Impossible Journey
Two years ago, I embarked on an impossible journey: I attempted to identify every form of wildlife on my 1.25 acre parcel of land.
In a sleeping pile of seven, this one alert garter snake keeps an eye on me.
It started out promising. The mammals were easy. In addition to two humans and a canine, I could identify, down to species level, the hoofed ruminants, the medium and small rodents, the weasel, the largest member of the procyonidae family and the small bat family that squabbles under our roof support beams. The amphibians were even easier with only two species of frog, a couple of salamanders, a newt, and two subspecies of the garter snake. Before I moved on to plant identification, I took a peek at the trail ahead toward the bewildering Kingdom of Fungi and realized that I didn’t have a chance to finish this project—-not even close. The diversity of lifeforms, even in an unremarkable piece of land like mine, is truly, truly astonishing. I had forgotten that basic lesson in microbiology.
There are something like 6,000-50,000 species of bacteria in a gram of soil. I have a little pond, which is going to house thousands of types of microorganisms, including arthropods, bacteria, algae, protozoa, hydras, fungi and phytoplankton. Even the green lifeforms on tree bark proved bewildering. I thought I was looking at lichen, moss and fungi but it turns out I’m seeing algae, like what normally grows in water but it’s damp enough in the Pacific Northwest that we skip the pond and just grow it on tree bark. Who knew?
Accepting that this was clearly a mission doomed to failure, I narrowed my scope: I’ll just learn to identify the bees. About a month in, I learned that even that was too difficult. First you need to distinguish between bees, flies, wasps and all of the clever insects that mimic bees (to discourage would-be predators) but actually aren’t. There are something like 4000 bee species in the United States. Even the ones easy to recognize, like all of the species of fat and friendly bumblebees, aren’t easy after all; their appearance varies depending on their gender and whether they are workers, drones or the queen bee.
Bombus vosnesenskii, the Yellow-faced Bumblebee, visits the green hellebore flowers but won’t touch the black ones.
After a summer of trying to get a toe-hold on this project, I learned the most important lesson of all: I don’t really care. I don’t care what we call earth’s creatures. I’m not a taxonomist by nature and trying to name the animals meant I spent more time with my nose in a book than just observing nature around me.
Instead I learned to imitate my dog: just watch, sniff the air, take it all in, language-less. This is how I learned that the messiest area of my yard is where all the action is, evidenced by an abandoned bird nest, a cache of Douglas fir seeds, the thatching ants’ bustling home and a shed snake skin. It’s also how I noticed the frightening absence of bumblebees after an extra cold spring, and how I sighed with relief when they returned: better late than never. (I’m still anxious though; the bumblebees are very small this year.) I learned a flurry of bushtit activity on the bitter cherry trees means there’s an aphid population explosion. Like my dog, I started paying attention to bird alarm cries, which usually portends a visiting owl hulking on a tree branch.
My artwork is about the impact of humans on planet earth and its creatures and ecosystems. I spend a lot of time feeling bad about the extraordinary amount of destruction we have caused in a frighteningly short amount of time. I’m not confident humans will last long given that we are mortally wounding the only place we call home. But, let’s take a moment to think about what we call home. We trot around on top of our planet, head in the air, with creatures that do the same. That is our ecosystem.
But, what if, on Earth, there’s a largely undiscovered ecosystem that is larger than the Amazon rainforest? And, with more diversity than the Galapagos Islands? And, what if that ecosystem were largely pristine because it has not yet been touched by humans or our self-created climate disaster?
It is true. This magical wilderness exists. There’s a rich ecosystem of billions of microorganisms beneath our feet that is almost twice as big as all the world’s oceans and with all of the characteristics I described above. As far as people have been able to drill into the earth, 5 miles or more, we have never stopped finding life, literal tons of it. I imagine this subterranean ecosystem as a type of seedbank, a rich brew of cellular activity poised to evolve into earth’s next surface-dwellers, when we, and our familiars, are long gone.
Meanwhile, the James Webb telescope is returning to us on Earth photographs of the shocking beauty of the universe as far into space and deep into time as we humans can see, which is around 13.5 billion years, close to when the first stars and galaxies were born. (Wow.) Scientists think life in outer space is likely, if for no other reason, then simply the odds are high given so much space and so much time. But, call me biased, I think life on our planet is extra special.
Like with my failed journey of discovery, we sometimes imagine we understand, and can know it all. But, the vastness of what lies undiscovered because of the expanse of time and of space and, even the immense microscopic complexity that lies just a few miles beneath our feet, is incomprehensibly ginormous.
We need to try to save the wee slice of the universe that we rely on, not only for our own basic survival, but as a moral obligation. (It was never ours to destroy.)
But, even if we fail, I take solace in the vision of the universe as the mythical turtles in infinite regression. It is turtles, complexity, possibility and beauty, all the way down.
