Peak Everything (19 page)

And so here we are today, in a human world dominated by money, news, sports, entertainment, employment, and investment — a world in which nature appears as something peripheral and mostly unnecessary. Nature is merely a pile of resources, a segment of the economy, at best something to be preserved for aesthetic or sentimental reasons.

But in domesticating plants and animals we also domesticated ourselves. Certain personalities were selected for, others discouraged. The abilities to conform and to delay gratification were selected for (at least among the producing and middle classes); the insistence on autonomy and freedom was discouraged. Meanwhile we domesticated other animals with similar objectives in mind: we wanted docile pets or willing field workers.

Again: we are like caged birds — except that our captors are others like ourselves. In effect, we have built our own cages.

When Bittner occasionally comes across a parrot that he knows was hand-raised, he notices the difference between it and its wild cousins. At one point he is offered the “ownership” of a captive blue-crowned conure named Bucky. He immediately accepts the bird, hoping to have found a mate for Connor — a solitary blue-crown who has led a lonely existence in the red-crowned flock. Bucky turns out to be another male, but never mind: both birds are at first delighted to be in each other's company. Yet gradually their relationship sours: Bucky is unsuited to life in the wild, while Connor is loath to give up his freedom. Bittner comments on Bucky's “chronic possessiveness”:

On the subject of freedom versus captivity Bittner writes:

If only European pioneers had harbored similar sentiments about the wild peoples they encountered.

As Bittner points out in his book, ornithologists are unsure about the descent of parrots, which have no clear relatives among other birds and must have diverged from some unknown common avian progenitor many millions of years ago. There are about 330 recognized parrot species in the world (most are endangered) — birds large and small, displaying nearly every color of the rainbow. All share the defining characteristics of hooked bill, the presence of a cere (a band of flesh above the upper mandible), and zygodactylic feet (two toes point forward, two backward).

As all parrot lovers know, these birds are eerily intelligent and endlessly entertaining. They are natural clowns, spending much of their time in play and other social behavior.

Captive parrots can, of course, be trained to talk. But there is some controversy as to whether their speech is necessarily limited to mere mimicry, or whether it can develop into genuine communication of concepts and abstractions. For many years Dr. Irene Pepperberg of the University of Arizona has worked with an African grey parrot named Alex who has learned to describe unfamiliar objects, ask for what he wants, and verbalize his own emotional states in English.
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Alex has become famous for his abilities, but critics have suggested that he is merely a fluke. So Pepperberg and her graduate students are using their methods to train other parrots to do the same things. They are also using rigorous controls to avoid cueing the birds via the “clever Hans” effect. Alex and his avian colleagues evince numeric cognition, categorization and word comprehension among other abilities previously assumed to exist perhaps among the great apes, but certainly not among birds.

“What matter is orange and three-cornered?” Pepperberg asks Alex.

Alex is permitted to examine several objects on a tray before answering. They consist of differently shaped pieces of cloth and other materials in varying colors.

“Want a nut,” he says.

“I know, I'll give you a nut,” replies Pepperberg.

“Wanna go back,” says Alex, meaning into his cage.

Pepperberg loses patience. “C'mon Alex,” she implores.

Alex replies, “I'm sorry.”
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In San Francisco the cherry-headed conure is a non-native species. What would happen if it proliferated there? That's a fair question. After all, look at what has befallen North American songbirds because of the starling, another bird that was introduced by humans — in this case, from Europe (Mozart was reputed to have had a pet starling of which he was particularly fond). Starlings crowd out the natives in cities and suburbs across the continent. One could imagine a local ecological horror story in the case of parrots as well. Suppose the San Francisco wild conures were to thrive, finding niches throughout the West Coast. Might they displace towhees, goldfinches, or hummingbirds?

That's not likely to happen: few introduced species are as successful as the starling. And if the conures of Telegraph Hill do manage to survive, they will have achieved a certain poetic justice. After all, it's not as if parrots are entirely strangers to North America. The continent once had its own native parrot, the Carolina parakeet, which was driven to extinction in 1918 by farmers and sportsmen who shot the birds by the tens of thousands. From a parrot's point of view, the conures' colonization of San Francisco's urban ecosystem might be seen as making up for lost territory.

Of course, the most threatening non-native species of all is Homo sapiens. The vast majority of successful colonizing species have arrived in their new habitats because of deliberate or inadvertent human action. And humans themselves — by killing “pests” and “weeds” and encouraging the growth of the few plants and animals they (we) have domesticated — take up the ecological space of thousands of creatures.

Invasive species typically don't follow the local ecological rules by which native species have evolved. Relatively undisturbed ecosystems tend to reach a climax phase, characterized by balanced predator/prey feedback loops that keep population fluctuations within a moderate range and give rise to what appears to be widespread cooperation among species. Invasive plants or animals upset these balances and often compete ruthlessly with natives. Invaded ecosystems have to adjust to the intruders, and this can take years, decades, or centuries.

We humans have upset habitats everywhere we have gone, starting in the Pleistocene. Twenty or thirty thousand years ago we managed to get pretty good at making and using weapons like spears and spear throwers, which enabled us to kill big animals such as mammoths and mastodons. As we spread around the world we killed off one species of megafauna after another. Only after staying in particular places for millennia did we learn the local limits and develop cultural forms that enjoined us to conserve. Evidence suggests that the Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians did-n't start out as intuitive ecologists; they learned that attitude as the result of trial and error.

I've been spending a lot of time in airports and airplanes lately as I travel far and wide to spread information about Peak Oil, so I tend to spend less time at home. I do get to meet interesting people, but the wear and tear is undeniable. Indeed, much of this essay was written on planes and buses, in airports and hotels.

These are about as “unnatural” as any environment one can find. Here it is difficult to take Gary Snyder's words, quoted above (p. 97), seriously: there is little or no evidence of wildness in the conventional sense to be found in any of these places (when I was in the Tucson airport recently I noted some wayward sparrows chirping anxiously in the rafters of the ticketing lobby; while it was a pleasure to hear and see them in that sterile environment, I feared for these lost creatures). Of course, in the broadest sense, as Snyder argues, everything people do is “natural,” including building and inhabiting airports, since people are no less biological organisms than are bacteria, scorpions, possums, sparrows, or parrots.

At the same time, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” does make sense at some level. At the core of the category of the “unnatural” is the human social construct described above (p. 103) — that of full-time division of labor in a context of agricultural production and city-building.

Why have no other animals built equivalent civilizations? Why no parrot skyscrapers, symphonies, or supermarkets? For better or worse, we humans have certain unique genetically endowed abilities. We are omnivorous — so, like other omnivores (crows, raccoons, rats, cockroaches) we are clever and adaptable. We have a descended larynx that enables us to make a wide variety of vocal sounds — hence language. And we have opposable thumbs that enable us easily to make and use tools. With language and cleverness we get the abilities to generalize and to plan ahead. Combine those abilities with ever-evolving tool systems and the results are formidable.

While parrots can be trained to speak in context, most linguists would say that this is still qualitatively different from human verbal communication. And of course it is. But contemplating what that
difference is and how it might have arisen brings up the questions: Did humans develop language and tools
because
they are special and different from other animals? Or did humans
become
special in their own eyes because they developed language and tools? Most people assume the former, but doing so just seems to widen the gulf between ourselves and the rest of nature.