The Book of Eels

by Patrik Svensson

  When they’re out sailing on Lake Galilee and a storm blows up, the apostles are frightened and wake Jesus, who is sleeping in the stern. Jesus rebukes the wind and says: “Peace! Be still!” and the wind ceases immediately. “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” he says reproachfully, almost mockingly.

  I’ve never been able to bring myself to believe in the miracles of any religion, but I can understand why someone would want to swap fear for conviction. I can understand that a person coming across something unfamiliar or frightening chooses the miracle over ongoing uncertainty. It’s a human thing to do. Having faith is giving yourself over to something. To what can be explained only through similes.

  And the promise of the Christian faith, what awaits anyone brave enough to become a fool, is the biggest of all promises: “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”

  Jesus promises his followers eternal life, which is why the most important miracle is the resurrection. That Jesus dies and is raised is the heart of the Christian message. Without it, faith becomes meaningless. Faith can’t be only about this life; it has to transcend it. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

  Only a fool would believe in the resurrection, but I’ve sometimes wished I were a fool, and I think Dad wished for the same thing. Because what is resurrection? If taken literally it means a person (or an eel) can die and then live again. But Paul also talks about something else in his letter to the Corinthians. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” he writes. Death is inevitable, but there are, according to Paul, ways to handle it. Further on, Paul talks about change, about how death isn’t an ending but rather a kind of metamorphosis: “We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”

  So a person (or an eel) can die and then be transformed in the blink of an eye and come back in imperishable form. No, that’s not true. That’s a simile. But a simile can carry within it its own truth, of course. You don’t have to believe the miracle to believe the meaning of the miracle. There are many ways to be a fool. And you don’t have to believe in the Gospel (or the eel) in a literal sense to believe what is at the heart of their message: Those who die stay with us in some form.

  Nana believed in God, but Dad and I didn’t. That being said, much later, when Nana was dying, I sat by her side and she cried and said, “I will always be with you.” And I obviously believed her. I didn’t need to believe in God to believe that.

  And that is, at the end of the day, what Jesus promises his followers. “I am with you always, to the close of the age,” he says when he reveals himself to his apostles, three days after his death.

  And that is, of course, what we hope for when we believe. Whether in God or an eel.

  17

  The Eel on the Brink of Extinction

  The last enemy to be destroyed is death. That’s true not only for people of faith, but also for those who prefer knowledge. It’s certainly true for all the people still trying to understand the eel.

  Because the eel is dying out, and at an increasing rate. There are data that suggest that the eel population began to shrink as early as the eighteenth century, which is to say around the same time science first took an earnest interest in the creature. More reliable data showing a decline in eel numbers are available from the 1950s at least. And during the past few decades, the problem seems to have accelerated significantly. According to most research reports, the situation today is more or less catastrophic. The eel is dying, and not just in the expected way, as the natural end to a long life full of changes. It’s becoming extinct. We are losing it.

  This is the latest and most urgent eel question: Why is it disappearing?

  It may be appropriate as a starting point to place the extinction of the eel within a larger context. Life is changeable; that’s the first law of evolution. Life is also transient; that’s the first law of life. But what’s happening now with the eel, as with so many other species, is far beyond the normal progression of evolution and life, in terms of both character and extent.

  Rachel Carson was one of the first to realize this. Her final book, and the one that she’ll forever be remembered for, was Silent Spring. It was published in 1962 and is one of the most influential works ever written about humanity’s ability to destroy what it claims to love. Silent Spring is about the devastating use of DDT and other synthetic pesticides, about how the thoughtless spraying of fields and forests kills not only insects but also all other forms of life: birds, fish, mammals, and in the end, humans. Through a combination of thorough scientific research and her inimitably beautiful and visceral language, Carson was able to both illustrate the extent of the problem and describe what it actually meant in practice.

  What she foresaw was a time when life is no longer seen or heard around us, simply because it has disappeared from the world we perceive, because it has ceased to exist. She foresaw a silent time, springs without the whirring of insects or singing of birds, without fish jumping in rivers or bats flitting through the moonlight at night. She saw an ongoing destruction of large swaths of the life we were so used to having around us, and she knew why it was happening: “As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.”

