Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (18 page)

It begged the question: what, by saving the Lange’s metalmark butterfly, would you actually save? Maybe it’s important to preserve a butterfly that looks a certain way. But there are identical-looking butterflies in Mendota. Maybe it’s about saving particular genes. But those genes are likely still up on Mount Diablo. Maybe it’s simply about staving off the extinction of experience, of keeping a creature and its context intact. And yet the experience of the Antioch Dunes—Jerry Powell’s experience of them, anyway—had gone extinct many decades ago.

I’ve sat and thought about all of this for a long, long time. Frankly, I don’t see any upshot—except simply to acknowledge how very disturbing it feels. Whatever principle was driving everyone to save the Lange’s metalmark felt so fragile, so washed in emotion. My instinct had been to try to lash it back to some immovable, empirical anchor. But now it wasn’t clear what all these scientific answers I’d collected added up to. Maybe, in the end, those emotions are all we have to go on—because when you looked at the butterfly rationally, nothing made intuitive sense.

—

I
DID SOMETHING
else unsettling that winter. I talked to Rudi Mattoni.

Mattoni still lives in Buenos Aires. He responded to my initial e-mail, explaining that he’d gotten involved with an artists’ colony down there and sending me a video he’d made so that I would understand where he was coming from.

The video began with a tutorial about biodiversity and slides detailing the extinction of various species. “Why should I give a damn?” another slide asked, and then the presentation scattered into a succession of stock images: a clear-cut forest, smokestacks, a human hand holding a globe on fire, a pile of rats, starving African children, a mushroom cloud. Soon there were photos of an art opening Mattoni had organized at a gallery in Buenos Aires. There were watercolors; a sculpture of butterflies and warplanes; photos of dead butterflies with their wings battened open with screws and nuts. The video might have felt chaotic, except that the entire time a lilting big band tune played in the background: a crackling 1944 recording of Benny Goodman and his orchestra doing “Poor Butterfly,” on repeat, with polite applause sounding at the end of each loop. “The sixth extinction and the end of Nature,” one slide read near the end. “We now live in a manmade world.”

Mattoni and I made plans to talk on Skype, and a few days later, he appeared as a grainy image on my screen. His black hair was streaked with white, and he hunched out of a dark room toward his computer, peering over his glasses. He turned out of frame to tell a housecat named Trotsky to scram off the top of his printer, and settled in.

Mattoni first wanted to make sure that I’d read the text of the Endangered Species Act. There’s a clause right near the top that nobody remembers, he said. “And it’s the whole soul of the Endangered Species Act.” It begins: “The purposes of this Act are to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered and threatened species depend may be conserved.”

It’s the
ecosystems,
Mattoni said—the ecosystems are the point. It’s an article of faith among conservationists that ordinary people’s affection for particular charismatic animals can be widened into concern about the deteriorating natural systems they rely on, as with the polar bear and climate change. But Mattoni’s experience had convinced him this was impossible. After hammering away with that strategy for decades in California, “I never got it through anyone’s head.” The butterflies were just a means to preserve wild places, but all the attention got lavished on the butterflies themselves. “People would say, ‘How do we save the blue butterflies?’” Mattoni told me. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t give a shit about the blue butterflies.’”

Mattoni hadn’t heard that the Lange’s metalmark was being bred in captivity now, and when I told him why—that peak counts had dropped into the double digits—he was thrown. “Jesus! What happened?” he said. The news only confirmed his thesis. In Antioch, a gorgeous butterfly had been singled out and perpetuated, just barely, decades after the entire ecological context around it had come undone. “Once the habitat is gone, it’s gone,” Mattoni said. “It’s too complex—you can’t put these things back.” He saw captive rearing as “basically trivial,” which is how he saw a lot of conservation. “It’s all theater,” he said repeatedly. “I’ve come to the conclusion that conservation is really kind of a dead cause. I think virtually all of these efforts are worthless. With climate change, Christ knows what’s going to happen. You can’t even predict it. There’s nothing you can do—nothing will stop this. Nothing will stop this until it all comes crashing down.”

