The World Is Not A Theme Park

By TED GUP

China's former leader Mao Zedong once declared war against sparrows, believing they were a pest and a nuisance. In response, millions of Chinese took to the streets, banging on woks and pans to terrify the birds. The idea: force them to stay aloft until they dropped dead of exhaustion. They did just that. The campaign was halted after an infestation of caterpillars, now freed of their feathered predators, devoured the crops, enveloped the trees and rained down upon pedestrians. In that same grand tradition of meddling with nature, Alaska has declared an air war against hundreds of wolves in an effort to boost already abundant populations of caribou and moose. And all to impress hunters and tourists. Never mind that when herds swell, starvation is often close by. Even as Alaska prepares to wage its wolf war, conservationists in the Lower 48 mourn the absence of wolves and seek to reintroduce them.

Chalk another one up to mankind's micromanagement of nature. Recklessly arrogant and myopic, Alaska's decision is rooted in special-interest economics, not biology. It's all the more distressing for what it tells us about ourselves as a species and our estrangement from nature. Alaska's folly is the product of a theme-park mentality in which nature exists for our amusement, to be enhanced by adding one species and subtracting another. An indiscriminate assault will kill off pack leaders, leaving wolves in hierarchical disarray, and harm eagles, foxes and wolverines, which dine upon the carcasses wolves leave behind. Such contempt for natural order is nothing new, though it comes at a time when many Americans belatedly question both nature's recuperative powers and the human species' claim to a divine right of subjugation.

So long as our species behaves like a spoiled only child, allowing parochial economic, political and leisure appetites to define the landscape, nature will deny us the thing we crave most -- a sense of belonging. To extend Groucho Marx's line, we would not join any club that would have us. Rarely accorded a standing of its own, nature is forever cast in anthropocentric terms, reduced to a prize in the simplistic consume-or-conserve debate. There is nature as the winsome obstacle to development, as the romanticist's favored tableau, even as the butt of ridicule by sophisticates who fault it for a lack of subtext or irony -- contrivances of the human mind. What value nature has, and it is not our place to say, may be that to its dying day it will be oblivious to our attentions.

Even as we consume and alter, we erect stage sets to mask the loss. Many Americans today mistake as wilderness the ersatz version to which they have become accustomed. Where once there were forests, now there are tree farms, transmogrified by science into monocultural stands of uniform height and genetic stock. In a word, a crop. Many anglers cast into rivers and lakes devoid of native fish. Stocked European brown trout and transplanted rainbows ply our streams, with native brook and cutthroat trout in retreat. Bighorn sheep and other game herds are shunted about for the hunter's delight.

$ There is no end to our effrontery. In Arizona a mutant Chinese grass carp, the sterile triploid amur, has been released into the ponds and water hazards of golf courses to keep the water free of entangling weeds lest golf balls be lost or the scenery spoiled. An African fish, the tilapia, cruises irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish. Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader of Shakespeare bent on sharing with the New World every species mentioned by the bard. Today millions of starlings consume and defile our crops and terrorize native bluebirds. So too, we have inadvertently unleashed an invasion of plants, among them, kudzu, hydrilla and water hyacinth.

Yet the more we monkey with nature, the more we seek assurance that somewhere it is beyond our tinkering. To a world idling in traffic, "Alaska" strikes a primal chord. Our longing expresses itself in mail-order catalogs full of the back-to-nature look and in the popularity of films like Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans and A River Runs Through It, viewed by urban audiences sitting elbow-to-elbow in the dark. Most will never know what it is to be dwarfed by an old-growth forest, spy brook trout sipping mayflies or hear a wolf howl. For many, such subtle communion has been replaced by the stridency of environmentalism, a full-blown crusade, and by dire appeals on behalf of distant rain forests and a bestiary of endangered species. In these alliances, those remote from nature draw comfort that though embattled, the wild still exists.

But that struggle will be won or lost closer to home, within human beings themselves. To progress from nature's despoiler to its custodian, we must first redefine our place in -- not over -- nature, accept the role of resident rather than architect and resist the temptation technology affords us to mold a world responsive to our whims alone. Alaska, which once sanctioned the shooting of polar bears from the air, now dreams of creating a second Serengeti, fulfilling the fantasy of those who begrudge nature its sparseness and exquisite balance. This is more than bad biology, and it is sadly fitting that it should befall the wolf. A majestic symbol of the wild and a victim of man's relentless efforts to eradicate what he cannot control, the wolf is the very embodiment of our conflict with nature. In the skies over Alaska, when the rifle barrels slide out the helicopter windows and take aim at the first frightened wolves below, mankind will once again demonstrate its awesome power, and yes, its ignorance as well.