Monstrous

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings will be published in the UK in early October. Starting at that time I will, conditions permitting, post new thoughts, humorous or otherwise, each week linked to a particular chapter, A through Z, of the book. There are 27 chapters (there two Xs) plus an introduction and conclusion so the posts are likely to run up to around the time of US publication next March.

The book covers a wide variety of themes, including monsters and the monstrous in nature and human imagination.  Of the latter, here are a couple of examples I happen to have come across in recent days:

One spring morning, amid the piles of dead peasants in Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was lifeless grey. Passersby had seen this before...not just the dead mother and living infant but that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly as they passed: "These are the buds of the socialist spring."

-- from Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Survivors remember seeing people's fingernails dropping from their fists like dried shell pasta. They remember human-sized "dolls of charcoal" slumped in alleys. Someone recalled a man struggling along on two stumps, holding a charred baby upside down. Another recalled a shirtless woman whose breasts had burst "like pomegranates".

-- from a description of the Nagasaki aftermath quoted by Sam Kean in The Violinist's Thumb

Land

I drove us out into the wheat fields, the crop thick and undulant. The sky was high and clear blue. The hot wind gusting and dusty and dotted with snapping grasshoppers. Hawks patrolled, lazing in the great warm dome or sitting sentry in a single tree here and there. I didn't say so but I drove us, to the extent memory could lead me, near to the place we buried the Americans. It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning – though that's lucky since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable whereas they're otherwise neither. Instead it all becomes part of our complex mind, to which, if we're lucky, we can finally assent. The great fields of grain swayed and hissed and shifted colors and bent and lay back against the wind where we stopped our car. 

-- from Canada by Richard Ford

'Sixth Extinction'

We didn't mean to help make the mammoth extinct. The wonderful portrait of a mammoth in Pech Merle cave reveals that early homo sapiens was fascinated by these marvellous creatures. This masterpiece of cave art is as acute as any modern work of naturalist observation. The hunters who painted in caves showed the same passion for the natural world as their descendants do. Their culture must have been bereft when the mammoth vanished – even as they helped it on its way.

In the 21st century the same paradox endures. Human activity endangers entire species, yet human culture is profoundly rooted in nature. The loss of a species is also a loss of the images, stories, symbols and wonders that we live by – to call it a cultural loss may sound too cerebral: what we lose when we lose animals is the very meaning of life. Those first artists in ancient caves portrayed animals far more than they portrayed people. It was in the wild herds around them that the power of the cosmos and the mystery of existence seemed to be located.

-- Jonathan Jones

Itseke

Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.

--  Ellen Basso on the Kalapalo, quoted by Robert Bellah

(photo: Fabio Colombini)

Fate of the elephants

“They were good shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.”

-- from Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits, the first in a series of three articles.

Garamba, a 1,900 square mile national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, used to have tens of thousands of elephants. Last year, there were around 2,800. This year, maybe 2,400. While Africa’s total elephant population is unknown, the latest figures, from 2006, put it at 472,269 to 689,671, but poaching has increased significantly since then.

29,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The ocean floor is home to 2.9×10²⁹ single-celled organisms — that's 10 million trillion microbes for every human on the planet — but vast though it is, this figure is only 8% of the previous estimate of 35.5×10²⁹

-- report 

Only 8% of the previous estimate is still plenty (!) and it exists alongside and/or interacts with/supports a huge amount of larger life even in the coldest darkest places. In Antarctic benthos, for example, researchers have found the Polychaete worm Spiophanes tcherniai  at densities 150,000 to 180,000 per square metre. (Hat tip DSN)

Torpid state

One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. 

-- from Walden

Quviannikumut

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound. "On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued westward."

-- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986). I've had the good fortune to reread parts of this book over the last couple of days.

Moral Malthusianism

Not sure I agree with the framing or the assumptions of this, which is from the preface to Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah, but it is worth considering:

We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our own adaptations. Our technological progress is geometric. It would be hard to argue that our moral progress is even arithmetic. As one who has lived through one horrifying decade after another for eighty years, I confess that I cannot see much in the way of moral advance. There is an irony here, as moral sensitivity has grown steadily in the last hundred years. We are far more sensitive to the needs of whole categories of people that were previously despised or repressed. Yet our growing moral sensitivity seems to have occurred in a world of widespread and undiminished moral horror.

Books from life

Easing back into the online world after a couple of weeks away, here's something I wanted to note when I first read it in mid August:

Scientists have for the first time used DNA to encode the contents of a book. At 53,000 words, and including 11 images and a computer program, it is the largest amount of data yet stored artificially using the genetic material.

The researchers claim that the cost of DNA coding is dropping so quickly that within five to 10 years it could be cheaper to store information using this method than in conventional digital devices. One gram of DNA can store up to 455bn gigabytes: the contents of more than 100bn DVDs, making it the ultimate in compact storage media.

The cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing have been dropping at exponential rates of 5- and 12-fold per year, respectively – much faster than electronic media at 1.6-fold per year.

-- news report, article

"There are no Grotesques in nature"

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings will be published by Granta on 4 October. Here is advance praise.

This blog will be offline until September.

"There are no Groteques in nature": Thomas Browne.  Image: glass frog.

Easier for a camel to pass

Photo: Juan Cole

Barely Imagined at the Wilderness Festival

I will be talking at the Wilderness Festival this Saturday, 11 August. [1] Here's an outline:

Barely Imagined Beginnings: Nature in the 21st Century

Join Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, for an exploration of some of the world's strangest animals and what we can learn from them about the Anthropocene, extinction, human imagination and what comes next.

Endless forms

We have moved beyond a world of natural history into an era of what Richard Pell calls “postnatural history.” His new museum, the Center for PostNatural History, opened in Pittsburgh [in July 2012]. With it he endeavours to create a curiosity cabinet from the Anthropocene period - the age of man.

The only criteria for inclusion in Pell’s Wunderkammer are that the organisms have been intentionally altered by humans in a way that would be passed on through generations. Intentionality is the important bit, Pell says; after all, a museum of creatures changed by pollution, nuclear radiation or climate change would be endless.

--  from A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans

(Image: Guatemalan worry dolls constructed from cultured tissue, Oron Catts and Lonat Zurr)

Sea tales

The giant sea-serpent glides into view time and again, with a particular frequency in the Victorian period, although the beached and rotting "Animal of Stronsa" in the Orkneys was, according to the scientists, a basking shark. Detailed accounts are often from respectable folk such as the Reverend Donald Maclean, minister of Eigg, "quite a man to be believed" according to the Glenelg minister – who saw one himself in the Sound of Sleat.

Hitch-hiking decades ago in the Hebrides, I was picked up by a fishing-boat skipper who at one point confided his own sighting of a long serpent with a bristling, hideous face yards from his stern off the Angus coast. "We've most of us seen them," he said, quietly, "but we don't like to talk about it for fear of being laughed at."

-- from Adam Thorpe's review of The Fabled Coast by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood

Guardian angel

...It turns out that after 4 billion years DNA can do a pretty good job of repairing itself. There's one gene in particular called the P53 gene, sometimes called the guardian of the genome, which looks for DNA damage wherever it can...

It's like a guardian angel embedded in our genes...and there are a lot of different ways DNA can get messed up...[and] when one of the two strands of DNA gets damaged this P53 gene it whistles over certain handyman proteins which come over cut the strand out... and pop in a new one because you know if you've got A and C on one side you need T and G on the other.

...other times both strands [of DNA] get snapped and that is an emergency for your body. When that happens this little guardian gene will force the cell to commit suicide because that cell will turn cancerous.

-- from Double Blasted at WNYC Radiolab, which tells the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, fathered two children and lived to the age of 95.

Dream bee

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé ¡bendita ilusión!
que una colmena tenía
dentro de mi corazón;
y las doradas abejas
iban fabricando en él,
con las amarguras viejas,
blanca cera y dulce miel.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Antonio Machado, quoted in Queen of the Sun

Moth

"How large does a butterfly have to be before anybody notices it is disappearing?"

-- The case of Alexandra's birdwing

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to visit (albeit for a ridiculously brief time) old growth forest in Sarawak. At night our field station attracted several Atlas moths.  This huge being is actually quite common but for those of us who had never seen it before the sight was beyond astonishing, like a dream that had emerged from the shadows into our tiny circle of light.

Geophony, biophony, anthrophony

What happens when [the animal] orchestra is disrupted by the anthrophony: chain saws, leaf blowers or highway traffic? If an indiscriminate sound like a loud motorcycle competes with the stridulation of an insect, the croak of a frog or the song of a bird, the affected animal may no longer be able to send its signal to mates or competitors. The voices of creatures in the choir may be drowned out. And mates and competitors will no longer be able to hear them. The integrity of the biophony is compromised...

...If you listen to a damaged soundscape — an expression of infirmity or extinction — the sense of desolation extends far beyond mere silence. The community has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.

-- from The Sound of a Damaged Habitat by Bernie Krause

Moral enhancement

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write:

Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

It's good to see this argument spelled out.  But even if (and I think it may be a big if) "our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology" can deliver "additional moral enhancement" can they really do so faster than foreseeable breakthroughs in energy technology can (just perhaps) solve the energy/carbon challenge?
So, for example, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central argues that "Our best hope is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."

Note: two recent useful pieces relating relating to the psychology of climate change are Beth's We are all climate change idiots, which notes Robert Gifford analysis of habits of mind he calls the "dragons of inaction", and Atul Gawande's Something wicked this way comes, which is actually about health insurance in the US but notes Albert O. Hirschman's anatomy of reactionary argument in three basic forms: perversity, futility, and jeopardy.

(Image: melting ice on Greenland coast)