Scientists have failed, Mattoni told me. None of the congressional testimonies and interviews with the press, including his own, convinced anyone. Curating the art exhibit was his way of trying something different. But the exhibit wasn’t meant to inspire people to preserve biodiversity, as I took it to be. The exhibit was meant to communicate the need to
catalog
biodiversity, he said. Mattoni wanted to see a full-scale effort to collect and describe all the earth’s plants and animals so that we’d at least have a record of what we destroyed. He was about to dedicate his life to this work. He’d just bought thirty acres along the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay—one of the few fairly natural remnants of a forest cut down a long time ago. There were big fish in his stream, he said, and wild boar running around; he could live on that land happily for the rest of his life. His plan was to do a scrupulous survey of every insect living there—for as long as he could still work, even if it meant netting bugs from a wheelchair.

Mattoni had traveled on exactly the opposite path as William Temple Hornaday. His vision had degenerated from trying to save species in the wild to giving them a fitting memorial. Hornaday had started by stuffing buffalo; Mattoni would end by mounting dead bugs. “We’re going to lose a lot, and nothing’s going to stop it,” he told me. “But the unforgivable sin is, we don’t even know what’s here. I don’t know what else to do, Jon. I think you can see it: I’ve given up.”

—

I
WENT
to one last butterfly count at Antioch Dunes. It was a brilliant, gusty morning at the end of August, a year after my first butterfly count, and by that time I’d gotten fairly good at appreciating the refuge for the eclectically weedy and artificial place that it was. Across the river, the white wind turbines tumbled like modern dancers, and the gypsum plant’s sky-blue water tower stood in faint relief to the actual sky. Way up at the foot of the western utility tower, one side of a long, flat field had been transformed into an utter jungle by a lurid green, leafy invasive plant from Asia called tree of heaven—largely chopped down to its stumps, but still stubbornly booming in places. Though it was a war zone in ecological terms, it felt hauntingly gorgeous as we formed a long line and strolled through.

I came to count butterflies with Liam O’Brien again. And not long after all the volunteers had familiarized themselves with the laminated butterfly mug shots, zeroed out their clicker counters, and started prowling through the underbrush, Liam was doing his thing, shouting, “Did everybody see the pygmy blue?” and kneeling by a plume of Russian thistle to make sure that no one missed out on seeing “the smallest butterfly in the U.S.!” Russian thistle, which the pygmy blue eats, is an invasive plant—it didn’t belong at the dunes. But you could argue that it brought the butterfly with it, contributing to the experience of the property in its own way. “This one’s a female,” Liam said, treating us to one of his theatrical little lectures. “The male’s
half
that size!”

No Lange’s metalmarks had been seen yet that summer, even after weeks of counts. It was worrisome. Liam later told me that, walking around, he kept thinking, even if they still were here, how difficult it was going to be for the males and females to find each other and mate, with so few butterflies left in such a relatively big space. It seemed entirely possible, too, that we might believe the species went extinct when it had not—that whole summers could go by in which the small cluster of inexperienced butterfly counters walking the dunes twice a week never stumbled into any of the exceedingly small number of butterflies flying there; that not a single Lange’s would even register as a disruption in anyone’s peripheral vision; that the humans and the butterflies could just keep orbiting one another obliviously, like separate worlds.

Ultimately, it was Liam who spotted the first Lange’s metalmark of the season that day—and as soon as he did, Louis Terrazas and the other Fish and Wildlife staff on-site began texting and phoning their superiors to report the good news: the species had survived the winter. Then, as our group started climbing one of the utility tower hills, a man named Brent Plater thought he saw another and shouted, “I got one with its wings open here!” But then Plater’s voice crumpled a little and he said, “Nope, it doesn’t look right,” so we moved on.

