Before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he spent twenty years sketching out his ideas in a series of journals called the Transmutation Notebooks and the Metaphysical Notebooks, archived now at the University of Cambridge. In one of these journals, called Notebook B, there is an incidental sketch, a few scratched lines like the barren twigs of a winter tree. The branches are labelled with tentative letters, almost apologetically.
It is the first moment when he ventured, in writing, the possibility of a branching, eternal tree of life. I am interested in that moment of knowing, that dawning of realization that the world has changed, is changing, and can never be the same again. My own personal moment of realization, the truest and bitterest revelation of extinction that I have known, came when I was nineteen, an undergraduate student in biology, spending a summer doing field research in Kenya.
It was my introduction to both the wonder and monotony of field science. The contemporary scientist is Nature’s actuary. Their job is to reduce the world to a series of numbers that can be punched into increasingly complex statistical equations and published in esoteric journals with high barriers to entry and minuscule readerships.
This is how truth is defined in a technocratic society. Anything that can’t be counted simply doesn’t count. This is not to impugn the nobility of counting, of the close and careful observation of nature, of the rational, ordered efforts to understand it.
But a method is not an ethic, or a philosophy. What should be a tool is too often treated as a motive. The approach creates a problem for wildlife conservation.
If any other human impulse in a wild place must become subservient to a line in some accountant’s ledger, then the wild will always lose out. Meaning, beauty—existence itself— cannot compete with a banker on the banker’s terms. In Kenya, this actuarial approach manifested as weeks spent in a Land Rover, counting herds of zebra with a handheld mechanical tally counter in my right hand and binoculars in my left.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
