by Tim Flannery
Much has been done to restore Europe’s raptors. Following reintroduction, red kites once again fly in English skies, white-tailed sea-eagles soar in Scottish skies, and the lammergeier can be seen in the Parc Mercantour in the Maritime Alps. Some raptors are even increasing their range without help, including the sea-eagles of the Oostvaardersplassen, where a pair self-established in 2006, and have bred annually ever since.
Vultures are also recovering, though not without considerable assistance. A program in the Rhodope Mountains, between Bulgaria and Greece, aims to protect black and griffon vultures. These magnificent birds, which are among the largest of all flying creatures, are threatened by farmers who leave poisoned carcasses to kill predators. Teams with specially trained dogs track the carcasses and try to remove them before the vultures consume them. There are also many griffon vultures in the Balkans, and a new colony in Italy’s Abruzzo. Today, some vultures tagged in the Balkans are seen in Gargano and up to Abruzzo, so the populations are joining up. But if Europe is to recover its full suite and population density of large raptors and scavengers, some provision will have to be made for leaving carcasses of domesticated beasts in the field, a practice currently strictly forbidden by the EU, even in nature reserves.
Europe’s populations of carnivores, larger herbivores and scavengers are now healthier than they have been for at least 500 years. Despite its human population of 741 million, Europe is once again becoming a wild and environmentally exciting place. But as some of ancient Europe’s wild beasts are being resurrected, the familiar ‘wild’ Europe of hedgerow and field, celebrated in the works of Beatrix Potter, is in eclipse.
Review of Down to Earth
2018
BERNARD LATOUR IS one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists. Based in France, he brings a refreshingly non-Anglophone approach to the big political problems of our times. At the heart of his latest book are the hypotheses that ‘we can understand nothing about the politics of the last fifty years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center’, and that ‘a significant segment of the ruling classes…had concluded that the Earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else.’
These are strong and challenging statements, but as Latour says, how else to explain the ‘explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation…or the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation state’ that are so characteristic of much of current politics?
For Latour, President Trump’s announced intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement (which in fact can only take place on the day after the inauguration of the president following the next US presidential election), proved that the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues, and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality. Trump’s supporters see him as the great wall-builder, the man who will shelter America from a fast-changing and increasingly threatening world. Yet Trump adds to the very threats that Americans and others must face. His ongoing efforts to undermine the Paris agreement includes recent measures aimed at dismantling Obama-era regulations on old coal-fired plants that are likely to prove the most impactful of his actions yet in allowing CO2 concentrations to spiral upwards. How many walls will be needed to hold back the melting glaciers, advancing deserts and rising seas that the additional CO2 will trigger?
The issues of refugees and climate change are inextricably interwoven. Latour brings a unique focus to the subject, looking at bordercrossers from the perspective of tourism as well as migrants. As he says, the wealthy can afford to fly to developing countries for holidays, but the inhabitants of the third world cannot visit the homes of the wealthy they host. When they do try to reach wealthy nations, the poor find walls, fences and imprisonment barring their way. Latour makes us see that migration is fundamentally an economic issue: the rich wish to protect their privilege, and are willing to use racism, xenophobia and the nation state to achieve their ends.
Latour understands that many of those most adamantly opposed to migrants are not economically privileged. Their insecurities, which are based on genuine concerns, are used by the ultra-wealthy to protect their own interests. If we are ever to break the hold of the ultra-wealthy on the economically insecure, Latour argues that we need to build protections for those who feel threatened by migrants, and indeed for those under assault from a changing climate. The alternative is to let the wealthy continue to use the media they own to co-opt the poor with populist politics. This is a critical point. Yet just what protections we might offer is not spelled out in any detail by Latour.
There is no doubt that increasing globalisation is causing political stresses. But so is technological change. The very idea of political representation is itself becoming obsolete as the 24-hour news cycle and real-time reactions to events take hold. It seems inevitable that the next step in the evolution of democracy will involve some form of decision-making by an informed public, perhaps through the use of citizen juries. But the current world of politics is not that sort of place: it’s a world of left and hard right ideologists seeking election, and that is the milieu into which Latour launches his ideas.
Latour thinks that, if we are to move into a better future, two things need to happen simultaneously—we become re-attached to the soil that supports us (and thus become truly local) and at the same time, to become attached to the world. In effect it’s an elegant re-statement of the old axiom ‘think global, act local’. As we attempt to do this, the reality of our situation means that we will have to compromise. The inhabitants of carefully planned and regulated cities will somehow either have to find ways of accepting ever more migrants from a bourgeoning population (and Africa’s population alone will reach four billion by 2100) or they will have to pay for measures that eliminate the factors making life so intolerable for many in the developing world.