  By identifying with the animals, with something beyond herself, Rachel Carson was able to arrive at a greater understanding of what was happening. From that sprung a feeling of desperation that eventually grew into courage and a conviction that it was her right, even her duty, to bear witness to what she knew. And that time was short. In June 1963, while Silent Spring sent ripples across the world, she appeared before the US Senate’s subcommittee on environmental hazards; she began her statement by saying: “The problem you have chosen to explore is one that must be resolved in our time. I feel strongly that a beginning must be made on it now, in this session of Congress.” Her eagerness and haste were not only rhetorical. She was dying herself. By the time Silent Spring was published, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and when she testified before the Senate subcommittee, the cancer had spread to her liver. She knew it was her last chance to turn her conviction into action—and she was successful, at least as far as the devastating pesticides were concerned. The use of DDT in agriculture was banned in the United States in 1972, largely thanks to Silent Spring’s enormous impact. But by then, Rachel Carson was dead. She passed away in April 1964, at the age of fifty-six. Her legacy will always be the attention she drew early on to the threat that has now become a widespread concern.

  SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE MORE THAN THREE BILLION YEARS THAT life has existed on this planet, changes have taken place that have been so far reaching and drastic one could say they were tantamount to a kind of metamorphosis, each altering the very composition of life on earth. Five times, these changes have been so all encompassing, they’ve been given their own category. These five periods are usually called the five mass-extinction events.

  The first of the mass-extinction events started about 450 million years ago, during the tail end of the Ordovician period, when life was still more or less confined to the oceans. Due to a cooling climate, which was in turn a consequence of continental drift, approximately 60 to 70 percent of all species became extinct over a period of about ten million years.

  The second mass-extinction event was also caused by devastating global cooling, about 364 million years ago; by its end, 70 percent of all living species had been wiped out.

  The third mass-extinction event was the deadliest. It occurred in the transition between the Permian and Triassic periods, approximately 250 million years ago, and killed off more than 95 percent of all species. There is no consens
us on the cause, but the most likely answer is that a confluence of events led to dramatic climate change.

  The fourth mass-extinction event took place over a relatively long time between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, about 200 million years ago, and saw the demise of up to 75 percent of all species.

  The fifth mass-extinction event is the most famous. Sixty-five million years ago, a meteor is thought to have struck the Yucatán Peninsula; the impact was at least one contributing factor to the extinction of the dinosaurs, along with 75 percent of the rest of the world’s species.

  The flora and fauna of our planet have undergone more metamorphoses than that, some almost as comprehensive, but relative to the long history of life, mass extinctions are nevertheless a very rare phenomenon. Species die, animals and plants come and go, but the time frame of this process is usually so long it doesn’t fundamentally disturb the order of things. That is the normal way of life: occasional goodbyes, not holocausts.

  And yet many researchers are positing that what we are experiencing now is not the normal way of things, that we are, in fact, living the sixth mass-extinction event. In August 2008, the American biologists David Wake and Vance Vredenburg wrote an article entitled “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?” It was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and even though the authors were not the first to ask this question, their answers were so persuasive that the threat no longer seemed hypothetical but rather highly probable.

  Wake and Vredenburg focused specifically on amphibians and salamanders and were able to show that yes, some form of mass extinction was unquestionably already underway. Of the earth’s circa 6,300 known amphibian species, at least a third were already endangered, and this development showed every sign of getting rapidly worse.

  One of the people who read the article was the science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her book The Sixth Extinction was published in 2014 and summarized what we know about the potential extinction event happening right now. About a third of all corals are at threat of extinction; so are a third of all sharks, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds. This extinction event may not turn out to be as far reaching as any of the big five, but the threat is nevertheless so great, and accelerating so rapidly, that it’s not out of the realm of possibility. If things carry on like this, there’s much to suggest that the number of species on our planet will be halved in just one hundred years.

  That is exceptionally fast—previous mass extinctions took place over millions of years; now we are talking about centuries—but what makes the current extinction event truly unique is that for the first time in history, there’s a living perpetrator. The culprit is not a celestial body, or continental drift or volcanic eruptions; it’s a creature. One of the many species inhabiting this planet has conquered it, and in so doing has caused the massive destruction of the habitats of all other species. It has managed to change not just the surface of the earth but its atmosphere, too. No other species has ever come close to exercising that kind of impact on life. On different forms of life. On all life.

  “If Wake and Vredenburg were correct,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life’s history, we are also causing it.”

  BUT WHY IS THE EEL IN PARTICULAR DYING? WHAT ARE THE SPECIFIC circumstances that have made this seemingly timeless survivor unable to carry on? To start, the question is accompanied by a theoretical problem. As we know, asking why can never be the first step in tackling a scientific problem. One has to start at the beginning. First, we establish that something’s happening: Is the eel dying? Then we observe it and explain what is happening: How is the eel dying? Only once that has been done can we begin to approach the question of why.

  And when it comes to the question of the eel’s extinction, this approach has turned out to be a little bit complicated.

