Albertus Minimus

For everything that lives is holy

If you don't remember the readings from Mass last Sunday, allow me to refresh your memory (and don't worry if you don't: I have terrible auditory memory. Unless something is written down I will inevitably forget it).

Gn 9:8-15

God said to Noah and to his sons with him:
“See, I am now establishing my covenant with you
and your descendants after you
and with every living creature that was with you:
all the birds, and the various tame and wild animals
that were with you and came out of the ark.
I will establish my covenant with you,
that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed
by the waters of a flood;
there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth.”
God added:
“This is the sign that I am giving for all ages to come,
of the covenant between me and you
and every living creature with you:
I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign
of the covenant between me and the earth.
When I bring clouds over the earth,
and the bow appears in the clouds,
I will recall the covenant I have made
between me and you and all living beings,
so that the waters shall never again become a flood
to destroy all mortal beings.”

I must confess that I had not realised before that God established His covenant not just with mankind but 'between me and you and all living beings'.

And then from the Gospel, a short part of the longer reading:

Mk 1:12-15

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,
and he remained in the desert for forty days,
tempted by Satan.
He was among wild beasts,
and the angels ministered to him.

Note that it says Our Lord was 'among wild beasts' as he remained in the desert. In the light of the previous reading, I can but wonder what this means. Where the creatures of the desert aware of who dwelled with them for that time? There were no witnesses to this time other than Jesus Himself, so we have knowledge only of what He chose to relay to His disciples. But I find it hard to believe that the four legs and the wings and the crawling creatures did not sense the presence of He who had made covenant with their ancestors many generations ago: I suspect it takes a human being to really ignore such a one.

On reflection, these passages suggest to me that the protection of our fellow creatures is a Christian duty. To drive a species to extinction as we have done so often in the past – from the megafauna of north America, hunted out of existence by the first American Indians, to the dodo, destroyed by marauding sailors – is to break God's covenant with His creation.

Hold your horses

I work in an office overlooking Tottenham Court Road here in the centre of London and, as you can tell from the strange time stamps to some of my posts, usually get in to work early so that I can do a bit of blogging before properly starting the labours of the day. One of the occasional benefits of getting in to work so early is that, every so often, I hear a slowly approaching sound, coming north up the road. The first time I heard it I couldn't for the life of me make out what it was: it sounded like a myriad tin cans being clopped against the road. But it was that 'clopped' that should have given it away. It was a troop of the Household Cavalry, riding from their barracks up to Regents Park, I believe.

There is something peculiarly moving about the sight and sound of a cavalry troop: the noise, as if a squad of dwarvish drummers are banging the bones of the earth; the horses, ridden three abreast, the uniformed men, in dress down uniforms at this time rather than the scarlet finery of their full regalia but still magnificent. It makes me want to cheer and throw a hat in the air.

And another reason for my fondness for the Household Cavalry is that, a few years back, I attended the funeral of a lady who had escaped Russia at the time of the Revolution. The funeral was at the Orthodox cathedral, and we then drove, following the hearse, through Hyde Park towards the cemetery where she was to be buried. As the cortege went through the park we saw, coming in the opposite direction, a troop of the Household Cavalry in full uniform.

And as they passed the hearse, each and every cavalryman saluted. It was a most moving gesture, and a testimony to a fineness of manners that has almost entirely passed from other arenas of the modern world. So while I know, in military terms, it's the infantry that wins or loses most battles, my heart I must admit is with the cavalry.

Quoth the raven

Following on from the previous post, while all the members of the crow family are intelligent, it's the biggest and blackest of the clan that's the brightest: the raven. Ornithologists and bird watchers tell all sorts of stories about its intelligence, ranging from the fact that ravens can count (an oft used trick of bird watchers is for two or three people to enter a hide, and then for one observer to remain behind when the others leave. Most birds will think that the hide is then empty and resume their activities. Not the raven: it counts them in and it counts them out and it won't return until all the people have gone) to an ability to use deception for its own ends (I remember reading in one journal of an observer watching a raven attacking a carcass in winter time. In this area, animals are sometimes poisoned and the ravens know that to eat such a carcass is to invite sickness and possibly even death. Anyway, the raven and the birdwatcher simultaneously noticed another group of ravens heading in their direction. This would mean the solitary bird having to share its meal with many other hungry beaks. To his astonishment, the watching man saw the feeding raven fall over on its side, apparently dead. The flight of ravens passed overhead and, seeing their lifeless comrade below, assumed that the carcass was poisoned and flew on. When they were safely out of sight the raven opened one black eye, checked, and then hopped back onto its feet and resumed feeding.)

