Natural Wonder/s

    The world of wonder almost parallels the world of wander.  By exploring the world around and within us, we begin to see more and more.  The world will never starve for want of wonders, wrote G.K. Chesterton, but only for want of wonder.  That quote stood out for the prolific author of both adult and children's books (with 20 million copies sold worldwide), Katherine Rundell.  Her recent book, Vanishing Treasures begins with this: A common swift, in its lifetime, flies about 1.2 million miles; enough to fly to the moon and back twice over, and then once more to the moon.  For at least ten months of every year, it never ceases flying; sky-washed, sleeping on the wing, or has no need to land (the swift, like the porpoise, can shut off half of its brain to sleep while the other half functions normally and stays alert; the swift also eats only what bugs are in the air and needs to find 100,000 such bugs each day when breeding).   When it does land to lay its eggs and build its nests, it becomes quite vulnerable, its leg muscles weak due to rarely touching the ground; yet the swift somehow manages to build a nest and lay its eggs.  Unfortunately, that nest is the the one nest poached by those seeking to make the infamous birds nest soup so popular in China.  Continued Rendell: The greatest lie that humans ever told is that the Earth is ours, an at our disposal.  It's a lie with the power to destroy us all.  We must cease from telling that lie, because the world is so rare, and so wildly fine.  It is populated with strangenesses and astonishments.  And to think that all of this started with penguins.  Wait, penguins?  

     Now backing way up to my early years of travel, my youthful days of being able to endure long flights with cheap fares, and exploring away with a carefree lack of reservations (as I mentioned to a friend, those abilities seem to somehow fade as you age), I was in New Zealand when I saw my first penguins in the wild, and they were blue penguins.  They were smaller than I had expected, but then I didn't exactly know what to expect, but my only "souvenirs" from the country were 2 keychains with replicas of those blue penguins.  And that was that, in regards to my interest in penguins...until National Geographic showed a trailer that showed hundreds of juvenile penguins jumping off of a 50' high wall of ice into the freezing waters below.  Some did so gracefully, others seemed to fall as awkwardly as you or I would if unexpectedly pushed.  But apparently this was not only survivable, but a necessary step if they wanted to survive (they needed to be in the waters to feed).  So penguins...who really thinks of them?  And who knew that they had feathers and that some of those feathers had "barbs and hooks" to break up ice that may build up on their bodies?  Or that there are currently 18 species of penguins that live all over the world, from Africa (yes, Africa) to Antarctica, and even the Galapagos, adaptations all during their 60 million years on this planet (us? -- not even close to one million years).  They can hold their breath (an average of 20 minutes), swim long distances (an average of 1000+ miles during breeding season), and swim far faster than a human (an average of 7 mph)...and they are for the most part, facing the threat of going extinct (over 50% of the species, wrote National Geographic).

  

                          

 

    So that was penguins, but they were only the beginning for Rundell's book.  When one hears about endangered species, generally they are the ones fairly common: rhinos, elephants, pangolins, and such.  But would you add to that list bears, wolves, seahorses, bats or giraffes?  There's more of course, so quickly summing up a few from her book, ponder these natural wonders: --Tuna can cross the Atlantic in 40 days, from Iceland to Miami, and Mauritania to Cuba; --spiders eat more insects than birds and bats combined (its "silk" is 5x stronger than a strand of steel of the same width, although a strand of spider silk long enough to encircle the Earth would weigh less than a pound); --in medieval times storks, herons, crows, cranes and others were commonly served in game "pies," and yes, that 4 & 20 blackbirds "baked in a pie" rhyme was a true recipe; --it takes the death of 1660 pangolins to make up a single ton of black market "scales," and a single illegal shipment can contain 7 tons of scales; --the elephant's trunk has over 40,000 muscles (humans have about 650 muscles in our entire body), and "can pluck a single blade of grass, or lift 350 kilos," and can smell water from 2 miles away; --wolves can hear you approaching from 9 miles away in open country; --in both Utah and England you can shoot as many hares as you wish all year long; --a bear's smell is 100x better than ours (a polar bear can smell you from 18 miles away); --a hermit crab's claw can grip with up to 3300 newtons of force, more than the 2200 of a wolf's bite; --some Greenland sharks are thought to be nearly 600 years old; --the US continues to import giraffe parts with impunity; of the 68,000 thought to be left in the world, US hunters shot and imported nearly 3800 of them last year.  Wrote Rundell: We risk losing all this magnificence before we begin to understand it.  Every species in this book is endangered or contains a subspecies that is endangered -- because there is almost no creature on the planet, now, for which that is not the case...Time is running short.  In the last fifty years, the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent.  We have lost more than half of all wild things that lived.

