Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  He thanked me and I drove away slowly, so as not to raise any dust.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I ARRIVED, Dick Brown pointed me to a comfortable guest room, and after he and his daughter and I had supper and Dick and I had had a chat on the veranda, we retired. The following morning, just after sunrise, Dick said I might benefit from an overview of the Jack Hills before I drove into that country, and offered to fly me over the land in his Cessna. With the map Bob Pidgeon had drawn for me open in my lap, and aided by the low angle of the sun, I picked out a route to follow through the hills. I was confident I could find my way now to the draw where the zircon crystals had been found. The ground at the foot of that draw, I saw, was boulder-strewn and too steeply pitched to navigate in a vehicle, but I spotted a copse of eucalypts nearby where I could park out of the sun and then walk the rest of the way up the draw.

  The drive from the station’s headquarters compound took less than an hour. Shortly after I parked I found the rock matrix Bob Pidgeon had directed me to. With the aid of a magnifying glass I found the tiny zircon crystals in it. I sat there in the draw for a while, next to the matrix, trying to place everything I could see from there into a time frame. The sun was well up by now. The surrounding land was an immensity of windless silence. To dig one of the crystals out of the rock I thought would disturb some sort of magic veil I didn’t want to disappear, and anyway, I didn’t feel compelled. Many places in the world have been so profoundly altered by development projects of one sort or another that they are no longer recognizable to the original inhabitants—or even the residents of a few decades ago. But making this kind of intrusion wasn’t really what was holding me back. It was my desire to steer clear, this time, of a bad habit, the desire to take things you don’t think will be missed. I didn’t need the crystals, any more than I needed many of the other innocuous things I’d pocketed over the years in out-of-the-way places.

  The effects of the jarring ride out here in the four-wheel drive from Dick Brown’s home took a while to drain away. It took even longer for my list of questions about this place to evaporate to the point where all I was doing was sitting there beside the rocks. They were like exotic animals. On that June morning I watched the sun bear off into the northern sky from the east above a Serengeti-like savannah of scattered trees and open brushland. The rays of its light seemed to tinker with the pale colors of the horizon. I sank into the time pooled in this shallow draw, sank through the Cenozoic into the Mesozoic, the Age of Dinosaurs, and fell further into the Permian, fell down through the Age of Fish in the Devonian, to the time of the first mollusks in the Cambrian, and then into the Proterozoic, the eon of the relatives of the cyanobacteria I’d seen secreting their homes at Lake Clifton. And finally into the eon when there was no life, the basement of Earth time, the Archean. It’s from then that these dazzling grains by my side had come. Theirs is the very long view. My time is not even a hair-thin splinter in the great sequoia of the time that is theirs.

  Into this reverie a flock of ubiquitous budgerigars suddenly flew, about thirty of them, small green-and-yellow parrots with blue tail feathers and warbling voices. They zoomed past swiftly, actively maintaining their close alignment, like race cars in the tight turns of a road course. I’d spooked them. I watched until they bore off in a straight line, like a single animal. I was aware now of sounds that must have been there all along but which had not registered—the cries of cockatiels, a crested parrot found nearly everywhere in Australia. A plaintive qweel.

  The birds’ voices break and animate the stillness here but do not overtake it. With my binoculars I scour the open hilly country. It has the general look of untrammeled land, but the admixture of plant life and the dry, broken sheets of friable soil signal that sheep and other ruminants not native to the place have been here a while.

  I left the bed of the dry wash and climbed a ridge to get a better view of country to the north. I was there only a moment before I saw a red fox. It looked up at me as it emerged from between two boulders and then was gone. I saw it once more in a pile of loose rocks below, and then it was gone for good.

  The fox, like the sheep, did not come with this country; it arrived with colonization, the fox to establish the English tradition of fox hunting, the sheep to create the foundation for a pastoral economy. Today Australia is home to large feral populations of a great array of non-native animals. Among them are pigs, camels, hares, cats, dogs, horses, mongooses, several species of deer, donkeys, goats, zebu cattle, and famously, rabbits. Their grazing, rooting, browsing, and predation on native species has so radically altered the nature of Australia’s nineteenth-century plant and animal communities that it is now impossible to say, across most of Australia, exactly what these communities once looked like. Imported birds—sparrows, canaries, Indian mynas, quail, pheasants, starlings—have also played a role in altering the landscape. And poorly managed sheep and cattle ranching operations have exposed millions of acres to erosion and desertification. What Cook saw during his coastal survey in 1770, what Matthew Flinders saw during his epic circumnavigation of the continent thirty years later, and what early white explorers of the interior saw—Ernest Giles, John McDouall Stuart, Edward Eyre, and the ill-fated Robert Burke and his partner, William Wills—will never be seen again. Which is as it should be, of course, in the natural order of things (i.e., if Homo sapiens is not to be set apart in the natural order). But the changes have been huge. They came on very quickly, and for many, they have been disorienting to the point of despair.

