Writers whose subject is the natural world, and the overwhelming changes that humans have inflicted upon it, grapple regularly with a maddening dilemma: how to convey that all hope is not lost, while presenting facts that can bear down on hope like an avalanche.
Hope is often fundamental to action, essential for rousing readers out of complacency; despair, meanwhile, can be an unhelpful emotion when the planet is spinning each day toward deeper environmental crises and feedback loops.
The dilemma points to another question — large, existential, and increasingly urgent: What “action” can people take? What could a single suitably roused reader even do anymore? In Katherine Rundell’s collection of short essays, “Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures,” the answer begins with a four-letter word we should all do more of: care.
In 22 bite-sized odes to an assortment of creatures (and one less praiseworthy piece on humans), Rundell describes our planet’s living cabinet of curiosities, a gorgeous assortment of wondrous animals deserving of our awe, respect, and solidarity. Through literary references and tidbits of history alongside descriptions of dazzling biology, Rundell conjures a parade of swimming, crawling, flapping, lumbering life. Each tribute is also a plea, and the book as a whole is a solicitation: It’s past time for us to truly see these beings, recognize their majesty, and step up, finally, to protect them.
There’s the narwhal, which mates “in a kind of ballet; a pair will swim alongside each other for hours, skins touching.” And the Hawaiian crow, or ‘alalā, whose range of calls include sounds “like a whistling kettle” and “like Elvis’s yelp,” and which for native Hawaiians serves as one of the guides for human souls after death, when “soul and bird meet, and together they leap into the afterlife.”
There’s also the coconut crab, a type of hermit crab whose claw is so strong it can grip with a force 50 percent greater than a wolf’s jaw. One theory holds that these crabs “crunched” beyond recognition the bones of Amelia Earhart after her plane crashed on the Western Pacific island of Nikumaroro. Hermit crabs are also famously resourceful. “They have been found in tin cans, in coconut halves,” Rundell writes. “I love their tenacity: forging lives from the shells of the dead, making homes from the debris that the world, in its chaos, has left out for them.”
Each tribute is also a plea, and the book as a whole is a solicitation: It’s past time for us to truly see these beings, recognize their majesty, and step up, finally, to protect them.
Rundell’s prose is consistently, insistently, beautiful. She’s something of a wonder herself: an Oxford scholar of Renaissance poetry, an author of children’s fantasy novels including the bestseller “Impossible Creatures,” a biographer, a playwright.
Her bestiary, inevitably, is also a catalog of human greed, ego, and neglect. (A more accurate but less marketable subtitle might read “A Bestiary of Extraordinary Creatures and How We Have Betrayed Them.”) Customs agents in Guangdong, for example, report confiscating seven tons of pangolin scales — the armor of the only mammal with such a coat — in a single shipment into China, and “each ton will have required the death of 1,660 animals. It is a fact so exhausting, so dreary, that it’s difficult to fathom.”
While the book is tough going at times, I wish it could be required reading for those who somehow don’t yet understand what we have lost, what we are losing, and what we can, if we set our minds and hearts to it, still save. (Rundell writes that half her royalties from the book will go toward environmental charities “in perpetuity.”)
“Vanishing Treasures,” which was published in the U.K. under the title “The Golden Mole,” contains examples of all manner of tragic human behavior: harvesting animal parts — rhino horn, badger flesh — as aphrodisiacs (they are not); fishing the seas with massive trawling nets that “devastate the ocean floor”; decimating forests and wetlands.
But some of the most striking examples are not of intentional cruelty or blatant avarice but of simple blind spots. So often we fail our wild cousins by declining to think beyond ourselves. It’s not just about us.
In a chapter on hedgehogs, Rundell writes of how these “delicate, erudite-looking” critters are threatened by something seemingly benign: the popular Guy Fawkes Day bonfires in England. “Come autumn, there is the added risk of hedgehogs taking up residence in bonfires and, on the Fifth of November, being burned alive.”
Surely people could prevent this with a bit of foresight. Because, as she writes, if you had never laid eyes on a hedgehog, you might think they were as mythical as a unicorn. You “would surely travel thousands of miles to see them, such is their peculiar loveliness,” she writes. “These are hard times, and the world is already aflame. The least we can do is refrain from setting alight some of the world’s sharpest and gentlest creatures.”
Such small shifts in behavior could be transformative. All we need to do is think beyond ourselves. What if we collectively stopped believing we have more of a right to thrive on this planet than any of the other animals that also make their homes here? “The greatest lie that humans ever told,” she writes, “is that the Earth is ours, and at our disposal.”
“These are hard times, and the world is already aflame. The least we can do is refrain from setting alight some of the world’s sharpest and gentlest creatures.”
The first step, for Rundell, is just a change of mindset: “We should wake in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next.”
Much as it’s easy to retreat in despair, the lemurs, the giraffes, the sharks and wombats, and actual bats, need our help. And Rundell maintains that there are things we can still do to save these magical, breathtaking creatures: Vote, invest carefully, protest, educate, consume less, refuse to give in to “half-baked nihilism.”
“We humans have shown ourselves capable of change so bold it could knock the breath out of you,” Rundell writes. “Why should we follow the old ways? Were they so perfect as to leave no room for something bolder, tougher, wittier, more equal and more just?”
Above all, she argues passionately, we need to care: “The time to give up is never.”
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
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