Anyway, here is another example of raven intelligence, from the pages of 'The Economist':

The task was to work out which colour-coded film containers held some bits of cheese, then prise the containers open and eat the contents. The subordinate male was far better at this task than the dominant. However, he never managed to gulp down more than a few pieces of the reward before the dominant raven, Munin, was hustling him on his way. Clearly (and not unexpectedly) ravens are able to learn about food sources from one another. They are also able to bully each other to gain access to that food.

But then something unexpected happened. Hugin, the subordinate, tried a new strategy. As soon as Munin bullied him, he headed over to a set of empty containers, prised the lids off them enthusiastically, and pretended to eat. Munin followed, whereupon Hugin returned to the loaded containers and ate his fill.

At first Dr Bugnyar could not believe what he was seeing. He was anxious about sharing his observation, for fear that no one would believe him. But Hugin, he is convinced, was clearly misleading Munin.

The full story, with further evidence for intelligence in this genius of the corvid family, is here. (With thanks to Chad for telling me how to do indented quotes.)

When magpies mourn

Do animals have any concept of mortality? Does the fear of death keep a dormouse from sleep? Well, there is some anecdotal evidence that this might be the case, particularly with animals that live in complex social groups, such as elephants. But of course, it's hard if not impossible to penetrate the barriers to communication that separate one species from another (and which suggests to me that if we ever do meet aliens from another world we'll spend most of our time trying to figure out what they're saying).

Whatever the truth of the matter, I'd like to tell you about an occasion that I saw (note, I'm not 'sharing' this with you, I'm 'telling' you - if I was sharing I'd have to break off some of the memories and give them to you to keep, thus meaning that each time I 'shared' this story there would be less and less to tell).

Driving home one afternoon some years ago, I noticed something unusual as I approached the house. Black and white, it resolved, as I got closer, into the bodies of two magpies lying in the street just opposite my house. Pulling up, the two dead birds were just a few feet away from me in the road. They must have been hit by a car, I presumed, although it was strange to see two birds killed like this, apparently simultaneously. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to do. I hate to see the way an animal's body is mangled if left in the road, but on the other hand squeamishness made me reluctant to touch the dead creatures. So I took the easier path, and did nothing. Still, the birds were not lying out in the middle of the road and were thus not so likely to get squashed by every passing vehicle.

Going into the house, I noticed that there seemed to be quite a few magpies flying around in their ungainly fashion, or dipping their heads forward as they grackled. But the days when that old rhyme:

one for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a girl, four for a boy

would almost invariably indicate bad days ahead on spotting a magpie are long gone. Now if you see one you can pretty well guarantee seeing another two or three. So I thought nothing much of it, went inside and did what every Englishman does when he gets home: puts on the kettle and makes a nice cup of tea.

But before I had the chance to settle back and enjoy the tea, something caught my attention. The kitchen is at the back of the house, looking out over the back garden and a park beyond, and it was the flash of black and white against green that caught my eye. Once or twice, well, shake one's head and ignore it. But three, four, five, six times. What was going on? I opened the door and went out the back. It was the sound I noticed first. There is always a background noise in London: traffic, trains, planes, the sussuration of a technological civilisation. But now, a raucous, raw sound overwhelmed that. The sound of birds, magpies, calling, cawing. Looking up, I could see what seemed like twenty or thirty birds scrabbling over the tiled roofs of the houses in the row. But they all had their tails to me, and were looking in the opposite direction.

I went back inside, through the house and out of the front door. And stopped. This side of the street and the other, to the left and to the right, the roofs of the houses were covered in magpies. Not twenty or thirty, but a hundred or more, all cawing, grackling, and scraping. And the object of the hundreds of bright black eyes? The two dead magpies that lay in the road.

Sudden, rather unwelcome, images from Alfred Hitchcock's film 'The Birds' came to mind at that point. I have never seen such a collection of magpies, before or since. And none of them were going about the normal business of magpies. Instead they had all settled on the rooftops, giving cacophonous voice to what seemed like, I don't know - distress, a valedictory address, a wake? - for their two fallen comrades, lying dead in the road.

There was only one thing I could do. The birds were still warm when I picked them up. The cacophony suddenly died away to the nearest approach to silence that London gets. The two magpies must have been killed only minutes before I got home. In the sudden silence I moved the dead birds out of the road, where inevitably they would have been in the end dismembered by passing traffic, and laid them on the grass verge. I looked up. Hundreds of pairs of bright black eyes were watching me. I wanted to say something to those strange, fierce minds behind the eyes, but there was a gulf immeasurable between us. I went inside and closed the door.