  The modern urge to turn a landscape into “what it once was,” to make it “better” by eliminating “pests,” to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn’t coevolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease—biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to “restore” any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has “destroyed” a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren’t able to reverse the direction of evolution, to darn a landscape back together like a sweater that has unraveled. Restoration privileges some animals and plants over others, and therefore presents ethical problems identical to those one faces in examining any project of social engineering or any country’s policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, it is not possible to restore the soil chemistry of lands turned nearly lifeless by decades of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and overgrazing.

  The chief value of restoration projects, perhaps, is psychological. At a time when the extent of serious damage to Earth’s ecosystems has ceased to be a topic of special interest, restoration projects, like any act of atonement, fill humans with a sense of self-worth and enhanced dignity. This humbling and pioneering work, despite the biological and ethical challenges, seems to me to mark the beginning of a kind of human behavior that will (partially) restore more than landscapes. It will provide living grounds for all life, including human life, until industrial expansion ends and begins to show signs of drawdown.

  It is not possible to consider the question of restoration in any complete way, it seems to me, without confronting the discomfiting issue of intolerance that underlies all efforts to restore. And this places one uncomfortably close to the volatile politics of immigration. The chief objection local people have to “invasive species” is that they can so quickly eradicate the familiar, the valued, and the iconic, can so easily turn what was once thought beautiful into what is considered aesthetically offensive. Some people come to feel that the arrangement of life that was formerly in place was intrinsically more valuable than what has replaced it. These judgmental attitudes toward exotic animals and plants overrunning indigenous animals and plants, of course, differs little from the attitudes of an indigenous human culture toward an invasive human culture, or an entrenched human culture toward
an influx of representatives from an “exotic” culture.

  Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as “invasive” or “foreign” and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are figuratively, not actually, timeless. And ours is an age of unprecedented cultural exchange, of emigration and immigration. Reactionary resentment around issues of race and culture has no future but warfare. And all landscapes are on their way to becoming something else, with incremental slowness and terrifying speed.

  The agitation people feel around subtle and radical change in their home landscapes has only partly to do with physical change in the land—Burmese pythons overrunning Florida’s Everglades, say, or copses of fast-growing balsa trees appearing in Galápagos. It has equally to do—possibly more to do—with the time available to absorb such change. It is more psychologically disruptive to be confronted with many changes over a short period of time than to encounter only a few changes over the same period of time, which was the universal human experience until a few hundred years ago. Today, with modern aircraft spreading local viruses all over the world, and commercial shipping flooding international harbors with thousands of new species when they flush their ballast tanks, and with communications technology fundamentally altering, in only a few decades, the way people communicate with one another, a continuously changing environment actually seems, for some now, more stable, more comfortable, than a seemingly static environment. Ideas such as racial superiority, once tolerated, now seem outdated. Further, globalization has created an environment in which mixed-race, mixed-culture, dual-citizenship, and immigrant-status populations are increasingly the norm in cities like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro, bringing the outsider face-to-face everywhere with an evolving and vital international mestizo culture.

  At some critical point, accommodation and cooperation replace violence and exploitation, or humanity’s fate is delivered into the hands of barbarians.

  * * *

  —

  WATCHING THE FOX disappear in a boulder field below the ridge, I can appreciate what makes this creature inimical to so many Australians. When chasing foxes here on horseback with packs of hounds went the way of powdered wigs in American courtrooms, the no-longer-harassed foxes spread far and wide. They killed off many of the small native predators they were in competition with for food, and the environments they entered provided few curbs on their behavior and no effective restraints on the growth of their populations. The red fox stands out on the land today as a symbol of colonial incursion. Certainly they snatch the occasional lamb; but actually, they are only foxes, endeavoring to make their way in a world they were transported to, like the camels overland explorers used and then turned loose when they were finished here. And the cats and dogs that ran away from homesteads. And the zebu cattle brought in in 1880 to supply workers building an overland telegraph line with fresh meat. And the mongooses brought in to control the rabbits and to reduce the population of Australia’s unusually large number of very poisonous snakes.

  Of the many “exotic” animals Australians mounted eradication campaigns against, once the species’ wild or feral populations were large enough to be perceived as a threat (campaigns were also mounted to eradicate native animals like the kangaroo and dingo in areas where their existence threatened the profitability of farming and ranching), the one against the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) was the most epic. Rabbits arrived in Australia with convicts aboard the First Fleet. Later, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, they were introduced at more than thirty different places by immigrants, for whom they were a source of both food and commercial profit. Some rabbits escaped, others were abandoned by families moving on; by the 1860s, wild populations had colonized about two-thirds of the continent. Between 1885 and 1914, more than 200,000 miles of rabbit-proof fencing was erected across Australia to control the extent of damage rabbits were causing farmers by grazing and by the construction of extensive underground warrens. While the fences were going up, farmers turned to increasingly more violent strategies to slow the spread of rabbit populations—explosives, bulldozing, poisonous gas. House cats and mongooses were loosed after the rabbits, and ways were developed to introduce lethal myxomatosis and caliciviruses into wild populations.

