{"id":165987,"date":"2023-11-09T12:02:12","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T17:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165987"},"modified":"2023-11-09T12:02:12","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T17:02:12","slug":"teetering-canaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/11\/09\/teetering-canaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Teetering Canaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Illustration by Na Kim.<\/p><\/div>\n

Translated by Imogen Taylor<\/em><\/p>\n

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it\u2019s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.<\/p>\n

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.<\/p>\n

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me\u2014she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its\u2014midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film\u2019s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another\u2014decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip<\/em> over<\/em>, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle\u2019s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.<\/p>\n

The question of when exactly tipping points are reached is, despite decades of feverish research, difficult to predict. There is a wealth of data on the subject\u2014figures that chart the various factors with relative precision, from the number of carbon dioxide particles in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere to the rising sea level to the maximum temperatures measured since records began and the projected number of plant and animal species lost daily to extinction. Plotted onto a graph in an impressively simple-looking grid of coordinates and neatly divided into units, this data can be extrapolated, and correlations established, but the result is only a series of formidable curves which, bar a few fluctuations, move with an apparent sense of purpose from the bottom left to the top right-hand corner\u2014from the one known, unchangeable past to several unknown futures.<\/p>\n

These prophecies are at once concrete and abstract; the scenarios they spell out made about as much sense to me as the mosaic of scrawled Post-its on Sibylle\u2019s wall. I walked up and down the hall, deciphering the occasional note, especially the bright signal-yellow ones that Sibylle had used to flag the midpoints. But the overall plot eluded me. I was sweating, though the hall was the coldest place in the apartment and it wasn\u2019t yet noon. Perhaps my temperature was up again, I thought, and I asked Sibylle for a rapid test, but like all the others I\u2019d taken, it turned out negative.<\/p>\n

That morning, a voice on the radio had announced that it was the driest summer on record. The newspapers, meanwhile\u2014this was national news, not local\u2014were reporting a mysterious fish kill of scandalous proportions in the Oder River. In the first articles on the topic, an angler referred to the event as \u201ca tragedy,\u201d the environmental minister called it \u201ca disaster,\u201d and a scientist described it as \u201ca massacre.\u201d A stretch of more than five hundred kilometers of a river that was both boundary and connection between two European countries was as good as dead; its ecosystem had tipped over.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know whether Sibylle had read Aristotle\u2019s Poetics <\/em>as a student, but his idea that a poet should write not about what has<\/em> happened but about what might<\/em> happen still applied. To what extent, however, poetry could be used to describe a present of overlapping emergencies and tipping points was more than doubtful.<\/p>\n

Sibylle\u2019s original plan had been to set her series in the near future, and she had taken several stabs at establishing the difference between our present and the time of the show\u2019s action. But since coming across a quotation by the author Kim Stanley Robinson describing science fiction as \u201cthe realism of our time,\u201d Sibylle had declared the problem obsolete. The future was unequally distributed; evidently the past was, too. Only recently, the demise of the fossil age had seemed imminent\u2014an arduous but inevitable process; now, all over Europe, mothballed coal power plants were being prepared for reactivation. No climate curve could compete with the material immediacy, the archaic weight of war. When the bombs fell, everything went through the floor.<\/p>\n

