Unsettling

Surviving Extinction Together

Elizabeth Weinberg

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506482057
• eBook ISBN: 9781506482064
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecología

The time has come to reimagine our relationship to the environment before it is too late.

As wildfires char the American West, extreme weather transforms landscapes, glaciers retreat, and climate zones shift, we are undeniably experiencing the effects of the climate crisis in more and more destructive ways. Climate change is impacting every inhabited region of the world, but there is much we can still do.

Unsettling explores human impacts on the environment through science, popular culture, personal narrative, and landscape. Using the stories of animals, landscapes, and people who have exhibited resilience in the face of persistent colonization across the North American continent, science writer Elizabeth Weinberg explores how climate change is a direct result of white supremacy, colonialism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Travel through the deep sea; along Louisiana's vanishing bayous; down the Colorado, Mississippi, and Potomac rivers; and over the Cascade Mountains, and examine how we as humans, particularly white humans, have drawn a stark line between human and animal, culture and nature, in order to exploit anything and anyone we find useful. With gorgeous and pointed prose, Weinberg weaves together science, personal essay, history, and pop culture to propose a new way of thinking about climate change--one that is rooted in queerness and antiracism.

Part One

“The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”

—Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

1

Graveyard

Picture an eighteen-wheeler with two trailers trucking down the highway, and you still haven’t conjured the length of a blue whale. Pile together thirty African elephants, and you’re still shy of its massive weight. The blue whale is the largest animal to exist on this planet, ever—even the heaviest dinosaurs were only about half its weight. A blue whale’s body contains more than twenty billion miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries.1

Whales—both blue whales and their smaller-yet-still-enormous cousins, like gray whales, humpbacks, and bowheads—are so large that once they reach adulthood, they don’t usually have to worry about other animals eating them. They die of old age, of illness, of starvation, or because we’ve hit them with a container ship or entangled them in fishing gear and drowned them. We see evidence of their death when they perish near the shore, washing up along the coast, but if a whale dies out in the open ocean, it usually stays there. For a short time, it will bob along the surface; then it sinks. Resting on the bottom of the ocean, it transforms into a city.

Partially decomposed, the whale emits a ghastly array of putrid scents, beckoning to predators around it. Sharks and deep-sea fish journey miles, ready for a rare meal. Over the next year or two—or seven to ten if it’s a particularly large species like a blue whale—these scavengers will devour the whale’s fleshy nutrients and swim off, satiated, in search of their next foraging spot.

Once large predators have ripped apart the carcass, smaller creatures move in to take advantage of what is left. Crabs, lobsters, and other crustaceans wander over; polychaete worms and mollusks burrow in to eat their fill. Over time, this army of scavengers will strip the carcass down to the bone.

All these predators, large and small, leave the detritus of their meals behind on the seafloor. There, it decomposes further, creating a rich slurry of nutrition where before there was only mud. Bacterial mats and other microorganisms unfurl, metabolizing whatever they can find.

This takes years, and throughout it all, this graveyard is astonishingly biodiverse. If you were to walk four steps away from a whale fall in any direction and categorize all the creatures you found, you’d have more small organisms than in any other recorded habitat below a thousand meters.2 Coming upon a whale fall in the deep sea is like wandering through a paved parking lot, then plunging yourself into a patch of tropical rainforest.

Finally, once all the soft tissues are gone, it’s time for the bones. Large whale bones are exceedingly fatty—a humpback whale skeleton may contain the weight of two small cars in fats3—and that’s a bonanza to any organism that can manage to get it. Specialized worms have evolved in tandem with whale falls for just this purpose. Tiny, feathered Osedax worms expertly burrow into the bone, dissolving the bone matrix with acid and extracting the fats. Bacteria play a role, too, converting sulfides within the whalebone into energy. The bones may last these organisms for up to a century,4 and even after that, the bones are essentially rocks, the tombstone of a whale waiting for a passing anemone or deep-sea coral larva to anchor to it like lichen.

More than four hundred species, from worms to sharks, are known to colonize whale falls, and many species were first discovered in this unlikely skeletal habitat.5 The death of a whale may be a tragedy, especially when humans are involved. But to the right organisms, it’s also a rare oasis.

