The End of the End of the Earth Read online

  My visit coincided with the news of a breakthrough in technology for making ethanol from cellulose. From a climate perspective, the lure of efficient biofuel production is irresistible, but to Janzen it looks like another disaster. The richest land in Costa Rica is already given over to monocultural agribusiness. What would happen to the country if second-growth forest could fuel its cars? As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on Earth is safe. Like globalism, climatism alienates. Americans today live far from the ecological damage that their consumption habits cause, and even if future consumers are more enlightened about carbon footprints, and fill their tanks with certified green fuel, they’ll still be alienated. Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” can avert the complete denaturing of the world.

  Guanacaste is already the last significant expanse of Pacific dry forest in Central America. To preserve even some of the species unique to it, the reserve has to last forever. “It’s like terrorism,” Janzen said. “We have to succeed every day, the terrorists have to succeed only once.” The questions that he and Hallwachs ask about the future have little to do with global warming. They wonder how to make the ACG financially self-sustaining, and how to root its mission permanently in Costa Rican society, and how to ensure that its water resources aren’t all drawn off to irrigate cropland, and how to prepare for future Costa Rican politicians who want to level it for cellulosic ethanol.

  The question that most foreign visitors to Guanacaste ask is how its model can be applied to other centers of biodiversity in the tropics. The answer is that it can’t be. Our economic system encourages monocultural thinking: there exists an optimal solution, a best conservation product, and once we identify it we can scale it up and sell it universally. As the contrast between Amazon Conservation and the ACG suggests, preserving biological diversity requires a corresponding diversity of approach. Good programs—the Carr Foundation’s Gorongosa Restoration Project in Mozambique, Island Conservation’s rewilding of islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, WildEarth Guardians’ fight to save the sagelands of the American West, EuroNatur’s blending of cultural and biological conservation in southeastern Europe, to name a few—not only act locally but, by necessity, think locally as well.

  During my time with Janzen, he rarely mentioned other projects. What concerns him is what he loves concretely: the specific dry-forest hunting grounds that he uses as a tropical field biologist, the unprivileged Costa Ricans who work for the ACG and live near its borders. Sitting in a chair outside his forest hut, he was an unstoppable font of story. There was the story of Oliver North’s airstrip for the contras, on the Santa Elena peninsula, and how Santa Elena became part of the ACG. The story of Janzen’s discovery that dry-forest moth species spend part of their life cycle in humid forest, and how this led him and Hallwachs to expand the scope of their already ambitious project. And the story of the thousand truckloads of orange peel that the ACG took off the hands of an orange-juice plant and agreed to dispose of, in exchange for fourteen hundred hectares of prime forest, and how a mischief-making environmentalist then sued the juice company for illegally dumping the peels on public land, even though, by the time the suit was settled, they’d decayed into a rich, reforestation-promoting loam. The story of how Janzen and Hallwachs learned to do business with multiple landowners simultaneously, making all-or-nothing offers for bundles of properties, to avoid being taken hostage by an individual holdout. The story of the landowner who invested the proceeds of his sale of ranchland in irrigation for sugarcane production outside the ACG—an example of conservation’s reversal of geographical entropy, its sorting of mixed-used land into areas of stringent protection and intensive exploitation. And the story of the ACG’s redesignation of its schoolteachers as “secretaries,” because “schoolteacher” wasn’t a recognized civil-service position.

  In 1985, when Janzen and Hallwachs set out to create the ACG, with no training or experience in conservation work, they couldn’t have imagined any of these stories. Guanacaste became the thing that happened to them, the life they chose to live. It may be true, of course, that “where there’s life there’s death,” as Janzen is fond of saying, and I did wonder if the vision of a climate-denatured planet, a world of switchgrass fields and eucalyptus plantations, is secretly appealing to human beings, because, having so much less life in it, it would have so much less death. Certainly there was death all around me in the forest, palpably more death than in a suburb or a farm field—jaguars killing deer, deer killing saplings, wasps killing caterpillars, boas killing birds, and birds killing everything imaginable, according to their specialty. But this was because it was a living forest.

  From a global perspective, it can seem that the future holds not only my own death but a second, larger death of the familiar world. Across the river from the lowest-lying of Amazon Conservation’s research stations, Los Amigos, are miles and miles of forest ripped apart by gold miners. The ACG is surrounded by agribusiness and coastal development that its existence has served to concentrate. But within Los Amigos are quetzals, tinamous, trumpeters, and everything else that their ongoing presence represents. Within the ACG is a forest that didn’t exist thirty years ago, with hundred-foot trees and five species of large cat, sea turtles digging their nests by the ocean, and flocks of parakeets sociably feasting on the seeds of fruiting trees. The animals may not be able to thank us for allowing them to live, and they certainly wouldn’t do the same thing for us if our positions were reversed. But it’s we, not they, who need life to have meaning.