At home, I looked up the passage in the Poetics <\/em>to see what Aristotle had to say about turning points. \u201cPeripeteia,\u201d he writes in Chapter Eleven, is a reversal from one state of affairs to its opposite, \u201cfrom ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either friendship or enmity, depending on whether the characters are destined for good or ill fortune.\u201d I caught myself wondering what we<\/em> were destined for. Not the bombastic apocalypse of the book of Revelation, that was for sure\u2014but evangelical hopes of deliverance were equally out of the question, with their guilt-steeped, redemption-starved slogans clamoring for nothing less than the \u201csalvation of the world.\u201d Aristotle had it good, I thought; he had the whole soap opera of Greek myth at his disposal. \u201cEvery tragedy,\u201d I read, a little further on, \u201cis made up of complication and d\u00e9nouement. The complication consists of the prehistory and part of the action; the d\u00e9nouement comprises the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was aware that the history of life on Earth was no stage play and the emergence of humans an astounding but fleeting protein-based event; I knew that, like other strange and wonderful beings, we would one day vanish. But I couldn\u2019t help myself; I saw the scenes play out in my mind again: the planet burning, then seething and steaming, then squelching; water withdrawing and continental plates shifting; forests growing rampant, oceans filling with life, animals coming on land to explore\u2014until, an eternity and a few glacial seconds later, a stooped, hirsute, armed creature emerged, with whom I had learned to identify. The rest was settlement and deforestation, mining, urbanization and satellite junk. I was stuck. If that was the prehistory, and human life was not to end in tragedy, we needed a d\u00e9nouement\u2014a solution, a turning point. But what form should it take? My brain, which had been just large enough to fit through the birth canal, seemed to have reached its limits. All it came up with was the worst kind of ecokitsch, calendar quotes such as \u201cWe have only borrowed the Earth \u2026\u201d and \u201cOnly when the last tree \u2026\u201d\u2014words of wisdom that I had once written on my exercise books in glitter pen and whose half life was shorter than that of a plastic bag rotting in a bush. The more dramatic announcement\u2014another tipping-point warning\u2014that it was already \u201cfive to midnight\u201d seemed, ironically, to be one of the oldest catchphrases around and had completely outlived itself. But there was that other common idiom, particularly popular in the English-speaking world, of \u201cthe canary in the coal mine\u201d\u2014a cryptic, equivocal expression that evoked a little yellow bird in the hidden bowels of the Earth. A fowl of the air in the underworld, relegated to lightless depths where it sings its song, perched in a small cage, because that\u2019s all it can do and because, torn from its context, it does what birds so often do in human stories: it produces a surplus of beauty, grace, and meaning. But how, I wondered, had the bird found its way into the mine\u2014into that figure of speech, that metaphor, that image of disorientation, of misery, mercy, danger, the Anthropocene?<\/p>\n

While searching for the origin of the expression, I came across a character\u2014and characters, as I knew from Sibylle, were always good. People were still more interested in people than anything else\u2014this was, of course, a not insignificant part of the problem. My character was the Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane, whose first biographical turning point might, in the script of a biopic, be the scene in which fourteen-year-old John sees his elder brother George turn copper-colored and struggle to breathe for days on end until he is carried off by diphtheria. The physiological miracle of human breathing would hold a lifelong fascination for Haldane and inspire him to a number of inventions, from the haemoglobinometer to a prototype space suit, but also to some rather abstruse experiments that might make for some good scenes in a biopic: his field trips to collect samples of contaminated air in the Dundee slums and London sewers, for instance, or his studies of altitude sickness at Pikes Peak, Colorado and decompression sickness in the deep sea lochs of Scotland\u2014not to mention the test involving goats in a decompression chamber, at the end of which the poor creatures teetered out of the porthole-like opening, staggering on their feet.<\/p>\n

But the scene that leads to the little bird comes earlier, in the 1890s, when Haldane, a man in his midthirties, is investigating mining accidents in British collieries. The coal from those pits was used to power the puffing machines of the motherland of industrialization\u2014machines whose wondrous, many-cogged mechanisms not only unleashed enormous quantities of energy and produced a highly ramified industrial system, but also sent vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and masses of workers into misery.<\/p>\n

Haldane appears in this fog-shrouded scene wearing overalls and a miner\u2019s helmet and carrying a cage full of mice and a leather case marked in signal red with the forbidding words London Fever Hospital<\/em>. He is already a renowned respiratory expert and has been called to the scene of the accident in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, if not to save the lives of the casualties then at least to prevent further accidents.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that conditions in coal mines were, then as now, unhealthy and often even life-threatening\u2014and explosions, triggered by coal dust or gases, were all too common. In the biopic, we see Haldane in the pit, taking blood not only from the dead miners but also from the pit ponies that have perished underground with them. We also see\u2014it\u2019s a color film, of course\u2014that he is troubled by the carmine hue of the blood; we see his gaze fall on the Davy lamps that are still burning next to the corpses. Then come a few scenes of rising action, but eventually\u2014after a change of scene to his laboratory in Oxford\u2014Haldane is able to prove that the majority of victims did not die, as supposed, in underground explosions or from a lack of oxygen, but were poisoned with carbon monoxide, that colorless, tasteless, odorless gas that inhibits oxygen intake even when inhaled in only the most minute quantities and kills large land mammals such as horses or humans within a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

