Bear Versus Texting Man: Our Spectacular Disconnection

(Photo by Mike Bender/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)I wrote the short essay below before encountering this blog post about dystopic fiction, this op-ed about useless creatures, and Steven Shaviro's blog post of 22 short theses. But all three are relevant to the issues set out below. (And in talking about the environment and our relationship to animals, let’s be clear: I’m not making any special claims about my own Southern Reach trilogy.)The op-ed about useless animals cuts to the heart of our problematic relationship to our fellow animals. The blog post of theses is important because it begins to suggest, on a philosophical and practical level, how to begin to move forward on these issues.As for the blog post on dystopias, my two cents: It's become harder and harder for near-future science fiction to be considered cutting edge or paradigm-shifting if it doesn’t on some level or sub-level engage with an aspect of the issues set out below, in my opinion. This may be a different issue than whether a novel is aesthetically successful or works in other ways. However it is worth noting as well that most contemporary mainstream novels with no speculative elements in them do not successfully convey the "science fictional present" in which we live. Which is to say, they could have been written any time in the past 50 years--plus smart phones.That lack in contemporary realism isn't great. But the escapism in a fair number of Collapse novels is, to my mind, perhaps more insidious because it trades off our own fears of, well, almost imminent collapse and turns them into somewhat comforting disaster porn. At the same time, this is a difficult endeavor. The instantaneous commodification and coopting of terms like “eco-fabulism” and “cli-fi” by pop culture and culture at large speaks to how difficult it is to find fresh ways to address these issues in fiction that do not immediately lose the shock of the new required for them to infiltrate minds in a meaningful way. (Especially in a context within which the 1970s disaster novels of, for example, J.G. Ballard, still seem more relevant than much current fiction.)For additional, related discussion, read this "in conversation" piece between me and Karen Joy Fowler.***In a popular YouTube clip, a man walks out of a doorway in some suburban location and meanders down the sidewalk, texting, his attention locked in on his phone. The black bear padding down the sidewalk toward him lumbers in the questing way typical of ursines. The man doesn’t see the bear and keeps on not seeing the bear for a very long time. When the bear is so close it has eclipsed the man’s vision, the man jumps half out of his skin and runs away. The bear also seems startled. The video has aired on many found-footage television shows and a lot of people find it very funny. But I’m not sure how funny it is, really.***Black bears are common here in North Florida, but it’s rare to spot them while hiking except through binoculars because they are shy, careful creatures. A black bear crossing the trail far ahead is a graceful, almost ethereal shape, delicate in a way you wouldn’t suppose from seeing them on film.When hiking, smart phones distract because part of the point is to exist in the moment and because in the wilderness it’s important to be observant of your surroundings. The landscape I walk through transitions from pine forest to black-water cypress swamp, and then to marsh flats and, finally, the sea. Along the way, you might encounter anything from wild pigs to alligators to water moccasins—and sometimes that snake is lunging at you, the pig charging, and the alligator, sprawled across the trail, triggers a decision about whether to jump over it or not.Wildlife encountered in its natural environment—whether a bear, bandy-legged raccoon or myopic armadillo—gives you some sense of animals as they really are and how they live. This is a kind of contact we’re losing, and with it our own connection to the landscape. A 2010 study by researcher Joe Heinrich concluded that American children grow up developmentally challenged in their perception of animals and the natural world. Americans also experience accelerated rates of myopia and Vitamin D deficiency due to living so much of our lives inside, glued to screens.Perhaps as a kind of slurry or run-off from these trends, our online experience is full of animals pushing slogans of universal truth or some humorous saying. Wise owls, “otter nonsense,” smiling dolphins. Because we love animals. We usually love them as long as they’re funny or wise or cute or in some other way reduced down to a meme. We breathe life into them using carelessly corrosive received ideas, each iteration farther from any kind of true seeing.Even worse are images like a popular “cute” one of an otter in a small glass cage. Holes in the cage allow people to shake hands with the otter. This image is shared and re-shared with seemingly little realization that if the image showed a human being in a glass cage, trained to shake hands with visitors, no one would be calling it “cute.” This is all a wretched lie and we shouldn’t buy into it.How did we get here? Perhaps if not for the false sense of superiority brought on in part by the comforts and gadgets of our post-Industrial Age, we might have continued to decentralize the role of human beings on Earth. That healthy process started when astronomers first discovered the Sun did not revolve around the Earth, that there were thousands of stars and worlds beyond our own. It never quite went as far as it should have, however.Despite the many genuinely wonderful things that our modern civilization has accomplished, we have continued to find the most destructive ways to differentiate ourselves from the animals, and in so doing treated the finite as if it were infinite. Today ideas like Manifest Destiny still permeate our society, sublimated in a devotion to unsustainable and endless growth. Continuous clear-cutting and bulldozing. The slaughter of animals for, increasingly, not even the semblance of a purpose.Despite all the evidence to the contrary, however, we seem trapped in the haze of an increasingly chronic state of disconnection, a superiority not supported by the facts: garbage-strewn oceans and studies suggesting saltwater fish may go extinct by 2050.Perhaps if we paid more attention we would already have cities that take as inspiration the complex ecosystems found at the top of redwoods instead of thoughtless development. Maybe we’d be able to see that a smart phone is fairly crude next to the ways plants communicate with one another, that the symbiotic relationship between the albatross and the sunfish reveals a startling and unexpected complexity. In such a context, I don’t think I’m a luddite to wonder if we’re not often using primitive modern tech like smart phones and GoogleGlass to build an inaccurate prism of the world around us, when we aren’t busy ignoring the world around us entirely. The natural world, at least.Otherwise, maybe we’d also see less obvious things—like the fact that our TV shows and movies are becoming a record of what we’re losing. Even cop shows from the 1970s document the erosion of wilderness and our fetish with concrete. This surreal record of loss of bio-diversity is matched by the even more surreal lie given to us by almost any historical or period piece: that of our current biosphere being the norm throughout time instead of the depleted, often gutted mono-sphere it is. Only a hundred years ago the skies were dark with passenger pigeons. Only two hundred years ago the average forest was a crowded landscape with animal life far more numerous and vigorous than we can now imagine.The truth of our essential situation right now is this lack of attention—even as we send out space probes and pride ourselves on the leaps we’ve made in understanding quantum mechanics. Yet we still haven’t discovered every creature that lives on Earth. Nor do we have a clear idea of the most basic relationships between some organisms, nor a sense of the larger picture that develops out of those relationships.Despite pockets of enlightenment, we often act as if we’re settlers on an alien planet, destroying and changing much that we don’t even recognize as important. But we don’t live on an alien planet. We have no home world to go back to if things fail here. We were born here, and we will die here, no matter how many new planets astronomers discover. This is the place we must pay attention to, and re-learn how to live in—to find a good answer to the question of what we contribute to the global biosphere.Can we abandon strategies that justify despoilment or enable a “stewardship” that consists of cataloguing an often near-catastrophic decline of habitats and bio-diversity? If we cannot, then efforts to re-tool technology to eliminate carbon emissions only serve to prop up an unsustainable human hegemony.Bears display, according to researchers, behavior that hints at intentionality and a long-term memory better than that of human beings. Most bears found in urban environments have experienced habitat loss. Most animals in cages don’t enjoy the experience.But the conflict here isn’t bear versus man. What we continue to ignore is the fact that if the bear is in trouble, we are too. And yet, until the day that we truly feel that in our guts, in our hearts—and that may be a painful day indeed--we won’t truly be paying attention. And we won’t see clearly enough to understand what constitute not mere patches on a failed system but true paradigm changes.