  CAPITALISM IN HYPERDRIVE

  (on Sherry Turkle)

  Sherry Turkle is a singular voice in the discourse about technology. She’s a skeptic who was once a believer, a clinical psychologist among the industry shills and the literary handwringers, an empiricist among the cherry-picking anecdotalists, a moderate among the extremists, a realist among the fantasists, a humanist but not a Luddite: a grown-up. She holds an endowed chair at MIT and is on close collegial terms with the roboticists and affective-computing engineers who work there. Unlike Jaron Lanier, who bears the stodgy weight of being a Microsoft guy, or Evgeny Morozov, whose perspective is Belarusian, Turkle is a trusted and respected insider. As such, she serves as a kind of conscience for the tech world.

  Turkle’s book Alone Together was a damning report on human relationships in the digital age. By observing people’s interactions with robots, and by interviewing them about their computers and phones, she charted the ways in which new technologies render older values obsolete. When we replace human caregivers with robots, or talking with texting, we begin by arguing that the replacements are “better than nothing” but end up considering them “better than anything”—cleaner, less risky, less demanding. Paralleling this shift is a growing preference for the virtual over the real. Robots don’t care about people, but Turkle’s subjects were shockingly quick to settle for the feeling of being cared for, and, similarly, to prefer the sense of community that social media deliver, because it comes without the hazards and commitments of a real-world community. In her interviews, again and again, Turkle observed a deep disappointment with human beings, who are flawed and forgetful, needy and unpredictable, in ways that machines are wired not to be.

  Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation, extends her critique, with less emphasis on robots and more on the dissatisfaction with technology reported by her recent interview subjects. She takes their dissatisfaction as a hopeful sign, and her book is straightforwardly a call to arms: Our rapturous submission to digital technology has led to an atrophying of human capacities like empathy and self-reflection, and the time has come to reassert ourselves, behave like adults, and put technology in its place. As in Alone Together, Turkle’s argument derives its power from the breadth of her research and the acuity of her psychological insight. The people she interviews have adopted new technologies in pursuit of greate
r control, only to feel controlled by them. The likably idealized selves that they’ve created with social media leave their real selves all the more isolated. They communicate incessantly but are afraid of face-to-face conversations; they worry, often nostalgically, that they’re missing out on something fundamental.

  Conversation is Turkle’s organizing principle because so much of what constitutes humanity is threatened when we replace it with electronic communication. Conversation presupposes solitude, for example, because it’s in solitude that we learn to think for ourselves and develop a stable sense of self, which is essential for taking other people as they are. (If we’re unable to be separated from our smartphones, Turkle says, we consume other people “in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.”) Through the conversational attention of parents, children acquire a sense of enduring connectedness and a habit of talking about their feelings, rather than simply acting on them. (Turkle believes that regular family conversations help “inoculate” children against bullying.) When you speak to someone in person, you’re forced to recognize his or her full human reality, which is where empathy begins. (A recent study shows a steep decline in empathy, as measured by standard psychological tests, among college students of the smartphone generation.) And conversation carries the risk of boredom, the condition that smartphones have taught us most to fear, which is also the condition in which patience and imagination are developed.

  Turkle examines every aspect of conversation—with the self in solitude, with family and friends, with teachers and romantic partners, with colleagues and clients, with the larger polity—and reports on the electronic erosion of each. Facebook, Tinder, MOOCs, compulsive texting, the tyranny of office email, and slacktivism all come in for paddling. But the most moving and representative section of the book concerns the demise of family conversation. According to Turkle’s young interviewees, the vicious circle works like this: “Parents give their children phones. Children can’t get their parents’ attention away from their phones, so children take refuge in their own devices. Then, parents use their children’s absorption with phones as permission to have their own phones out as much as they wish.” For Turkle, the onus lies squarely on the parents: “The most realistic way to disrupt this circle is to have parents step up to their responsibilities as mentors.” She acknowledges that this can be difficult; that parents feel afraid of falling behind their children technologically; that conversation with young children takes patience and practice; that it’s easier to demonstrate parental love by snapping lots of pictures and posting them to Facebook. But, unlike in Alone Together, where Turkle was content to diagnose, the tone of Reclaiming Conversation is therapeutic and hortatory. She calls on parents to understand what’s at stake in family conversations—“the development of trust and self-esteem,” “the capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy”—and to recognize their own vulnerability to the enchantments of tech. “Accept your vulnerability,” she says. “Remove the temptation.”

