partly, from D-Con. Profits from dead rats are helping to fuel its big pay day. Trickle down is about money and it’s also about poison percolating through the intimate and inevitable connections of nature long after the rat has been killed.  What on Earth is Peet’s talking about, “no connection”?  Have they been drinking D-Con?

When Peet’s was founded, there was nothing like it. Now there are many options for drinking delicious, sustainably grown coffee, brought to us by businesspeople who see that there is no separating the twin green connectors, money, and nature, from our overall health and well-being. If Peet’s steps away from this issue, we must step away from the barrista.

Raptors Are the Solution is asking for protestors to call into Peet’s this Thursday: http://www.raptorsarethesolution.org/ For background: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Conservationists-see-rat-in-Peet-s-deal-3758787.php

Even though I have written a book about evolution, I confess to kneeling in awe at the concept. And indeed, having read literally hundreds of papers and books explaining evolution from many a vantage point, I suspect that even brainiac scientists who can sketch out on cocktail napkins the molecular transfer of nucleo-whatever-icides to show you the physical transaction of evolution, don’t fully grasp it themselves. Otherwise, they would be able to say what evolution is. Ernst Mayer, a giant of biological thinking, has a point-blank book, What Evolution Is, and I love that book, but even a writer of this stature somehow falls short of a definition. There is a reason for this. Evolution is the pattern and process of nature, and nature is bigger than we are. Our brains, even collectively wired and cooperatively producing, are yet a subset system to a comprehensive entity the size and persistence of which our imaginations can only barely intuit much less quantify.

Recently I read an old interview with poet Gary Snyder (I can’t find the link, sorry!), in which Snyder commented that whenever we have an insight or a thought, we assume it has come from within ourselves. He posits the idea that it could have come from somewhere else; in the context of the interview, maybe from a bird or a mountain or some ineffable thing in nature.

The difficulty in grasping his suggestion is similar to the grapple with evolution. It is so everywhere, we can’t locate it. We only understand it by taking a stance separate from it, but we are not separate from it so we contradict ourselves. Evolution challenges the limits of our consciousness.

In The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, biologist David Mindell lays out some basic evolutionary tracks. First he reviews “three unpopular discoveries,” putting the cultural resistance to evolution in a line with refusal to accept the Copernican universe and germ theory. In other words, people take a long time to change their minds, often hundreds of years. Then Mindell writes about the evolution basically everyone does understand and millions embrace, and that is artificial selection in breeding animals. Selecting animals for specific traits and having them reproduce to pass those traits on is actively manipulating an evolutionary process. Also, we understand that diseases have a life history and this affects how we get hit by them and how we reduce their effects on us. Medicine is a place where most people more or less accept evolution and on some level do get it.

Mindell approaches “evolutionary metaphor in human culture”; it is a fascinating subject, but whole cultural studies departments have been deeply devoted to elucidating its fine points and Mindell’s greatest hits, while useful, doesn’t quite do the field justice. He’s excellent back in the land of the concrete, discussing DNA evidence in court cases like O.J. Simpson’s (remember that)?

So going by Mindell’s table of contents alone, we have evolution: unfolding in the history of scientific discovery and belief; creating fatter cows and more docile dogs; rescuing millions from disease; the foundation of all nature and biodiversity; a fundamental human search image in culture; and something we hammer out and slap around in courtrooms and classrooms.

Got that? Okay, what is it?