I live, as I’ve mentioned on occasion, in the forest in the Andean
Patagonian region of Argentina, just “over the hill” from Chile. The ski town
that is up the road about twelve miles from me is a sort of mirage. What I mean
by that is that it sits on a transitional line in nature between the vast and semi-arid
steppe land and the richly forested mountains of the Andean Cordillera. This is
one of the still privileged areas of the world where humankind’s direct impact
has been minimal and where millions upon millions of acres of natural
woodland—forests so dense and wet that they are sometimes referred to by
scientists as “cold rainforests”—stretch, basically, from here fourteen hundred
miles south to the southernmost city in the Americas, Ushuaia, in sub-Antarctic
Tierra del Fuego. So, a mirage, as I say because when you’re in this ski town,
Bariloche, you have the illusion of forming part of civilization. But wander a
relatively short distance from Bariloche in any direction, and you’ll be smack
in the middle of the wilderness, disconnected from the world and on your own in
terms of survival.
When you come to Bariloche, you fly over miles and miles of wilderness, touch
down in the midst of the mirage, and live a somewhat unrealistic existence
until you fly back out again. You have the illusion of being “somewhere” when,
in reality, you’re in the middle of nowhere. And any interruption in the
transport and supply line promises an existential crisis locally.
This fact tends to be brought home to locals and tourists alike when
there is some emergency. It happened, for instance, during the last volcanic
eruption in the area a few years back, when dense abrasive ash in the
atmosphere made commercial flight impossible for months on end and people had
to opt for land transport, once roads had been reasonably cleared of pyroclastic
debris, in order to journey the thousand-plus miles back to Buenos Aires, the
city from which literally all things spring in Argentina. So much so that there
is a saying here in Patagonia: “God is everywhere, but his office is in Buenos
Aires.”
The corona virus is illustrating this fact once again, but in a much
more compelling way, since all non-essential land travel has been banned by the
federal government and all domestic flights everywhere in the country have been
grounded until September. Only a handful of international flights are leaving
the country—scant charters coordinated with embassies to repatriate foreign
tourists and business people—and no flights are coming in from abroad until
further notice. A good example of what this means on an individual basis is the
case of my wife’s cousin, who traveled from Buenos Aires to Bariloche to visit
her daughter who lives here, and was surprised by the national quarantine. What
that signifies for her is that she has no idea when or how she will be able to
return home, since her flight has been canceled and there are no other means
available for her to leave. She is, then, stuck for the duration.
When I first moved to the place where I live a quarter of a century ago,
only a handful of misfits like myself lived out here in the sticks. Now I have
probably five times as many neighbors as back then. It remains a very natural
neighborhood with no sidewalks, no pavement, no streetlights, etc. A small
human enclave surrounded by forest and soaring crags, and on the edge of a
system of glacial lakes and their attendant lagoons. But when I get out and
walk around it sometimes looks to me, comparatively speaking, like Grand
Central Station...or at least way more like suburbia than it used to. Neatly
mown yards and symmetrical gardens have been carved out of the wilderness and
tall elderly hardwoods have been sacrificed to the cause of sun-worship, to
home-owners’ fears of falling branches and to their resistance to leaf-raking
and autochthonous plants.
And then too, there is evidence that a growing number of leach beds on
steeply higher grounds above the lagoons are over-fertilizing the wetlands.
Poor construction of individual sewage disposal can lead to raw effluvient
water pollution, in a place where, when I first arrived, the water in most
glacial basins was potable without treatment—and remains so wherever people are
still absent.
In town the problem is far worse. In recent years Bariloche has grown
beyond all control. Traffic jams have become a major problem at peak hours of
the day, and the sewage disposal system built shortly after I arrived, when the
town first started growing exponentially, was already obsolete when it opened.
It wasn’t long before raw sewage was leaking into the vast and stunning Lake
Nahuel Huapi on which the city fronts. In summer, at certain points on the
twelve-mile lakeshore and mountain drive between the turn-off to my place and
town, the smell of raw sewage can be stifling, especially around choke points
for tourism and local residents, like the densely populated suburban area known
as Melipal, or like the Campanario funicular that, on any given day, carries
literally thousands of visitors up the mountainside to the eatery and
observation site at the top.
In the suburbs closest to town, construction has crept up the mountainside
year after year. And although limits are always set on how much higher the
suburban sprawl can go, the lines keep getting moved higher and higher as
demand for prime real estate soars. What no one wants to talk about are the
consequences of ever-advancing deforestation and excavation in these areas. And
as long as the price of land continues to increase, it will surely be an
unexplored topic of conversation among everyone but the area’s
environmentalists until the inevitable happens and homes are devoured by
mudslides some spring or fall. It wouldn’t be the first time. A decade or so
ago, a couple of houses on the Ñireco River near downtown tumbled down the
hillside during particularly heavy autumn rains.
