When you examine societies just as self-confident as ours that unraveled and were eventually swallowed by the jungle, you see that the balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off it can all end. Two thousand years later, someone will be squinting over the fragments, trying to find out what went wrong.*
The International Wildlife Museum was designed to replicate a French Foreign Legion fort in Africa. It houses the collection of a late millionaire big-game hunter, C. J. McElroy, who still holds many world records, including the world’s biggest mountain sheep – a Mongolian argali – and the biggest jaguar, bagged in Sinaloa, Mexico. The special attractions here include a white rhino, one of the 600 animals shot by Teddy Roosevelt during a 1909 African safari.
The museum’s centerpiece is the faithfully reproduced 2,500-square-foot trophy room of McElroy’s Tuscon mansion, which bears the taxidermized spoils of a lifelong obsession with killing large mammals. Locally often derided as the “dead animal museum,” for [author/paleoecologist Paul] Martin on this night, it’s perfect.
The occasion is the launch of his 2005 book, Twilight of the Mammoths. Just behind his audience rises a phalanx of grizzy and polar bears, frozen forever in mid-attack. Above the podium, its ears extended like gray spinnakers, is the trophy head of an adult African elephant. To either side, every breed of spiral horns found on five continents is represented. Pulling himself from his wheelchair, Martin slowly scans the hundreds of stuffed heads: bongo, nyala, bushback, sitatunga, greater and lesser kudu, eland, ibex, Barbary sheep, chamois, impala, gazelle, dik-dik, musk ox, cape buffalo, sable, roan, oryx, waterbuck, and gnu. Hundreds of pairs of glass eyes fail to return his moist blue gaze.
“I can’t imagine a more appropriate setting,” he says, “to describe what amounts to genocide. In my lifetime, millions of people slaughtered in death camps, from Europe’s Holocaust to Darfur, are proof of what our species is capable of. My 50-year career has been absorbed by the extraodinary loss of huge animals whose heads don’t appear on these walls. They were all exterminated, simply because it could be done. The person who put this collection together could have walked straight out of the Pleistocene.”
He and his book conclude with a plea that his accounting of the Pleistocene mega-massacre be a cautionary lesson that stops us from perpetrating another that would be far more devastating. The matter is more complicated than a killer instinct that never relents until another species is gone. It involves acquisitive instincts that also can’t tell when to stop, until something we never intended to harm is fatally deprived of something it needs. We don’t actually have to shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.
ALAN WEISMAN , The World Without Us
When I die, one of my romantic comforts is to imagine my remains composting into rich, dark soil, nourishing an oak, a rosebush, or such. Apparently, all will be redily seized and utilised by the earth, upon human extinction, to replenish and flourish. Even, (in time), those nasty polymers.
Great, enlightening read.
*Arthur Demarest