Plater is a young attorney who radiates a low-key sincerity and narrows his eyes when he thinks. He directs a small nonprofit in San Francisco called the Wild Equity Institute, and that year was preparing a federal lawsuit to help the Lange’s. The suit sought to block three power generating stations just down the road: two new natural gas plants that were in construction, and an older plant that was operating with a lapsed permit. Power plants emit nitrogen—the main chemical in fertilizer—which settles in the surrounding soil, altering its chemistry, and boosts the growth of certain vegetation. The level of nitrogen around Antioch Dunes was already abnormally high, and new research was identifying high nitrogen concentrations as a severe threat to imperiled butterflies, since nitrogen often gives an even bigger boost to the invasive plants that their host plants are losing ground to. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had recently written to the California Energy Commission, warning that the new power plants were “virtually certain” to harm the Lange’s, and likely to kill it off completely.

Plater’s lawsuit had the outlines of a stereotypical endangered species fight—a butterfly versus energy and jobs. A couple of local right-wing blogs were already belittling the suit and the bug, and many residents of Antioch and neighboring towns supported the power plants—they would be huge moneymakers for the community. But a lot was getting lost in the coverage, including why the power plants were clustered around Antioch to begin with. In part, it was because nearby San Francisco, which was demanding more energy, was also trying to go green and had made it all but impossible for new power plants to be built within its own city limits.

The problem felt intractable; everyone seemed to have a legitimate complaint. I wondered aloud to Brent Plater if the Lange’s wasn’t, in some more meaningful way, already lost. Its entire context was gone. Why not just let civilization have its power plants this time?

Plater told me that if humanity agreed to set aside some significant percentage of the earth for other species, then he’d be willing to make those kinds of concessions—to lose the Lange’s. But the balance is so out of whack that every battle is now a battle of principle that can’t be forfeited. Realistically, Plater conceded, he didn’t know if he could stop the power plants. But he hoped to compel a settlement. Potentially, some serious money could be squeezed out of the companies that owned the plants—enough to finance a much more comprehensive restoration of the Antioch Dunes than anything the government had been capable of so far. Maybe they could even truck in some phenomenal amount of sand, dump it everywhere, and try to start over. In short, the lawsuit could be yet another freak turning point in the story of the Lange’s metalmark: another forty-ton whale surfacing out of nowhere, but this time to restore order rather than exacerbate the chaos.

It was something to hope for. Frankly, it was all starting to feel a little pathological otherwise—this grasping after a butterfly that only got harder to pin down the closer you got. When we look at nature, maybe most of what we see is lines that we’ve superimposed there ourselves: taxonomic lines, legal lines, baselines of how we believe the world is supposed to look. These lines have only as much authority as we give them. It’s our emotions that fasten them in place: how deeply we
believe
in their truths, and how guilty or queasy we feel when we come close to crossing them, even when crossing them may be the rational thing to do.

Maybe the most imposing line is the one we imagine between ourselves and nature—the belief that there is such a thing as pristine nature, and that it is sacrosanct, and that any changes we trigger in it can only be disfiguring. Recently, small pockets of conservationists have challenged that idea, arguing instead, just as the proposal for Pleistocene Rewilding did, that we should be actively seeking to cultivate a
new
nature, instead of struggling to forestall the disintegration of the one we happened to inherit. There’s talk about the “managed relocation” of species—picking up animal populations and airlifting them into new habitats where they’re more likely to survive climate change. There are calls to stop the blanket vilification of invasive plants, to accept that weeds are not going away, and to realize that they can be parts of equally biodiverse “blended” ecosystems rather than only blights on the “native” ecosystems we feel such nostalgia for. Seizing that kind of creative freedom—owning up to our power on Earth and exerting it—is either inspiring or existentially terrifying, depending on whom you ask.

In Antioch, meanwhile, people were clinging to the last Lange’s metalmarks—believing in the butterfly and clapping as hard as they could, so that, like Tinker Bell, the species wouldn’t disappear from the stage. But what if the greater, more progressive challenge was to work through the guilt and knowingly let the butterfly go?

In the end, part of me wants to argue for that. But, then again, maybe letting go once only leads to more letting go. Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything. Maybe giving in a little only hastens the terminal disenchantment I’d seen afflicting all those old men—the many Rudi Mattonis who tried to hold on to so many things they believed in and, looking back on their lives, believed they’d lost.