Still, compared to the urban areas of the world most devastated by the
intrusion of humans, this entire region remains a natural paradise, with the
largest populations being limited, fortunately, to a tiny proportion of the
vast Patagonian wilderness.
I decided when I first moved in to make as little impact as possible on
the breath-taking nature that surrounded me. I cut down none of the
centuries-old southern beeches than towered over my little cabin. Nor did I
weed out any of the beech, cypress, radal, wild apple or laurel saplings that
bristled all over my one and a half-acre grounds. I was advised that I should
have someone come in with a team of oxen to drag out the dog rose and Spanish
broom by their roots, because if I didn’t, they would take over. But when I saw
them bloom gloriously in the spring, I didn’t have the heart. They also warned
me that I should cut down two old Douglas firs that were growing below the
house. They were “exotic invaders” I was warned, seeded by birds from the
grounds of an old hotel just over the ridge, and once they took root, they
would drop their cones and seed the ground with dozens of others of their kind
like a veritable plague. But they looked so beautiful with their pine-green
bark and spreading evergreen branches. They were like Christmas come early when
they were festooned with hundreds of new cones.
When I first arrived, I remember thinking it strange that the trees on
this piece of land were divided between centenarian hardwood that soar a
hundred feet or more toward the sky and young trees no more than ten or fifteen
feet tall with trunks no bigger than my wrist. Large stretches of the land were
coarse and barren, breeding aggressive burrs and Spanish nettles en lieu of grass.
I asked a savvy native of the area, who was in his seventies at the
time, about this. Why, I wanted to know, were there young trees and old trees
but none in between. And why, when there was such dense forest all around, was
this particular place split between wooded areas and semi-arid patches where
nothing but brambles seemed capable of growing.
Fifty years before, he told me, when all of this was a single, heavily
wooded, hundred-acre rural establishment, there had been a forest fire that had
advanced to this point before the autumn rains put it out. Some of the big old
trees had been spared while others had perished, and underbrush had been burned
to the bare ground.
“If you’re lucky, and don’t do like your foolish neighbor up the way and
cut everything down,” he told me, "you might live to see this all be fine
woodland again.”
In the end, the only thing I did to combat the burrs and help the forest
floor along in its transition was to seed hearty rye-grass and sweet clover in
the driest places and add water for a couple of years in a row and then let the
grass grow knee-high and tassel so that it would seed itself from then on. Over
the years, I’ve stepped back and watched how, left to its own devices, my
little piece of nature has gone through an evolutionary transition and
flourished. The once tiny hardwoods have grown into a tall, sturdy, young
forest. And the once dry patches are now filled with tall green grasses, dog
rose bushes, lush stands of Spanish broom and rising saplings. The once
knee-high wild apples are now tall trees that bear hundreds of apples that the
burrowing parrots flock down out of the mountains to consume each fall. Where
the two big Douglas firs used to stand alone, there is now a deep, dark grove
of tall straight evergreens.
The forest has returned because I have let it take its course and in
return it permits me to live in peace in a world of lush verdure and brilliant
splashes of color the year round. Here and there I hack out the smallest paths
necessary to allow me to contemplate this progress. But in the end, my land
belongs to nature and nature has been kind enough to let me squat here for a
few years. The forest was here long before I arrived and will be here long
after I’m gone. I’m just passing through.
I’ve been giving greater than usual thought to this as a result of the
corona virus emergency shutdown that has taken place around the world. In these
apocalyptic times in which environmental experts keep broadcasting unheeded
warnings about the suicidal course on which humankind is embarked if we remain
alienated to our surroundings and to the carrying capacity of the very planet
that we call home, this brief hiatus has—or should have, at least—brought home
the fact that the smallest of efforts to change our ways could mean the
difference between the survival of future generations of human beings, or the
inevitable sixth great extinction in which humanity will be the species that
goes the way of the dinosaurs.
Rather than seeing a slowing of the process of our demise, these
environmental experts are shocked to find that their “worst-case” scenarios of
less than a decade ago were way too optimistic. Environmental deterioration due
to human-induced global climate change is occurring at break-neck speed.
According to their revised models, it may not just be “future generations” that
must suffer the full effects of certain areas of the world being rendered
uninhabitable, but some of the current youngsters as well, who may have to
struggle to survive as aging adults inhabiting a spoiled environment.
What we can see clearly as a result of the current worldwide shutdown
due to a modern-day plague is the dramatic way that the earth reacts when we
stop doing what we’re doing and give it a chance to make a comeback. That’s
because nature is not personified. Nature does what it does and involuntarily
copes or doesn’t with human advancement or retardation. Nature doesn’t care what Man does. Nature does what
comes natural, continues on its way, deploying its processes that are affected
or not by a vast array of elements, just one of which is the advance of humans
on their environment.