So, there you have it. Maybe this means something else entirely, but I can honestly say I've never seen behaviour like this on any other occasion (nor have I ever seen so many magpies gathered together). Did those birds understand and mourn the deaths of their comrades? I don't know. But it was undoubtedly one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

Rat trap

Now, a degree in psychology may not have taught me much about the depths of the human soul, but one unexpected insight it did impart was a renewed respect for rats. The laboratory versions are put through all sorts of trials, most of which indicate that they are immensely resourceful creatures, although quite what those experiments tell us about human beings is debatable. So, it's much easier for me to see the point of a rat than a mosquito. But I would like to tell you about one incident when the humble rattus rattus reduced this particular representative of the lords and masters of creation to a quaking, naked, pillar of indecision.

I was in Sri Lanka, renting a room from an old Sri Lankan lady called Mignonne. The monsoon was building, the humidity was unbearable and sleep was elusive. The bed sat in solitary, mosquito net covered splendour in the centre of the room, surrounded by what seemed like acres of polished wooden floor. That memorable night I took off my sweat soaked clothes and padded naked across the room to switch off the light. Just as I reached out to plunge the room into the tropical night a rat squeezed under the door, saw me and scuttled across the room to the only cover available in the room: my bed.

There is a peculiar sense of vulnerability, which has to be experienced, to standing naked in a room, with a cornered rat hiding under the bed upon which one's clothes rest. Was there anything I could use to urge my unwanted bed companion on to new quarters? What I wanted was a broom, preferably one with a long handle. But the only broom was in the kitchen. Mignonne had seen much in her life, but on the whole I did not think it appropriate to enlarge her experiences to include a naked young Westerner. But there was nothing in the room that would serve. So for many long minutes I stood undecided by the door, the mosquitoes appreciating their unexpected access to fresh regions of flesh.

In the end, the rat made the decision for me. Black whiskers twitched out of the shadows beneath the bed, blacker eyes glittered, and then it was away and out of the balcony doors.

Henceforth I resolved, whatever the humidity, to retain a minimum of night time clothing.

What is the point of mosquitoes?

It's an interesting question. With virtually everything else in the vast panoply that is Creation I can appreciate some thing about the creature concerned, some feature or aspect of beauty, that makes it worthwhile in the eyes of its Lord and Maker. But I confess that for years the mosquito proved beyond any appreciation on my part. Even the leech - and speaking as someone who once wondered why his shoe was making that peculiar sloshing sound, only to remove it to find my foot pustulated with blood engorged bags, this is saying something - yes, even the leech has reason and purpose.

Englightenment dawned when I woke bleary eyed after one particularly fraught night in Sri Lanka, when I had been reduced to a crazed semblance of a human being, leaping wildly around the room in the hotel where I was staying, making wild slapping motions at my droning tormentors, only to succeed in raising further red weals upon myself when the insect supping on my blood took flight before my hand could squash it.

Because after this, of course, I realised that our human pretensions to be lords and masters of Creation are just that: pretensions. Thus I realised that, apart from other reasons for its existence known only to its Maker, the mosquito exists to confront human beings with our powerlessness. For while it is relatively easy to admit our powerlessness with respect to the grand phenomena of nature such as earthquakes and volcanoes, how much harder for us in our pride is it to see our weakness with respect to the humble mosquito.

So, thank you, mosquitoes of the world, for reminding us always of the limits of our power.

The gardeners of Eden

In a previous post I asked what happens to the garden without the gardener. Chad and Bekah S from Cacoethes Scribendi raise some fascinating points in the comments which I would encourage you to read, and I would like to develop further what I wrote in light of their ideas.

Chad pointed out that, contrary to our modern image of tribal societies living in perfect harmony with their environment, aboriginal peoples throughout the world have done their fair bit to reduce biodiversity. I should really have made this clearer in my original post - I was aware of the suspiciously coincidental loss of North America's megafauna with the arrival of man on the continent, and similar changes to ecosystems in, for instance, New Zealand, when the Maoris reached the Land of the Long Cloud. The point Chad makes is apposite: all humanity is fallen, whether 21st century New York 'sophisticates' or Bronze Age New Guinea 'savages'. Thus, we all have a tendency to make an utter mess of things - although of course, those armed with the tools of modern agribusiness are in the position to make a bigger mess of things quicker than those furnished with blowpipes.

But with respect to maintaining biodiversity, I think it's possible that human beings have sometimes acted to help the situation quite unwittingly. For instance, in the article I originally linked to, Maasai leader Martin Saning'o is quoted as saying that the Maasai "were the original conservationists... Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems."