Latour is the master of the bon mot. Sentences like ‘Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments’ make Down to Earth an entertaining read. But it is far more than that. At its most profound it is a manifesto for a new kind of politics, and indeed a new way of being, in this age of climate disruption. Occasionally, however, the pithy summaries can get in the way of comprehension. ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy’, is delivered on page 2, but it is only far later that it is unpacked enough to make sense.
In attempting to find a starting place from which to build a better future, Latour goes back to the dying days of the reign of Louis XVI when, between January and May 1789, the king’s functionaries drew up a ‘ledger of complaints’ in which ‘all the villages in France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, regulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax’.
Latour sees this great geography of grievances as one of the triumphs of France’s revolutionary era. Perhaps, if the work had been done earlier, and actions had been taken to redress the grievances, the outcome of the French Revolution might have been different.
The period we are now emerging into is, in Latour’s view, no less dangerous than those endured by the French in the 1790s. A great, global geography of grievances could catalyze actions that could begin to slow the flow of migrants. It could also slow climate change itself. Yet after twenty-one years of negotiations wasted in the lead-up to the Paris climate agreement, we are coming to the problem very late in the day.
Our Twisted DNA
2019
TRACING GENEALOGIES HAS become immensely popular of late, and numerous companies offer to help you search through historical records or analyse your DNA. The pastime is no doubt enlivened by the scintillating possibility that you might discover noble blood, or even a notorious rogue, hiding in your family tree. But such discoveries generally don’t tell the searcher much; most of us have little idea of how
our genes are bequeathed to us at all.
Carl Zimmer’s interest in genetic inheritance began when his wife, Grace, was pregnant with their first child, and the couple met with a genetics counsellor. Zimmer, who has written books on evolution, neuroscience and bacteriology, didn’t see the point of the meeting, for they had already decided to have the child regardless of any genetic flaws that might be found. It was only when the counsellor asked the couple about their family histories that Zimmer realised how little he knew about his own, and began to be curious about his ancestry.
The result, many years later, is both two delightful, healthy daughters and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, a grand and sprawling book that investigates all aspects of inheritance, from ancient Roman law to childhood learning, and on to the bacteria that inhabit our belly buttons (which are surprisingly varied among individuals). Along the way, the book provides many amusing historical anecdotes and important scientific insights.
Inheritance, as a means of endowing privilege, has been of vital importance to people ever since the Neolithic period some ten thousand years ago. Pedigrees (from pé de grue, the foot of a crane, which resembles the connecting lines on ancestral trees) have long been used to justify social hierarchies. In times past, the European nobility would spend lavishly to draw up impressive (and often invented) pedigrees for themselves.
In 1715 the Irish noble Viscount Mountcashel published a pedigree in which he claimed to be able to trace his ancestry all the way back to Adam and Eve. In Mountcashel’s time, the popular understanding of heredity didn’t extend much beyond the theory that men planted seeds in the wombs of women, where they were nurtured. Yet it does seem odd for Mountcashel to have averred that, in all the ages since Adam, not one of his female ancestors had ever become pregnant by anyone but her wedded partner. ‘Son of a bitch’ is such a powerful insult not just because it slanders one’s mother, but because it questions one’s pedigree, and therefore the legitimacy of one’s position and inheritance.
If you are searching for your own noble blood, genetic research has both good and bad news for you. If you follow a pedigree, with all its forkings, back to the eighth century, you will trace over a trillion forks—an impossibility, because that is more than the number of people that have ever existed. When Joseph Chang developed the first statistical model of heredity in 1999 to explain the paradox, he established that many forks disappeared if our ancestors were closely related to one another, and that if you go back seven thousand years, ‘you reach a point in time when all the individuals who have any descendants among living people are ancestors of all living people’. So you might have pharaohs in your ancestry, and possibly caesars and holy Roman emperors as well. Yet because of the swapping of DNA fragments during sexual reproduction, the DNA of our ancestors becomes diluted very quickly. Only one per cent or less of an ancestor who lived four centuries ago is present in your DNA.
None of this, of course, was understood before the discovery of DNA in the 1950s. Early misconceptions about ancestry, along with a belief in superior breeds, were expressed in the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth century. In 1910 Henry Goddard, an American high school teacher turned psychologist, invented the word ‘moron’ to describe people with mental deficiencies. He was director of research at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, which had been established to care for ‘feeble-minded’ boys and girls. He believed that ‘degeneracy’, in the form of children with special needs, was increasing. The deputy principal of the school argued that ‘we must stop the increase. And that means to find out where they come from, why they come and what to do to check the stream.’
Goddard soon convinced himself that moronism was an inherited condition, and he wrote a book about the delinquent ancestry of Emma Wolverton, one of the wards at the Vineland School, giving her the pseudonym Deborah Kallikak (from the Greek for ‘good’ and ‘bad’). His best-selling book The Kallikak Family, published in 1912, propelled him to fame and remained influential well into the 1950s. It had made an impression on Hitler in the 1920s and informed the Reich’s racial hygiene laws, under which feeble-minded children and other ‘undesirable types’ were sterilised or euthanised.
