The Last Word On Nothing

Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they navigate a litany of obstacles, both natural and human-made: They swim lakes and ford rivers, climb mountains and traverse deserts, squeeze under barbed-wire fences and pick their way through oil-and-gas fields and, most terrifying of all, dash across highways. And all of it, I should add, while pregnant with twins. 

To get to Rock Springs, of course, required a substantial migration of my own, entailing two planes and a rental car, a carbon-binging annihilation of space and time that would have seemed like genuine magic to my not-too-distant ancestors. Less than a month later, travel now seems an extravagance, not to mention an unconscionable public health danger. A few months hence and we may all end up like the survivors in Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopia about the aftermath of a pandemic, incredulous at the notion that those rusting steel cigars called airplanes ever leapt from the ground.

The age of unfettered human mobility, now on hiatus, has come at the expense of most other organisms. Animals as small as mice and as large as elephants are losing their ability to freely bestride the landscape, their worlds ever more circumscribed by the frenetic movements of a single overweening ape. It’s logical enough, then, to assume that a dramatic deescalation of human movement will permit other critters to reclaim some ground. Okay, the viral stories about the Venice swans were feel-good hokum, but I don’t doubt that far-ranging animals like those Wyoming deer will find a more accommodating migrationscape this spring. 

This is not, to be clear, cause for celebration. Not even the most misanthropic ecofascist would want to give half the earth back to nature in this way, and it’s impossible to talk about any potential silver linings of COVID-19 without sounding like a privileged ghoul. What’s more, any gains the planet makes during this pandemic — improved air quality, reduced carbon emissions, more room for wildlife to wander — are, absent larger structural changes, destined for ephemerality, to be swiftly unmade the moment civilization roars back to life (which will most definitely not be Easter). 

How, then, to discuss the pandemic’s side effects in a way that both looks forward and respects the cataclysmic suffering it’s inflicted? Personally, I like how the poet Ellen Welcker framed it in Spokane’s alt-weekly, the Inlander:

There is an opportunity here, though I am not trying to be overly optimistic and indeed I don’t feel that optimistic. People are going to die. People have already lost and will continue to lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their homes… Yet, if we step outside of the catastrophic effects of all of this unfolding, the tumult in our daily lives — there remains an opportunity to live our lives in ways that just a week ago seemed unimaginable. Driving less. Slowing down. Sharing resources. Caring for our elders. Health care for everyone. Safety nets for all. Real collaboration to slow the climate crisis of which this is a part. The list goes on. We are seeing the first glimpses of this possible new world today.

At some point this will all be over (yes! really!), and we’ll have learned — what, exactly, from this horrific unintentional experiment? Maybe that nature needs a more permanent break from us: not an ad hoc panicky withdrawal that destroys millions of lives, but a graceful, well-managed retreat that takes direct aim at the travel habits of the globe-trotting affluent.

Last week, like most Americans, I canceled all travel plans, road trips and flights alike, and it felt… well, it felt good, an expiation of my flygskam and whatever Scandinavian neologism connotes guilt at leaving your wife and dog behind to saunter across the continent. For me, the “possible new world” now gradually taking shape is a more rooted one, in which I surrender some degree of mobility — voluntarily, this time — in deference to other forms of life.