I don't doubt that the second part of the quotation is true, but I'm not at all sure that the first part is accurate. The Maasai would surely have been concerned about protecting their herds and their pasturage and so on. However, as a side product, what they did to protect their own livelihoods also acted to promote biodiversity in the lands they ranged. I would argue that this was often the case with pre-industrial societies. Farmers and pastoralists in such situations had, understandly, enough to do ensuring the sustenance of their own families to worry about the conservation of the Hairy Nosed Wombat, but their practices often conspired to promote biodiversity.

To explain further how this could happen, as I understand it, the flora in most climatic zones tends towards a particular sort of climax vegetation. Thus Britain, before man, was essentially one huge forest, with a mixture of tree species but with oak, beech and, in Scotland, Scotch pine predominating. Thus only animals adapted to forest life could live here. But with man's arrival, the forest began to be cut down. This opened up the Wildwood, allowing, for instance, those creatures and plants that flourish in a woodland edge habitat greater opportunities. And of course, with the creation of arable and pasture land, other fauna and flora had their chance too. Obviously there are losers too in this continual change, most notably those creatures, usually large predators, that require large range areas to find sufficient food. So Britain lost creatures of legend such as the wolf and the bear and the beaver. However, other animals will have benefited and expanded in numbers, at least until the start of industrial agriculture with its death grip on the land.

So I would say that the idea of human beings as conscious gardeners seeking to tend the planet for the benefit of all is, as Chad remarked, almost certain to fail. We're just too, well, stupidly proud to do that. But I do think native peoples around the world, once they had settled into a land, became quite good at maintaining the overall diversity of its flora and fauna simply because if they didn't they would die out, as was, for instance, possibly the case with the Polynesians on Easter Island.

It's a shame, but while Adam and Eve may have been the gardeners of Eden, their descendants, should we decide to attempt the task, would likely make an almighty mess of being the gardeners of Earth.

What happens to the garden without the gardener?

I grew up reading the books of Gerald Durrell and watching David Attenborough on TV (as a child living in London that was about as near to wild nature as I was likely to come, apart from the occasional encounter with a feral cat or skulking fox). And I still today believe in the intrinsic value of the other passengers aboard the good ship Earth, although for reasons somewhat different to those before.

So this article on 'conservation refugees' came as an unpleasant shock to me. It seems a huge number of tribal peoples have been shifted from the land that they have inhabited for generations to make way for national parks and other conservation areas. Estimates vary, but range from five to tens of millions of people turned into refugees as a result of conservation efforts.

Should I have been so surprised? No, not really. But it is perhaps the natural result of being a city boy. When I think of wilderness my model is the great national parks of North America, huge areas reserved for fauna and flora where, in the words of John Muir, 'man himself is a visitor who does not remain'.

But even those wilderness areas of America were once inhabited, first by Native Americans and then farmers and ranchers. Here in Britain all our National Parks are man made down to their very geography: the grass covered moorlands of Yorkshire or the purple heathered hills of Scotland are creations of farmers and their flocks. So why did it not occur to me that the Serengeti or the Amazon, Australia's red heart and the Sundarbans of India might also have their human populations, as creative in their management of the land as our Yorkshire farmers and Scottish grouse keepers? Well, I suppose one reason is that Mr Attenborough usually appeared to be the only human being anywhere around. Still, now I know, and so do the big conservation organisations, although not all of them appear to have understood the message, placing 'biodiversity' over 'multi-culturalism' of the aboriginal variety. For while

(i)n 1962, there were some 1,000 official Protected Areas worldwide. Today there are 108,000, with more being added every day. The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That's an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.

Yet despite this vast area of the planet set aside for conservation purposes biological diversity continues to decline. So, what's up? What's wrong with the plan? Well, although this is only alluded to in the article, one possibility is that man, particularly as represented by tribal peoples with long knowledge of the land, actually acts to increase diversity. After all, you can try this experiment in your own garden. At the moment, if you're a keen gardener, it will be filled with different species of plants and, possibly even animals and birds. Now, stop. No more digging, no more weeding, no more pruning, no more planting. In a year it's possible that the diversity of species will increase as invading plants set up shop. But give it ten years and that diversity will start to decline, as the less competitive species are pushed out and others thrive, until in the end the garden will return to the wild wood. Now, the wild wood is of course a rich habitat in itself, but what it doesn't have is the constant interference, the continual opening up of new microclimates and ecological subsystems that man produces in his dealings with the natural world. Thus the regular burning of grass land by Australian aboriginals encouraged different varieties of plant and tree to spread by continually opening up new areas to the effects of fire.

To put it simply, and in a theological context, it always seems to me that with respect to the natural world, God paints in broad brush strokes or the minutest, molecular detail. He leaves the intermediate realm to man, as His steward and - a most honourable office - gardener.