Goddard’s argument that feeble-mindedness was passed down from generation to generation turned out to be entirely spurious. In the 1980s two genealogists reexamined the Wolverton (Kallikak) family tree as given by Goddard and discovered that Emma Wolverton’s supposed pedigree was as false as Mountcashel’s claim of descent from Adam.
Fraud and error have been an ongoing theme among those interested in establishing the genetic basis of intelligence. When the British psychologist Cyril Burt published a series of studies of identical twins, he convinced many that intelligence was determined by inheritance. But in 1966 the Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin read Burt’s work and ‘within ten minutes…knew…that it just had to be fake’. The test scores given for identical twins were correlated to within a tenth of one per cent: one such instance would be unlikely, but the twenty instances in Burt’s study were ‘astronomically improbable’. Not only had Burt invented his research findings, he’d published scientific papers under false names to give the impression that other researchers supported his work.
Although Burt gave twin studies a bad name, other more honest researchers persisted in the field. They have established that about half of the variation in intelligence test scores can be attributed to inheritance, though just which genes are responsible remains a puzzle. As Zimmer says:
While identical twins often end up with similar test scores, sometimes they don’t. If you get average scores on intelligence tests, it’s entirely possible your children may turn out to be geniuses. And if you’re a genius, you should be smart enough to recognize your children may not follow suit.
The non-genetic factors that bear upon intelligence are important because they can be influenced by technology and social policies. The introduction of iodine into salt in the US, for example, raised the average IQ by 3.5 points (because iodine is vital for the production of some growth hormones, even a mild deficiency during pregnancy can impede fetal brain development). Poverty, meanwhile, can dumb us down: studies show that although living in poverty does not reduce the heritability of intelligence in Europe, in the US it does. Could it be that the existence in Europe of universal health care and more generous social programs is protecting the intelligence of its most vulnerable citizens?
Some of the most fascinating material Zimmer covers concerns the phenomena of mosaicism and chimerism, in which individuals are made up of cells with differing genetic inheritances. Mosaicism can occur in a number of ways. For example, if a genetic mutation arises in a cell early in development, the descendants of that cell will make up a large proportion of the cells present in the adult. One outcome is a skin disorder known as CHILD, in which half of a person’s body is darkly pigmented, while the remainder is pale. Cancer is a kind of mosaicism that often arises later in life, when some genetic mutation allows a cell and its descendants to grow in an uncontrolled manner.
Chimerism (from the Greek word for a mythological monster whose body is composed of parts from different animals) is an even more intriguing condition. Chimeric individuals are composed of cells originating from two or more separate origins. The term ‘genetical chimera’ was first coined by Sir Peter Medawar, who used it to describe freemartins, female cattle that shared cells in the uterus with a male twin, and whose cellular makeup therefore includes both male (from the bull calf) and female cells.
Medawar’s pioneering studies of chimeras and immune tolerance led to breakthroughs in organ transplantation. He was also involved in the discovery of the first human to be recognised as a chimera. Known today only as ‘Mrs. McK’, she was twenty-five years old in 1953, when she decided to donate blood. When her blood sample was analysed, it was discovered to consist of both A and O types. A baffled doctor wondered if she had recently had a blood transfusion. But Mrs. McK had not had one, so the doctor sent a blood s
ample to an expert in London, who thought to ask her if she had a twin. Mrs. McK replied that she had a twin brother, but that he had died when he was three months old. Her type A blood cells were all that remained of him. Medawar, in describing the case, wrote:
There is no telling how long Mrs McK will remain a chimera, but she has now been so for twenty-eight years; probably, in the long run, her twin brother’s red blood cells will slowly disappear, and so pay back the still outstanding balance of his mortality.
Other kinds of chimeras are even more astonishing than those only detectable by blood tests. A baby born in a Seattle hospital in 1960 had a clitoris so large that it resembled a penis. When she was two years old she was operated upon to reduce the size of the organ. But after the removed tissue was examined, some cells were found to be genetically male. Further tests revealed that her entire body was a mixture of male and female cells. The child was the result of two eggs that had been fertilised by different sperm—one with male chromosomes, the other with female. Normally the result would have been twins, a boy and a girl. But the fertilised eggs had fused, creating a single chimeric individual.
Such phenomena illustrate the multifariousness of inheritance: we can be stitched together, from a genetic perspective, in ways that complicate our understanding of what an individual is. Unsurprisingly, the law is poorly equipped to deal with such nuances. In 2003 Lydia Fairchild, a pregnant, single mother of three living in Washington State, sought welfare benefits. In order to qualify she had to take a DNA test to prove that she and her former partner were indeed the parents of their children. The tests proved paternity but, according to the Department of Social Services, showed that Fairchild could not possibly be the mother of her children.