Humans and the wild — how can we cohabitate?
Where and when do New Zealanders blur ecological lines and what have been our successes and failures?
WILD SOULS: FREEDOM AND FLOURISHING IN THE NON-HUMAN WORLD by Emma Marris (Bloomsbury, $43)
Whatever you do, if you are of a sensitive disposition, don’t look at the photographic insert in Emma Marris’ Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Nonhuman World. The grainy black-and-white photograph shows Mary, an elephant, being hanged by the neck from the gantry of a crane in Tennessee in 1916 as capital punishment for trampling a new keeper who had goaded her.
Perhaps the image should not upset us any more than driving past a New Zealand paddock in the middle of blazing summer where animals are confined without shade or shelter or news items about the “farrowing crates” in piggeries, but somehow it does. This is possibly because it starkly reveals humanity’s selective morality when applied to other species.
The ethical relationship of human beings to the creatures of the non-human world has always been complex, especially now that untouched environments are bordered and shrinking every day. In Wild Souls, Marris does not deal with domesticated animals so much as the decisions that human beings make with regard to wild animals.
Marris is the American author of Rambunctious Garden, which argued for new philosophies of conservation. Mixing concrete examples with focused philosophical and ethical inquiry, she explores the environmental issues of the contemporary world, frequently through wellresearched travel and direct experience.
In one chapter of Wild Souls, she really brings things home. Her account of a visit to Zealandia, offshore islands in the charge of the Department of Conservation, the policy with regard to 1080, as well as predator-trapping and Predator Free 2050, are familiar and can be read with a New Zealander’s “inside knowledge”. Her inquiries are not abstract but particular.
Do New Zealanders simply have an obsession with killing all introduced species? Have we actually considered that 1080 results in a particularly painful death for animals that ingest it? Are our lofty goals of a predatorfree country even possible? Why is the not-native kiore rat given heritage status while all other
species of rat need to be exterminated? Why does arriving with the Maori trump arriving with the European? Where and when do New Zealanders blur ecological lines and what have been our successes and failures?
It is a book filled with facts. Rats will stop to aid a companion in distress. The pacing of a caged animal like a tiger is predicated on how much they would have ranged in the wild.
However, it is the questions of the book that are the important thing.
Do we save the last condors, the world’s highfliers, by caging them for captive breeding? Do we feed polar bears who are starving in a reduced habitat as a result of human-made climate change?
It is to Marris’ credit that she does not dumb down her conclusions.
These are the quandaries that all of us in the contemporary world must face.
Our wilderness is dwindling. Wild animals face unprecedented threat. Our choices have consequences. It is not easy.