VALUABLE LESSONS...THAT WE WILL LIKELY IGNORE

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. What I was witnessing, he said, was the forest taking back the land, slowly but surely re-populating it with native species and exotic ones like the tiny firs coming up all over the place down below the house where the two old ones stood. The firs dated back to when the hotel just over the ridge was built on the lake back in the nineteen-forties and the landscapers used pines to line the half-mile-long entrance lane.

“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.