Dear friend—
i. my boyfriend tells me that in some towns, the wildlife begs less deer. hunting, he says, is often good and necessary. this weighs as untruth in my chest, though i understand the science. ii. my mother cannot bear to look at roadkill, as though each dead animal is a child she could have nursed back to health. i used to scoff at her squeamishness, thought it childish. have since realized she can’t look because she feels their deaths in her own body. iii. once, in the car with my boyfriend and my roommate, the night already bled into the trees, a deer ran in front of his car. he swerved into the bushes; narrowly missed some hulking stone. when he sprung out, surveying the damage, he shucked his flannel and looked so good in a white t-shirt. when the car finally stopped and i blinked back to life, he asked, is everyone okay? — and i had forgotten, for a moment, that there were other bodies in the world besides my own. months later, i learned my roommate was concussed that night; had told no one but her mother. iv. once, i woke to the hill below my dorm room blanketed in white, and i beckoned my roommate to the window. three deer trod, a mother and her children, each hoofprint in the snow a please, please, please. soon they turned and ran down, to the city street below and all its fouling beasts. v. how might deer mourn? vi. how do we tell them they are a tithe to right our wrongs? vii. months after, dream-dark and every tree a phantom, i am back in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s car. i ask him how the crash has changed him. i drive slower, he says. minutes later he is pumping the brakes for a deer in the oncoming lane; flashes his headlights to warn a second driver. the other car comes to a stop. the deer continues into the trees, sure-footed, still breathing.
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Two summers ago I interned for an environmental advocacy organization. It was the second summer of the pandemic and I had just finished my first year of grad school. With a cohort of twenty-some virtual interns, I wrote letters to the editor, phone banked, worked on social media posts, and helped to plan events.
I learned that phone banking is in my top 5 Least Favorite Modes of Social Interaction. I learned that it is hard to teach old people how to use Zoom but surprisingly not that hard, more than a year into the pandemic. I learned that the legacy environmental movement is quite old, quite white. I also learned about spotted lanternflies.
The organization had at least one event on spotted lanternflies that I can remember, and I spent at least one night calling dozens of strangers to ask if they wanted to join us on Zoom some Wednesday in the future to learn more about the bugs.
If you haven’t heard the buzz, spotted lanternflies are invasive species, and Pennsylvanians have marching orders from the Department of Environmental Protection to kill them on sight. I had never seen one before. As someone who can’t even bear to touch the water beetles that catch the waves in my grandmother's pool, I had no desire to see one.
This summer, I have seen a total of eight spotted lanternflies.
Three I saw all at once, against an apartment building behind my local Giant Eagle. They congregate along the East Busway, it seems, as that is where I've seen every one.
Spotted lanternflies fuck up tree sap and kill plants that grow food like grapes and apples. They are a scourge that has expanded their reach from PA, first spotted circa 2014, to 11 other states.1
My friend, I confess I have not gathered up the courage to kill one.
I will be honest and say that letting the spotted lanternflies live has nothing to do with any personal moral conundrums about a bug's equal right to call this planet home or even the environmental Thoughts I share later in this letter. Rather, I hate looking at dead bugs even more than I hate looking at live ones. They give me the heebie-jeebies. The thought of allowing one to touch me—or, imagine! voluntarily touching one—stirs something reptilian in the back of my throat and my brain.
But the spotted lanternflies do remind me of Some Thoughts I had had a while ago.
.
One of the first assignments I received in my penultimate semester of grad school posited this: "Can population growth be good for the environment in the presence of quality institutions?
The question seems to assume that population growth could be good for the environment if we had good institutions (or technology, for that matter). I’m doubtful of this, as it seems based on the premise that we know what is “good” for the environment in the first place.
When I received this prompt, I had recently finished reading Under a White Sky, in which Elizabeth Kolbert surveys several ways that humans are trying to combat the consequences of climate change.2 She travels to see the levees in New Orleans; the revitalization of the pupfish in Death Valley; the scientists working on carbon capture and sequestration in Iceland.
The entire time, she's wondering—is this the right thing to do? Could we, perhaps, be making things worse?
In the case of levees, we know it’s absolutely making things worse. More levees means more subsidence, more sinking. It's a dirty bandaid that actually infects the wound rather than healing it.
But with the other interventions, she (and, sometimes, the scientists working on them) are not so sure. Genetically modifying coral to make them more resilient to temperature changes seems noble—but we humans have a history of botched attempts to positively change ecosystems and the environment.