  Had I been a conservationist at the height of the campaigns against rabbits in the fifties, I would no doubt have cheered the bulldozers on, unaware of the effect 200,000 miles of wire fence was going to have on the land. If I had been a farmer or a pastoralist, I might have spent whatever money I could afford on gelignite explosives and phosphine gas. If I had been one of the handful who still raised rabbits for profit, I might have gone to Brisbane to complain loudly about the manufacture and distribution of viruses lethal to the rabbits of Queensland. If I had been sentimental, uncomfortable taking on the messy business of unenlightened planning, I might have thought that the rabbits were too cute to kill. Who can say what theologians, philosophers, pragmatists, and proto-environmentalists of the time might have said if they’d been offered room at the table along with the pastoralists, the agriculturists, and politicians?

  Sitting that day in the Jack Hills, after losing sight of the fox, I felt a twinge of the nostalgia that might come over any of us when we learn that a wild landscape that was emblematic for us in childhood has been turned into a resort community peppered with condominiums. Whatever one finds in front of herself at the moment, however, is what the given situation is. That other thing, the so-called pristine landscape of a former time, is no longer available; and somehow a person must make peace with that. To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is.

  An observation I heard several times, in different circumstances, about the makeup of Australia’s human population—it’s a popular assertion, but not one I was able to confirm—is that half of modern-day Australians are either immigrants or first-generation Australians. The increasing heterogeneity of burgeoning populations around the world, of course, raises the ire of reactionary politicians in many countries. They rail against the loss of putative racial and ethnic purity, just as many of the same people rail against evolutionary theory and global climate change. They read these signs of inevitable change in the status quo as threats to plans for human perfection that they feel responsible for engineering.

  What is to become of us if we decide that the only relief from a persistent sense of discomfort or irritation in our individual worlds is to go after the newcomer, to denounce reconciliation as cowardly, and to kill the Arab student in Tel Aviv, the black intellectual in Atlanta, the Caucasian relief worker in Somalia? Will we also be burning down the eucalyptus trees in Florence, the bougainvillea in Caracas, the ginkgo trees in Manhattan? Will we be inventing a rationale to legitimize the use of arsenic against the Jaburrara or the eradication of rabbits? Will we drag our gods in, and our economists, to preside over the division of wealth that comes with each of our victories over those whose only mistake was to have other ideas? Or will we grant the imperfections in our behavior which have for so long been apparent, and examine instead the forms of reconciliation, those already known and those yet to be invented?

  Crossing back over the countryside to the copse of eucalypts in the draw where I’d parked, I felt suspended still in that deep well of time at the bottom of which molecules of zirconium silicate crystallized and became tiny brown grains with four billion years of history ahead of them, before some traveler with a hand lens bent down to peer at them. I pictured the emergence of hominins at the distant end of this arc of time, their lone survivor, Homo sapiens, standing with its paintings, its music, telling mythic stories, and becoming acquainted w
ith its problematic appetite for triumph, for vengeance, cruelty, war, and acquisition.

  An arduous life in a world of gargantuan human mistakes, of realpolitik decisions, and of personal failure might have prepared any one of us to grasp unflinchingly our own capacity to become immoral, to become the terrorist, the seeker after power and extensive privilege, the anointed enforcer of whatever we construe to be right. And enabled us to understand, considering shortages of good water, metallic ores, and arable land worldwide, what many human populations are likely to face long before the century is out. And compelled us to object to the efforts of elected governments to ferret out and review the thoughts of each of their citizens, and to object to the argument that for-profit businesses be accorded the same rights individual citizens enjoy, to oppose the ceaseless manufacture and distribution of lethal weapons, and to consider that our own progeny will have to face harrowing decisions in the future merely to survive.

  Are we not bound, now, to learn how to speak with each other?

  * * *

  —

  RICHARD AND I had tea on his veranda again that evening. He told me stories about seeing flocks of galahs and other birds flying alongside his plane, about the upwelling of affection he felt for them, their guileless effort at life, and how very different this dry country seemed to him after a pelting rain, how fresh. That morning, before I left for the Jack Hills, Richard had brought me a .308 Enfield. He asked if I might take the rifle along and shoot any wild goats I saw. They compete with the sheep for food, he said. I declined, and he nodded his understanding.

  “It’s not for everybody,” he offered, and returned the rifle to its place in the rack on the living room wall with the other rifles and guns.