———

One of my first encounters with skeletons and graveyards was watching The Lion King. I saw the movie in theaters. I was five years old, a worrier and a wimp, and though the movie scared me, I was proud of myself for sitting through it, refusing to cry frightened tears even when I wanted to. I hugged my knees as Simba and Nala wandered into the elephant graveyard despite being warned away from this dangerous, disturbing place. I, too, was curious about what existed in that uncharted wilderness, but the scene where they run through heaps of bones chased by hyenas was as terrifying as it was enthralling.

The elephant graveyard is a desolate place. Mist and fog sweep across purple-gray cliffs while hulking bones pile in mountains like brambled hedges. Hyenas, portrayed as dirty, stupid scavengers, lurk in the gigantic skull of a once-powerful elephant. Nothing grows. It’s a forbidden, liminal zone, the only part of the Pride Lands not ruled by the lions, and I dreamed of roaming through it myself, discovering its secrets.

After seeing the movie, I played Lion King with my best friend constantly. I always insisted on being Simba while she was Nala; I didn’t want to be a girl and certainly not a secondary character. We would run across the perfectly groomed lawn of my parents’ suburban backyard, two lion cubs scampering across the savannah and escaping the rigid conformity of adult supervision. Then we would enter the gloomy copse of trees that separated my parents’ yard from our neighbors’, hiding behind tree trunks and turning over rocks to see what weird creatures we could find. There in the elephant graveyard, we would face and miraculously escape certain doom.

———

Early in The Lion King, Mufasa takes Simba on a walk through the Pride Lands and tells him about the circle of life, the law of the lions’ domain. While it may seem unfair that the lions both rule and eat the antelope, Mufasa explains that when lions die, they turn into grass, which the antelope eat. Everyone contributes; everyone gets their due.

Mufasa’s explanation parallels a basic tenet of ecology: the importance of balance. Whatever you take out, you have to put back in some form for everything to function properly. If you don’t, the environment will change until it finds a new equilibrium. The circle of life is one of the first times a Disney movie explicitly grapples with the idea of environmental balance and stewardship. It was an idea I’d carry forward throughout my childhood as I got to know different landscapes and ecosystems. Everything has its cycle; you just have to look for it.

When Mufasa’s brother Scar takes over, everything goes to shit, demonstrating exactly what happens when you jam up the circle of life. He promotes the hyenas, formerly low-ranking scavengers, to the lions’ equals, and the balance of this Disneyfied savannah is thrown off. There’s no food; there’s no water. The lionesses are forced to travel further and further in search of prey.

When Simba returns to the savannah, the Pride Lands are indistinguishable from the elephant graveyard. The movie shifts from lush greens and golds to moody purple; bones are everywhere; the river is dry.

We’re creating our own elephant graveyard, our own barren savannah. Every day, we burn fossil fuels for everything from flying jets to heating our houses, and in the process, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There, it’s building up and wrapping around the planet like a thick, fluffy blanket, trapping heat inside. And that heat has consequences: Earth’s glaciers and ice caps melt; hot air brews into hurricanes so strong they leave cities trembling in their wake; droughts strip moisture from once-fertile farmland.

Just as the lions blame the hyenas in The Lion King, Americans spend a lot of time pointing to overpopulation in low-income countries and energy use in China and India as if those are the only causes of climate change. But the truth is that just one hundred corporations—mostly oil, gas, and coal companies—are responsible for some 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.6 They’re getting rich while the world burns. And generally speaking, each of us in the United States is responsible for far more carbon dioxide emissions than almost any other person on the planet. In 2014, the average American released more than twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the average Chinese citizen and ten times as much as the average Indian citizen.7 From 1850 to 2014, our nation sent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other.

Even though we know all this, our representatives dawdle on climate reforms, if they even believe in climate change in the first place. We keep driving, flying, and heating and cooling our houses with oil and gas. I keep doing it even though I know the science. Tackling a problem so huge, so communal, seems impossible.

While we dawdle, our warmer atmosphere heats the ocean, and that balmy water may affect the ability of krill to grow and reproduce, and krill feed creatures from small fish all the way up to blue whales. Without krill, the whales, and so much else, will starve. A warmer ocean can also harbor new diseases and parasites, and will carry sound differently, making it harder for whales and other animals to communicate. While the harm we’re causing whales may, in an unsettling move, cause a brief uptick in whale falls, if populations plummet, so too will the habitat their bodies provide.

