Good Show
by Jack Beatty
LAST CHANCE TO SEE by Carwardine. Harmony Books, $20.00.
WHO WOULD HAVE thought that a book in the field of “ecology/nature, ” to cite the rubric on its back cover, could be as lively, sharply satirical, brilliantly written, and even funny as this one? Not I; I should have thought that such a book would be oppressively earnest, the literary equivalent of prunes. A dread solemnity tends to come over writers in the face of “ecology/nature.” They want to show their solidarity with the “creatures with whom we share the planet,” or some such indmidatingly worthy moral ambition. Style, wit, energy, paradox—all the qualities that make writing more exciting than birdwatching—vanish in the presence of such lofty motives. Yes, I, too, care about the creatures with whom we share the planet; indeed, the night before I wrote this review, a sixty-fivepound creature jumped onto my chest at 4:40 A.M., emitted a voluptuous yawn, scratched himself so violently that he woke my wife, and then collapsed in a heap on my neck. I wasn’t at all sure that I could continue to share the planet with him as I flung him out the door. And what I don’t like about writers who specialize in “ecology/nature" is that they rarely own up to such feelings. They are too busy being good to be human.
DOUGLAS ADAMS is not that kind of nature writer. He smokes, he drinks, he has unflinching things to say about certain representative people of the Third World, a type often treated as a protected species, and he is an Englishman, which means that he would rather be clever than profound any day.
Above all, he packs his irony with his shaving kit. He describes himself as a “writer of humorous science-fiction adventures,” and is the author of the popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Last Chance to See is an episodic narrative of several adventure-filled journeys that the author took with his zoologist coadjutor, Mark Carwardine. The idea was to do a BBC radio series on species that are close to extinction. They had a shocking lot to pick from.
“There are,” Carwardine writes in a concluding section of the book called “Mark’s Epilogue,” “more than a thousand different species of animals and plants becoming extinct every year.” We are what is doing them in: nothing evil we do, just the fact of us. “Most of the extinctions that have occurred since prehistoric time,” Carwardine says, “have occurred in the last three hundred years.” Most of the extinctions in that three-hundred-year period have happened in the past fifty years. And most of the extinctions in those fifty years have happened in the past ten. This inexorable attrition to zero can be stopped. It is being stopped now, in many places around the world. That is the good news of this book. It shows how human care can undo what human carelessness has wrought.
Adams and Carwardine went to the island of Komodo, in Indonesia, to see what is being done to preserve the famous giant Komodo dragon lizards; to Zaire, to check up on the mountain gorilla and the northern white rhino; to South Island, New Zealand, to see the kakapo, a nocturnal parrot who can’t fly, has herculean difficulties mating, resorts most inappropriately to passive resistance just when a cat is about to make a meal of him, and, as you might expect, is right on the edge of extinction; to China, to see the blind dolphins of the Yangtze River; and to the symbolic isle of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, site of a famous extinction—the beating to death by Dutch colonists of every dodo bird there would ever be.
THE PLEASURES of Adams’s text may be divided into three categories—people, places, and animals.
Here he is on an Indonesian travel agent who was trying to explain why the tickets that Adams and Carwardine had reserved for a flight to an island adjacent to Komodo wouldn’t get them there: “He tried to demonstrate the uselessness of stamping our feet to us with maps. ‘In these areas,’ he said, pointing to a large wall map of half of Asia, ‘it works. East of this line here it doesn’t work.’ ”
Next, a place:
Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.
And another place:
Sleeping in Labuan Bajo, however, is something of an endurance test.
Being woken at dawn by the cockerels is not in itself a problem. The problem arises when the cockerels get confused as co when dawn actually is. They suddenly explode into life, squawking and screaming at about one o’clock in the morning. At about one-thirty they realize their mistake and shut up, just as the major dogfights of the evening are getting under way. These usually start with a few minor bouts between the more enthusiastic youngsters, and then the full chorus of heavyweights weighs in with a fine impression of what it might feel like to fall into the pit of hell with the London Symphony Orchestra.
This passage ranks with the best set pieces in Mark Twain, and yet you can tell, by the repetition of “weigh” (“heavyweights weighs in”), that it was blithely tossed off. These Englishmen have transferred to writing the “we’re all amateurs here” ethic that once won them an empire. Imagine what they could do if they really worked at it!
Finally, here is Adams on an animal:
The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. . . . When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, “Don’t wash—I’m coming home,” we are simply bemused and almost think of it as a deviant behaviour. . . . For a great many animals, however, smell is the chief of the senses. . . . Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their feces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is not the sort of note we would appreciate being left.
People will probably buy Last Chance to See for its matter (“ecology/nature”), only to find themselves at grips with Adams’s decided manner. Style is the real subject here. Last Chance makes us care about some hard-pressed animals, and it ends with a list of organizations to which we can send contributions if we wish to translate our concern into efficacious money. However, it renders this service to nature not through the instrumentalities of science but through those of humanism—rhetoric, irony, cadence, and wit. I believe it was Kierkegaard who wondered, “How can I be myself in the presence of the Truth?” This is a book for people who feel that way about “ecology/nature.”