On the Seventh Day

… My attention was on the forest; it has been there all my life. I can work up some appreciation for the travel stories of Paul Theroux and other urbanophile authors who treat human settlements as virtually the whole world and the intervening natural habitats as troublesome barriers. But everywhere I have gone — South America, Australia, New Guinea, Asia — I have thought exactly the opposite. Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

Once on a tour of Old Jerusalem, standing near the elevated site of Solomon’s Throne, I looked down across the Jericho Road to the dark olive trees of Gethsemane and wondered which native Palestinian plants and animals might still be found in the shade underneath. Thinking of “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways,” I knelt on the cobblestones to watch harvester ants carry seeds down holes to their subterranean granaries, the same food-gathering activity that had impressed the Old Testament writer, and possibly the same species at the very same place. As I walked with my host back past the Temple Mount toward the Muslim Quarter, I made inner calculations of the number of ant species found within the city walls. There was a perfect logic to such eccentricity: the million-year history of Jerusalem is at least as compelling as its past three thousand years.

That is taken from an essay, Bernhardsdorp, by E.O. Wilson originally in his book, Biophilia. I am taking it from the collection of nature writing, American Earth, edited by Bill McKibben.

I expect that most people view nature as Paul Theroux does: with ”intervening natural habitats as troublesome barriers.” I, however, am utterly in agreement with Wilson,  for whom wilderness is ones “logical destination.”

Here are two more brief snips from the essay:

… In a twist my mind came free and I was aware of the hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention, where passions lose their meaning and history is in another dimension, without people, and great events pass without record or judgment.

… Think of scooping up a handful of soil and leaf litter and spreading it out on a white ground cloth, in the manner of the field biologist, for close examination. This unprepossessing lump contains more order and richness of structure, and particularity of histoy, than the entire surfaces of all the other (lifeless) planets. It is a miniature wilderness that can take almost forever to explore.

And, finally, this wonderful bit of description:

After the sun’s energy is captured by the green plants, it flows through chains of organisms dendritically, like blood spreading from the arteries into networks of microscopic capillaries. It is in such capillaries, in the life cycles of thousands of individual species, that life’s important work is done. Thus nothing in the while system makes sense until the natural history of the constituent species becomes known. The study of every kind of organism matters, everywhere in the world. That conviction leads the field biologist to places like Surinam and the outer limits of evolution, of which this case is exemplary:

The three-toed sloth feeds on leaves high in the canopy of the lowland forests through large portions of South and Central America. Within its fur live tiny moths, the species Cryptoses choloepi, found nowhere else on Earth. When a sloth descends to the forest floor to defecate (once a week), female moths leave the fur briefly to deposit their eggs on the fresh dung. The emerging caterpillars build nests of silk and start to feed. Three weeks later they complete their development by turning into adult moths, and then fly up into the canopy in search of sloths. By living directly on the bodies of the sloths, the adult Cryptoses assure their offspring first crack at the nutrient-rich excrement and a competitive advantage over the myriad of other coprophages.

In the text of the book that I am quoting, that last paragraph appears to be a quote from some other source but it has no footnote or attribution. (Oh, look. I see that Felix Grant has something to say. No, he seems to have changed his mind. He’s just going to stand their smirking gently.)

Back to the moths on sloths, given their life cycle, imagine the creation myth that the caterpillars of that moth might come up with. Of course, the sloth would have to be god, so you might get something like this:

 ”… and on the seventh day, god descends from the heavens …”

I leave it to you to extend the metaphor.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/