If you take something out of Earth’s natural system, like the carbon that’s been buried deep within the ground as coal and oil, the system will wobble until it finds a new and different balance. We just might not like the balance it ends up with.

We’ve watched this story play out time and time again; we even include it in our children’s tales, and yet we don’t ever seem to learn. Eat all the wildebeest, drink all the water, and you’ll be left with nothing.

———

Nearly three million whales were killed by the whaling industry between 1900 and 1999, slaughtered for their oil and bones.8 That doesn’t even factor in the whaling that took place earlier, at the height of industrial whaling, the era of Moby-Dick and sub-Arctic expeditions. While it’s hard to say for sure, genetic analysis suggests that large whale populations may have been depleted by 85 percent or more by human whaling. Blue whales in particular, those giants of the sea, have been reduced to a single percentage of their historical population in the Southern Hemisphere,9 their numbers dropping from 327 thousand in 190410 to just a couple thousand in the early part of this century.11

At the end of their lives, whales are huge carbon sinks. They eat vast quantities of krill and small fish and transport the carbon in their bodies to the ocean floor when they die. Fewer whales means less carbon capture. Thanks to whaling, literally millions fewer tons of carbon are captured each year.12

And if whale falls have historically been oases in a realm of otherwise scarce habitats, these havens have become fewer and farther between since humans started roaming the ocean in large numbers, slaughtering whatever we found. Though many formerly hunted whale populations have rebounded since the international moratorium on commercial whaling in the 1980s, whale populations—and whale falls—are now only a shadow of what they once were. Every year, whales are dying because of us.

The math is simple: fewer whales, fewer whale falls. And fewer whale falls means less habitat overall. Whale fall expert Craig Smith estimates that 15 percent of whale-fall specialist species could go extinct in the near future; in the North Atlantic, a third of the local specialists may already be gone forever.13

When we were killing whales, we thought they were endlessly bountiful; we thought we deserved every bit of whale we took. But we weren’t just wiping out the whales, we were wiping out everything that depended on them. We may have signed the death warrant for whale-fall specialists before we even knew they existed.

———

For a long time, Europeans believed that whales were monsters. Cetacea, the group of animals that includes whales and dolphins, gets its name from the Greek kētos, meaning large fish or sea monster. On old maps, whales are grotesque. Several appear on Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina, one of the most famous illustrated maps of the early Renaissance. On one part of the map, a tusked, green orcha attacks a fanged balena, both with demonic glints in their eyes. In his map key, Magnus declares that a balena may be four acres large, with eyes as big as fifteen men.14

Elsewhere on the map, north of the Faroe Islands, a pig-like, turtle-­backed whale rises to the surface, so large that men have mistaken it for an island. The men have anchored their ship to the whale and set up camp on top of it, building fires to cook their food. But inevitably, Magnus writes, such whales eventually dive, and the men upon their back, “unless they can save themselves by ropes thrown forth of the ship, are drown’d.”15

In the early days of European oceangoing, whales were monstrous, queer creatures that sailors only glimpsed in brief moments at the surface. They were so unlike us, so alien, that the only option was to make up stories to try to explain them. As our relationship with the ocean changed, our understanding of whales evolved, though not necessarily for the better: we saw them as risks likely to destroy a ship or eat our catch.

It wasn’t until commercial whaling that we began to understand whales more fully. Finally, we could get a closer look; naturalists could examine a whale that hadn’t been rotting on a shoreline for days, bloating and sloughing off its features as it decayed. But even then, we saw them as little more than resources. Not monsters, maybe, but still not worthy of our respect. Even now, we’re just beginning to understand how intelligent whales are; how they have cultures of their own; how our actions have annihilated their lineages and their communities.

In places where people have lived alongside whales for generations, this relationship looks markedly different. Many I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1. Graveyard
• 2. Ice
• 3. Wilds
• 4. Survival
• Part Two
• 5. Extinction
• 6. River
• 7. Fire
• 8. Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• Suggested Further Reading
• Notes