The Monkey Link Read Free

shoulder to the yoke, and he sets off to hike around the world—anyone would be glad to do the same. The strange part is that there were only a handful of these eccentrics. To earn the right, they had to be surprising. But to surprise this work-worn, stifled world is hard. In the adventures that become famous, you are struck by just one thing—their simplicity. Why didn’t anyone ever think of this before? It makes you envious. You, too, could have done it. And somehow you see all too clearly that you can no longer follow. The gap, the breach, is already cemented over and guarded. This world is hard to surprise. As the poet wrote: “It’s not easily surprised by your words, not impressed by the look on your face   …   ” Yet we may well be surprised by the things that do impress this world, how simple they always are, how seemingly obvious, within reach of anyone. So here we are, living in a world more impressed by natural behavior than by the formula mc 2 . I maintain that this shift, rather than the long list of naturalists of all centuries, constitutes the essential history of the science of ecology.
    We live in a world of people born just once. We are not witnesses to the past, not participants in the future. The instinct, memory, and program of the species have grown weak within us, as weak as the connection of the times. This very weakness (so extreme that we have lost our connection with nature) is where the human seed springs up. Man originates exactly where any other species dies out. No warm fur, no terrible teeth, no lupine morals. Trousers, the bullet, religion   …
    How strange, I thought, grasping the experience with difficulty, assimilating the conclusion with ease   … Let’s take a bird and solder it into a box   … The trajectory of scientific thought reminded me of the chaotic flight of a moth. Clumsily conspicuous at the end of the trajectory was the conclusion that had suggested itself at the very beginning. How comical, I thought. Examining his own hands with bewilderment, man discovers that birds have wings. Opening his mouth in surprise, he finds that birds have a beak. Has he “discovered” that birds have wings and a beak—or that he himself has hands and a mouth?
    Humankind, I thought, you’re incapable of comprehending any other biological existence. Each time you make the terrible effort to do so, you comprehend only your own   … But would man comprehend even his own existence if he did not try to comprehend a different one? Man’s capacity to know another nature strikes me as catastrophically small, yet there is nothing nobler, or more necessary for human consciousness, than to spin our wheels in this effort.
    Ecologists, too, have many of the accoutrements of science, of course. Laboratories, test tubes, retorts, automatic recorders, freezers—the whole Laputan environment, the background against which the white-coated scientist poses, juggling cult objects. But we don’t know what he’s pouring into what in the photograph—-or whether he’s mocking us. The priest of science is bathed in fluorescent light, he peers profoundly at something he’s supposed to have some knowledge of, while we have none. This is what makes us an enlightened society, that we revere what we don’t understand. I’m not being ironic—it really is a mark of enlightenment. But we don’t revere nature. We revere science.
    At last we have an emerging anti-science that reveres nature.
    And really, why does he wear such a knowing expression in the universal photo on the magazine cover? A true scientist’s expression (in my naive conception) should be frightened, shocked, confused. For, in his field, he knows everything ever known up to now, up to this day, up to this second—but beyond this he knows nothing. No one does. He is at the cutting edge of science, where knowledge stops. The world’s top specialist, if he truly seeks something beyond this, is the very man who knows nothing.