The earth doesn’t care what the environment is. It doesn’t mind one way
or another if it is habitable or inhabitable to human beings. It will keep on
being the earth and evolving according to its circumstances at any given moment
and will be totally indifferent to whether people are still part of the scene
or not. No matter what happens to humans, the earth will keep being the earth
and whatever the earth is at any given stage will be self-evident and
self-defining, be it the deep blue and bright green planet that we’ve been
lucky enough to know as our home or a hostile, radiation-burned, un-arable
desert bordering on a dead sea. It will still be the earth, and we will no
longer even be a thought or a memory.
The point is that, no matter what the deniers might tell you, it’s up to us whether we continue to exist or
not. And up to now, it seems, we’re willing to self-destruct—or, at least
willing to ensure that any chance for a human race in the future will be nil.
What the corona emergency has dramatically demonstrated is that if fear of
a present phenomenon is capable of distracting humans from their mad obsession
with self-destructive behavior long enough, their battered environment rewards
them with clear signs of immediate recovery.
The process of curing a badly damaged environment could take generations
of consistency. But the short-term effects of even a marginal and involuntary
mending of our ways are stunning. For instance, since the start of the lockdown,
Los Angeles has registered several days in which its air was some of the
clearest and cleanest in the country. LA citizens awoke on those days to the
uncommon sight of the tall mountain peaks that surround the city, and which are
sometimes not visible for months or years on end. This is the same California city
that, if you look up smog in the dictionary, you might well find a picture of
it next to the definition.
The waters of the usually pestilent if iconic canals of Venice have
settled and changed from murky brown to transparent green and one photographer
was so moved by the change that he filmed a jellyfish swimming contentedly
through the city’s aquatic thoroughfares. There are reports from cities and
towns in Europe and the US of herds of deer appearing within the city limits,
or bears napping on tree branches above urban streets, of coyotes slinking
across rooftops like they might across a mountain ridge or hillock, of wild
mountain sheep flocking along city streets and into parks to graze and of wolves
taking a sunbath by the sides of highways.
Seismographs are registering much lower shockwaves with the movement of trains,
subways, pylon drivers, oil drills and fracking equipment stilled. According to
one UK scientist, there is simply “less rumbling” on the earth’s surface. LA isn’t the only place where pollution
indices have plummeted. Earth-scanning
equipment on satellites is registering a noteworthy drop in the concentration
of greenhouse gases such as nitrogen dioxide that are normally spewed into the
atmosphere by the internal combustion vehicles and power plants that are an
outgrowth of the human race’s addiction to hydrocarbons. Nowhere have these
pollution indices improved as much as in Europe and China, where very strict
social-distancing norms have been enforced. And for a fleeting moment, the
planet has taken a baby step toward curing its ever-increasing fever.
In science fiction, the scene is often a hundred years past Judgment Day
and the world remains a grim and arid place where little survives. But what
this period of lock-down should perhaps teach us is that nature is wiser and
more positive than we think and it is willing to reward us for repentance. We
are being given an optimistic glimpse of how much better, safer and more
fruitful our natural environment could be if we would just make a minimal but
concerted effort to live more simply, to streamline our bloated economies, to
more fairly and more economically utilize our resources, to ask ourselves what
the difference is between what we need and what we covet, between a pleasant
existence and a life full of striving in order to accumulate what, in the end,
is a plethora of non-essential and unnecessary “stuff”.
The key to preventing the human race from growing so obsessed with consumption
for the sake of consumption until we ourselves are consumed in the sixth great
extinction would be wise and compelling leadership and limitations on the obscene
accumulation of wealth that is the main driving factor behind our impending
demise as we become too obese and complacent for the environment to be able to
carry us anymore. Unfortunately, all too often, humans appear to be prone to
seeking the leadership of individuals who are ambitious more than wise, greedy
rather than frugal, self-serving instead of empathic, purveyors of violence
rather than peace and seekers of power rather than servers of their fellow
humans.
The fact is that while we’ve been deathly sick, nature has been getting
well. And that should be a valuable lesson to us about how to save our one and
only human environment from destruction—namely, by loving and respecting our
home and concentrating on refraining from doing it irreparable harm. Because,
in the end, the ultimate punishment will be to ourselves.
For a brief moment, we have given our mostly senseless, wasteful advances
a rest and let the planet breathe! What should impress us most about the corona
crisis is not just how we manage to come out on the other side of the plague,
but what we learn in the meantime about how to save ourselves from the biggest
and final plague of all, the sixth great extinction from which no one will
survive, except the earth that will live on to evolve another day—with us or
without us.