  * * *

  Reclaiming Conversation is best appreciated as a sophisticated self-help book. It makes a compelling case that children develop better, students learn better, and employees perform better when their mentors set good examples and carve out spaces for face-to-face interactions. Less compelling is Turkle’s call for collective action. She believes that we can and must design technology “that demands that we use it with greater intention.” She writes approvingly of a smartphone interface that, “instead of encouraging us to stay connected as long as possible, would encourage us to disengage.” But an interface like this would threaten almost every business model in Silicon Valley, where enormous market capitalizations are predicated on keeping consumers riveted to their devices. Turkle hopes that consumer demand, which has forced the food industry to create healthier products, might eventually force the tech industry to do the same. But the analogy is imperfect. Food companies make money by selling something essential, not by placing targeted advertising in a pork chop or by mining the data that a person provides while eating it. The analogy is also politically unsettling. Since platforms that discourage engagement are less profitable, they would have to charge a premium that only affluent, well-educated consumers of the sort that shop at Whole Foods are likely to pay.

  Although Reclaiming Conversation touches on the politics of privacy and labor-saving robots, Turkle shies from the more radical implications of her findings. When she notes that Steve Jobs forbade tablets and smartphones at the dinner table and encouraged his family to talk about books and history, or when she cites Mozart, Kafka, and Picasso on the value of undistracted solitude, she’s describing the habits of highly effective people. And, indeed, the family that is doing well enough to buy and read her new book may learn to limit its exposure to technology and do even better. But what of the great mass of people too anxious or lonely to resist the lure of tech, too poor or overworked to escape the vicious circles? Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, contrasts the world of a “peon” airport lounge—saturated in advertising, filled with mesmerizing screens—with the quiet, ad-free world of a business lounge: “To engage in playful, inventive thinking, and possibly create wealth for oneself during those idle hours spent at an airport, requires silence. But other people’s minds, over in the peon lounge (or at the bus stop), can be treated as a resource—a standing reserve of purchasing power.” Our digital technologies aren’t politically neutral. The young person who cannot or will not be alone, converse with family, go out with friends, attend a lecture, or perform a job without monitoring her smartphone is an emblem of our political economy’s leechlike attachment to our very bodies. Digital technology is capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute.

  It’s tempting to correlate the rise of “digital democracy” with steeply rising levels of income inequality; to see more than just an irony. But maybe the erosion of humane values is a price that most people are willing to pay for the “costless” convenience of Google, the comforts of Facebook, and the reliable company of iPhones. The appeal of Reclaiming Conversation lies in its evocation of a time, not so long ago, when conversation and privacy and nuanced debate weren’t boutique luxuries. It’s not Turkle’s fault that her book can be read as a handbook for the privileged. She’s addressing a middle class in which she herself grew up, invoking a depth of human potential that used to be widespread. But the middle, as we know, is disappearing.

  MAY YOUR LIFE BE RUINED

  In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw something in my face, some unconscious furrowing of my brow, and called out sarcastically: “You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don’t feel bad about dropping bombs on someone’s homeland.”

  I could have answered that it’s possible to feel bad about both birds and bombs; that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it seemed to me that the birdseller was saying something true about the problem of nature conservation in a world of human conflict, something not so easily refuted. He kissed his fingers to suggest how good the birds tasted, and I kept frowning at the cages.

  To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and nobody eats songbirds and only naughty farmboys shoot them, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling. Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe, bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.

  Italian hunters and poachers are
the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and snap with songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebird. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law.

  In the European Union, however, there are at least theoretical constraints on the killing of migratory birds. Public opinion in the EU tends to favor conservation, and a variety of nature-protection groups are helping governments enforce the law. (In Sicily, formerly a hot spot for raptor killing, poaching has been all but eliminated, and some of the former poachers have even become birdwatchers.) Where the situation for migrants is not improving is in the non-EU Mediterranean. In fact, when I visited Albania and Egypt, I found that it’s becoming dramatically worse.

  * * *

  February 2012 brought eastern Europe its coldest weather in fifty years. Geese that normally winter in the Danube Valley flew south to escape it, and some fifty thousand of them descended on the plains of Albania, starving and exhausted. Every one of them was exterminated. Men using shotguns and old Russian Kalashnikovs mowed them down while women and children carried the carcasses into towns for sale to restaurants. Many of the geese had been banded by researchers to the north; one hunter told me he’d seen a band from Greenland. Although nobody in Albania is going hungry, the country has one of the lowest per capita incomes in Europe. The unusual influx of salable geese was literally a windfall for local farmers and villagers.