For example, Kolbert notes, cane toads were introduced in Australia as an alternative to harmful pesticides used to tackle cane beetles, which threatened the country’s sugar plantations. But the poisonous cane toad proved too resilient and began spreading throughout the continent, wreaking its own ecological havoc along the way. Australia opened Pandora’s box, unleashing the toad hordes, and hasn’t been able to shut the lid since.
All this to say, we can hardly ever ascertain which ecological interventions we make will, in the long-run, be net positive. Science does not give us a crystal ball.
It also doesn’t answer the more philosophical question—net positive for whom? In Australia, the cane beetle was a problem because it fed on cash crops. But who put the cash crops there in the first place? Perhaps sugar plantations irreversibly changed the ecosystems before the cane beetles went to town.
I’m drawn back to the fact that mass extinction events have happened before our current ones, that animals have been going extinct and earth’s climate has been changing since before humans ever discovered fire. But now that we are the dominant species on the planet. By our numbers, our power, our systems, our technologies, we now decide what lives or dies.
But we have that power without having much sense of what any animal or an ecosystem or the planet wants. On top of that, we have competing visions from all walks of life and corner of the globe when it comes to how we prioritize and value the countless animals and ecosystems on our planet.
Let’s return to that prompt: “Can population growth be good for the environment in the presence of quality institutions?” So what is “good for the environment?” Does it mean returning it to as much of a pre-human state as we can? Does it mean repairing the damage we’ve done? Does it mean reparations for the species we’ve driven extinct, or the sustainable use of resources to minimize disruptions to ecosystems? Is good for the environment good for the cane toad? The cane beetle? The sugar crop? The vegetation that came before the sugar crop? Ad infinitum.
.
All this isn’t to say that I think we should give up on stopping climate change or saving endangered species or reforesting the Amazon. Or, that we shouldn’t kill lanternflies on sight, for that matter.
Rather, I just think we’ve become so far removed from the environment that we face fare more unknowns than knowns, and we should perhaps act more like it.
Personally (as a non-scientist, non-ecologist, non-geologist), I have less faith in getting our hands into the mix, and more comfortable with the idea of simply stepping away from the pot.
Writer and architect Anthony Fieldman suggests as much—that the best interventin may be leaving well enough alone.3
He claims that reforesting just 48 million acres could offset 100% of all our carbon emissions. That's just 12% of the land we currently use for cropland.
(I'm doubtful of the precision of this accounting, as the carbon sequestration capacity of forests is dependent on so many factors, and representing all of these potentially rewilded forests with a single number seems impossible. However, I'm ready to believe the thrust of the stat—that it would take a surprisingly small amount of rewilded forests to mitigate our emissions.)
I also wonder about the cultural assumptions behind this claim—that we can continue on, business as usual, if we just plant some trees. That we can continue our endless consumption and energy use if we just plant some trees.
Fieldman is explicit that this plan only covers our carbon emissions, not the wealth of other damages we do to the planet, like toxic chemical pollution and habitat degradation. Covering those damages might require a whole 'nother essay—or several books, more like.
But his essay brings to mind two possibilities for more sustainable societies (that is, societies whose activities fit inside the planet’s capacity to support them.)
Either we can try to return to the earth, in the hippie fashion—living amongst nature, reducing our footprint, giving up much of our modern life, etc.—or we can create a clear delineation between human activity and the natural world.
Imagine, a country like the U.S. split between megacities and collections of towns on one side, and millions of acres of national parks on the other side. Allowing the nature there to return to something like homeostasis, while we go about our lives on the other side of the bubble. More conscious, more sustainable, for sure, but ultimately keeping our dirty hands out of the day-to-day processes of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.
I worry about the cultural implications of such a separation. Among other concerns, can we really appreciate nature if we don't experience it? (This is the ethos behind national parks and natural history museums).
Many of our current crises came from the hubris that we humans are separate from nature, and can therefore separate ourselves—even rise above—the problems we create for it.
But as someone who cares deeply about the future of the planet and the damage we do to it, but also very much enjoys air conditioning and the internet and is perhaps not ready to embrace all that nature has to offer, including lanternflies and the rest of its creepy crawlies ... there's something deeply attractive—tempting?—about this idea.
I’m mulling it over.
Thanks for reading,
—mia xx
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/15/spotted-lanterfly-killing-new-york
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617060/under-a-white-sky-by-elizabeth-kolbert/
https://medium.com/@anthonyfieldman/the-case-for-the-vertical-farm-3ee95de2756d