  

     But let's return to how we humans are faring, which means back to the disease of tuberculosis.  Imagine an article titled The Plague That Won't Die, as the New York Review did recently.  Not only won't TB die, but as the article noted: Nearly a century and a half after Koch's [microbiologist Robert Koch] first attempts to devise an inoculation, we still have no effective vaccines.  As mentioned in an earlier post, the recent book by John Green provided a quick glimpse of just how formidable this disease has proven: ...over a million people died of tuberculosis in 2023.  That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria, typhoid, and war combined.  Just in the past two centuries, tuberculosis caused over a billion human deaths.  One estimate, from Frank Ryan's Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, maintains that TB has killed around one in seven people who've ever lived.   Covid-19 displaced tuberculosis as the world's deadliest infectious disease from 2020 through 2022; but in 2023, TB regained the status it has held for most of what we know of human history, killing 1,250,000 people.  TB once again became our deadliest infection.  And whatever your impressions of TB may have been, since several strains are already antibiotic-resistant, the disease can be much worse (the World Health Organization noted that last year, 1 in 6 diseases had now become resistant to antibiotics).  Noted the piece in NY Review: ...in the lymphatic system it causes swollen masses that can press on the vocal chords, robbing victims of their voices; in the guts it causes raw, bleeding ulcers and obstructed bowels.  The disease is airborne: colonies of bacteria are exhaled from the lungs of a person with pulmonary TB in a fine mist of particles that can linger suspended in the air for hours.  How long the bacteria survive in the air depends on the surrounding conditions; in spaces with poor ventilation --an enclosed car, for instance or a windowless room-- they can last hours or even days.   

     Cut!  No, forget TB and consider yourself actually getting cut, as in a severe cut (and who hasn't seen those endless stabbings on British mysteries?).  Wrote Sebastian Junger (who suffered an abdominal hemorrhage and underwent emergency surgery): The human body has around ten pints of blood in it -- or "units" as doctors prefer.  Women tend to have less blood than men, and children have less blood than adults, but in all cases, a healthy person can lose around 15 percent of their blood without much effect. (Women commonly lose that much in childbirth)  At around 30 percent blood loss, those --three to four units-- the body starts to go into compensatory shock to protect its vital organs.  The heart rate increases to make up for low blood pressure, breathing gets faster and shallower, and capillaries and small blood vessels constrict to keep blood where it's needed most, in the heart, lungs, and brain...At 40 percent blood loss, the body starts to cross over into a state from which it cannot recover on its own...The brain, heart, and vital organs are not getting enough oxygen and are beginning to shut down, which accelerates a process of acid toxicity triggered by the initial shock of blood loss.  Acidosis can kill people even though they received enough blood to keep their heart beating.  A person can die in two or three minutes if a major artery is severed or can hang on for hours if the blood loss is slower, as it was for me.  Either way, without a massive blood transfusion --often delivered straight to the jugular-- the patient will die.     

     

      If you stopped to think about the things that could kill you, you could drive yourself crazy, wrote Steve Friedman in his book, The Agony of Victory.  He was writing about the endurance athlete Danelle Ballengee, an ultra-runner who regularly ran alone and ran for hours on end, often in remote locations.  So when the unexpected happened, devastatingly so, she had to face the very real possibility that she wouldn't be found, that she would either freeze to death or die of dehydration, much less be at the mercy of whatever predatory animal might wander by.  At that moment, as the fourth day and night went by, her mind questioned more and more of her possible, perhaps impending, fate:  Another second in the intersection.  Another inch on a highway.  One misstep on some ice-covered slickrock.  Or maybe it was just slippery lichen.  One second she was one of the best endurance runners in the world, out for a late autumn loop in the high desert...and then the second was gone...According to a newspaper account published a week after the accident, she flew off a cliff and plummeted the equivalent of two stories, landing on her feet.  The reality was messier and more plain...Her pelvis had broken in four places.  At one spot it splintered into too many pieces for doctors to count.  She cracked three vertebrae.  She lost a third of her blood.  Doctors at Denver Health medical center had operated on her for six hours...the bill from Grand Junction, where she had been taken by the helicopter, totaled forty-five thousand dollars, and the insurance policy that had sounded so good when she bought it turned out to be not so good, and she hadn't even received her bill for surgery or her Denver hospital stay yet.