So what these conservation organisations are unwittingly doing is turfing the gardener from his garden and then bewailing its subsequent loss of beauty. Still, it's not, I hope, too late to learn. For '(i)f we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.'

An uncommonly canine cat

One of my two cats appears to be under the impression that he is a dog. He's getting on a bit now, but when he was younger he was the only cat I've ever met who would chase a ball on a string that I twiddled and dangled with such non stop enthusiasm that in the end he would collapse panting on the floor. He would also chase said ball when thrown, pick it up, trot back to me and drop the ball at my feet for it to be thrown again. Alas for him, this enthusiasm makes him a hopeless hunter: at the first sight of fur or feather he quivers with excitement, tail lashing as he strains to restrain himself, but to no avail. The classic feline repertoire of stalk and wait, stalk and wait is beyond his self control. Rather an immediate leap, a failing swipe with a paw as bird or mouse disappears beyond reach, and then an embarrassed washing of face and whiskers as if to suggest that he was merely practising his hunting technique and had no real interest in any results. He even begs food when we're eating at table like a dog. Am I alone in knowing a canine cat?

The passion of the egg collector

Egg collecting is a passion. Not one that I share, but a passion nonetheless, and one that can grow easily into an obsession. For the true collector, the desirability of an object increases in proportion to its rarity.

Thus, imagine a collector who happens upon a clutch of eggs of the last remaining pair of dodos in the world, who have somehow managed to escape the ravages of rats and cats and hungry sailors, maybe on some small rocky outcrop off any nautical charts. Imagine the ecstasy of such a discovery: not the excitement of finding a species on the brink of extinction, no. That is not what would ignite his passion. Rather the prospect that by taking these eggs - and thus rendering the dodo finally and irreversibly extinct - he would have in his possession a clutch of eggs that would be forever unique. That is the ultimate desire of the obsessed collector.

What is wrong with that?

Think of a dog fox patrolling his territory in Central Queensland. Recently humans have been making determined efforts to kill him, but he has not been caught. Then one day he meets a young and naive representative of one of the reasons humans have been trying to exterminate him. Would our fox stay his jaws because there are only about 65 Northern Hairy-nosed Wombats left? He might be put off by size, or the powerful legs and strong claws, or even the nose, but the fox would not care if dinner was the last Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat. He is merely proving that, at the moment and under prevailing conditions, he is fitter than his marsupial competitors.

Let us look at the ethics of conservation. According to biological theory, species go extinct all the time. Estimates vary, but most authorities agree that far more species of animals and plants have vanished during the earth's long history than exist today. Nothing in biology suggests that this is unusual, but rather the workings of natural selection. After all, the great filter of evolutionary theory is survival, which is measured by offspring. Those species that cannot adapt to a changing environment produce fewer offspring until, finally, they are no more, and others occupy their ecological niche more efficiently.

Nor is there anything in evolutionary theory to suggest that we are any different from other species. Note that it is not humans who are driving the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat to extinction, but other animals. So there is nothing in the theory to justify saying that we stand outside normal evolutionary pressures as a species apart and above from all others.

In fact, human beings are agents of evolution and currently quite effective agents. We could even call ourselves the Emperors of Evolution.

However maybe we are driving the evolutionary engine too fast? Think of all those species that we have driven over or to the brink of extinction in the last hundred years.

But the history of life on earth is a history of catastrophe. 65 million years ago some 70% of all the species on earth were wiped out. We, as a natural disaster, don’t even come close. In the history of extinction Homo sapiens is merely a minor accident.

There is, however, our own self interest. We need a functioning ark to carry us through space and they don’t seem to come any smaller than planet sized. But if we look to science for a reason to protect that last clutch of dodo eggs from the would be collector we are going to be disappointed. For, according to science, everything dies in the end: species, families (personal and biological), stars, galaxies, everything. Set against this eventual passage into the darkness of unknowing the real and present ecstasy of the egg collector when presented with those unique, irreplaceable eggs. There is no rational reason there for him to stay his passion.

Thus there is in the biological logic of evolutionary theory no compelling reason to actually conserve anything. For this we have to look elsewhere. To the immortal hand or eye that framed the symmetry of egg and bird, tree and plant. 'For everything that lives is holy' said William Blake, and in this he is certainly right, for all was created by God and thus bears His mark. The only compelling logic to preserve our fellow creatures on this planet from the passion of the egg collector is the knowledge that to destroy by our own actions any species of plant or animal is to destroy the handiwork of its immortal Creator, who, having made, saw that 'it was very good'.