  The name of the organization coordinating much of the work on environmental protection and biological diversity around the globe, and which has over a thousand member organizations, is the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. Among other things, the IUCN compiles the so-called Red List, an inventory of animals and plants that is regularly updated to identify which species are considered threatened around the world. The explicit aim of the Red List is to create a “universally accepted system of classification of species at high risk of extinction globally.” In other words, the IUCN’s criteria serve as a kind of international standard, a scientifically tested assessment of how life in its different forms is doing.

  On the Red List, each species is assessed according to established criteria and rated on a scale ranging from the most heartening (“least concern”) through “near threatened,” “vulnerable,” “endangered,” “critically endangered,” and “extinct in the wild,” to the final and irrevocable declaration of “extinct.” And since it is an objectively and methodically compiled inventory of all known life on earth, it provides information on how everything from algae to ringworms and humans are faring.

  Humans are doing well. The most recent IUCN assessment of Homo sapiens, from 2008, says the following: “Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing.” It is also noted that “humans have the widest distribution of any terrestrial mammal species, inhabiting every continent on earth (although there are no permanent settlements on Antarctica). A small group of humans has been introduced to space, where they inhabit the International Space Station.” At present, according to the IUCN assessment, “no conservation measures are required.” Homo sapiens is thriving.

  The eel, Anguilla anguilla, on the other hand, is in trouble. Or, at least there’s good reason to think it is. It’s what we are led to believe. It goes without saying that since it’s the eel we’re dealing with, we can’t claim to know for certain. As is so often the case, our knowledge comes with caveats. Because it turns out the eel doesn’t quite fit the criteria normally used by the IUCN for its assessments. Firstly, our inability to determine the exact size of the total population is a problem. Population size is, naturally, the first criterion for determining the level of threat to a species. But according to IUCN’s reports, population size should be determined by the number of “reproductive individuals,” which is to say the number of fully grown, sexually mature specimens. That means, the IUCN writes, that ideally, the criterion would be applied to “mature eels at their spawning grounds.” In other words, a headcount of silver eels in the Sargasso Sea would be necessary. However, since no one has managed to find so much as one silver eel in the Sargasso Sea after more than a hundred years of trying, it is obviously impossible. The eel won’t let itself be mapped that way. It avoids even those who would help it.

  What could potentially be done is a count of how many mature silver eels set off from the coasts of Europe toward the spawning grounds. But here, too, data is scarce; eels have a habit of disappearing into the dark depths of the ocean very quickly. The observations that have been made, however, suggest that the number of migrating silver eels has plummeted by at least 50 percent in the past forty-five years.

  The third-best alternative, which is what the IUCN primarily bases its assessment on, is quite simply to start at the other end and assess what emerges as the result of the eels’ secretive rendezvous in the Sargasso Sea—what Rachel Carson called “the only testament that remained of the parent eels.” In other words, the number of glass eels that turn up in Europe in the spring. A lot more is known about this, and it’s these data that suggest the situation is absolutely catastrophic. All reliable counts indicate the number of newly arrived glass eels in Europe today is only about 5 percent of what it was at the end of the 1970s. For every hundred transparent little glass rods swimming upstream every year when I was a boy, at most a handful make that same journey today.

  This is the basis for IUCN’s decision to categorize the European eel,
Anguilla anguilla, as critically endangered. Which, according to the official definition, means it’s “facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.” The situation is not only catastrophic but also acute. The eel could really disappear, in the foreseeable future, and not just from our sight and our realm of knowledge, but from our world.

  SO THIS IS THE FINAL QUESTION: WHY IS THE EEL DYING? AND THE final answer is not surprising, given that this is the eel we’re talking about: It’s hard to say. It’s the same problem that everyone attempting to understand the eel has been confronted with: The answer eludes us. We don’t know for certain. We know parts, but not the whole. We are, to some extent, forced to rely on faith.

  There are several explanations as to why eels are in trouble, and science can confirm them all, but no one knows for sure if they’re the only causes, or even the most pivotal ones. As long as there are unanswered questions about the life cycle of the eel, we can’t say for certain why the eel is dying. As long as we’re uncertain exactly how the eel procreates or how it navigates, we can’t say what’s preventing it from doing those things. In order to save it, we have to understand it. This is what most research on the state of the eel emphasizes nowadays: In order to help the eel, we need to know more about it. We need more knowledge and more studies, and time is short.

  And thus, we arrive at the great paradox: The mysteriousness of the eel has suddenly become its greatest enemy. If it is to survive, humans have to coax it out of the shadows and find answers to the remaining questions. And that will, of course, come at a cost. Because throughout history, there have been people who have embraced this mysteriousness, who have been drawn to it and have chosen to cling to it. People who, like Graham Swift, or his storyteller Tom Crick, want to believe that a world where everything’s explained is a world that has come to an end.