New Yorker cartoon: Roz Chast

     Perhaps I was reading a bit too much about these vagrancies of life and the paths each one takes.  I thought of much of this, those unexpected twists and turns of life, the unknowns, all as a rare storm came through and dumped a few inches of snow onto our deck (our state is way behind in its normal snow accumulation, causing annual ski events to be moved to other states, and sending many skiers home quite disappointed).  If each snowflake was unique, both in shape and form, how could there be so many?  And here I was shoveling them off by the millions, each hitting the stiff wind and being blown to another spot before landing in the yard and eventually melting.  Was that a mirror of us, of life and how it worked?  To quote Henry David Thoreau: Talk of mysteries! -- Think of our life in nature...rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!  the solid earth!  the actual world!  the common sense!  Contact!  Contact!  Who are we?  Where are we?

    It is a difficult world to survive in, this one we have created, continued Rundell.  It is so very beautiful, and it is so ruthlessly perilous to the vulnerable.  We will have to demand more, both from our adversaries and from our friends.  The alternative --a world in which humanity lives alongside a tiny handful of specieis, amid empty skies and empty seas-- becomes more possible every year...So this book has been a wooing.  It has been an asking for your wonder, and for your attention.  Fear and rage will help galvanize us, but they will not suffice alone; our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us.  For what is the finest treasure?  Life.  It is everything that lives, and the earth upon which they depend: narwal, spider, pangolin, swift, faulted and shifting human.  It calls out for our far more urgent, more iron-willed treasuring...So much can still be saved.  It i the greatest task, now, of everyone alive: to keep it from the flames.

    Another video I "linked" long ago but which readers may have missed is below.  For 209 seconds, just over 3 minutes, take a peek at where we are in this vast unexplored vault we call life.  Why do I do this --that is, keep showing these "we are so tiny in the scale of things" videos (we are).  To make us feel insignificant?  To have us feel that we are nothing special?  To have us despair at how little we mean in the overall picture?  Actually, no, no and no.  We may indeed be tiny, a mere speck in both physical and geologic space, but we are indeed unique, as unique as each snowflake, not only as humans but as a planet itself.  And yes, we may mean little in the cosmic picture, but we may also be an important thread, perhaps one of many, many millions, contributing to the "fabric" of space itself.  Who knows?  But somehow we were gifted here with life...life for ourselves and life for everything around us, from the smallest microbe to the largest mammal, as well as a world of atoms and snowflakes and minerals and plants and viruses so different that we've yet to comprehend how it could all be so...and still we don't seem to be content.

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      Real hope isn't the promise that everything will be all right -- but it's a belief that the world has so many strangenesses and possibilities that giving up would be a mistake; that we live in a universe shot through with the unexpected.  That came from another book Rundell had put together, one of hope and one in which she asked various authors and artists of children's books to provide their visions (Rundell is probably more known for the many children's books she's written).  There's never been a single decade in human history when we have not taken ourselves by surprise: we, the ungainly, wonky-toothed human species, have an endless potential for change.  I am not an optimist, or a pessimist; I am a possibilityist.  The possibilities out there for discovery, for knowledge, for transforming the world, are literally infinite -- there are spectacular ideas in the next ten years that we can't even begin to dream of now...I think stories of transformation, of wild glories and everyday glories, of magic both real and imaginary, can act like a map.  They give us a push toward hope.   So I end with a poem from that book, one written by Marie-Alice Harel and one that talks of a child with a pangolin friend (along those lines, who knew that the platypus had quite the stinger?):  Animals can't speak, or at least not in languages which we can understand.  But they too are special...life, even those snowflakes, are all connected.  And maybe we need to take the time to again look from afar and realize that if we take too much advantage and perhaps destroy even part of this wonderful gift we have, one called life, that we may have to travel many thousands or millions of lifetimes before we even come close to finding another...

     From My Brother Is A Pangolin: We dance and laugh under the stars sometimes, when days are good and treat us kind.  We hide and cry in tune.  When sorrows lay as thick as snow, he knows secrets I'll never know.  How flowers smile and trees chuckle as birds fly high above and low.  He tells me so when I listen.  It's not his voice; it is the wind, the secret song of silent things.  With infinite patience they wait, the wild ones that don't know hate.  If like wings I could spread my arms and just so, shield them from harm.  My skin, soft and thin, and his armour of scales, both fragile things under a high sky ceiling.  He says there's hope is all that grows, that includes me, and I'm smiling.  His trust is what keeps me going when days are dark and cold as snow.  My brother is a pangolin.  Because his sorrow is my sorrow, ten thousand miles between us count for nothing.  I feel his heart beating under my skin.