Haldane\u2019s life was one big self-experiment; one of his biographers even described him as a kind of \u201ccanary in the coal mine\u201d himself, so strong was his habit of self-experimentation. In a later scene, we might see him studying the effects of carbon monoxide on his own organism and comparing the results with the effects of the same substance on a mouse. While he observes only a slight drowsiness in himself, the mouse is already curled up unconscious in a corner of its cage, the pale fur of its belly exposed. Haldane grabs the little body, opens the window and almost immediately\u2014it is literally a matter of seconds\u2014the mouse, who remains unnamed in the script, recovers consciousness.<\/p>\n

Switch scenes again and Haldane is recommending to the miners that they use mice as \u201csentinel animals\u201d\u2014but as the rodents are rife in the pits, and always after the men\u2019s victuals, they are clearly not trustworthy enough for the job. In fact, it won\u2019t be long before mice are cast as canaries in the drama of human medical history and used as model organisms in genetic research, but that would be another film altogether, a documentary that would open in a park in Novosibirsk with a tracking shot onto a bronze statue of a bespectacled mouse about the size of a baby, dressed in a lab coat and wielding a pair of needles with which it appears to be knitting a DNA helix.<\/p>\n

But to return to our hero. Haldane eventually strikes on another, smaller species of warm-blooded creatures that are similarly practical, almost as easy to acquire and keep, but most importantly, have an impressive track record as pets. Canaries are also such efficient breathers that they absorb oxygen even when they exhale; this makes them extremely sensitive to toxic gases\u2014sensitive enough to lose consciousness some twenty minutes earlier than humans. Twenty minutes is a long time, long enough to leave the mine and return to the surface, to fill one\u2019s lungs with fresh oxygen and escape asphyxiation. What\u2019s more, the symptoms of poisoning are immediately apparent: an unconscious canary will stop singing and fall in a swoon from its perch\u2014an unmistakable warning sign. And aren\u2019t those bright yellow feathers a sign in themselves, crying out to be interpreted?<\/p>\n

Some sources claimed that the first canaries to be sent down into the mines were deviant specimens that had been withdrawn from sale and were going for a bargain: male birds with less attractive plumage and poor singing skills. But the contemporary literature that I managed to find on the subject\u2014titles such as Katechismus der Kanarienzucht <\/em>(The canary breeder\u2019s catechism, 1901) or Der Kanarienvogel: als Hausfreund der deutschen Familie <\/em>(The canary: a friend of the German family, 1908)\u2014never tired of complaining that \u201cthe English fancy\u201d for breeding canaries for their color and form alone, \u201cwith no heed to the birds\u2019 singing power,\u201d had brought forth \u201cmonstrosities\u201d such as the long-necked, humpbacked Scotch Fancy, the London Lizard with its scalelike markings, and the Yorkshire Spangle, a straw-yellow bird with a brown-green cap and eye rings that was \u201cparticularly popular among the lower classes of the population\u201d\u2014\u201cthe strongest\u201d but also, as the author remarks, not without a touch of chauvinism, the \u201cmost phlegmatic breed of English canary.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is one scene without which no Haldane biopic would be complete. It is set underground and shows a group of miners\u2014some still boys, some aged before their time\u2014having whistling competitions with the birds in their little cages. Since canaries are good mimics, this scene should perhaps be imagined as a kind of concert\u2014a high-pitched, cross-species, underground concert, the voices echoing and answering one another, spurring each other on. I liked the idea that the men kept an eye on the birds, concerned about their well-being\u2014not least because their own depended on it. I also liked the thought that they, in turn, would save the lives of their lifesavers in an emergency.<\/p>\n

It touched me to read that the miners mourned their canaries when they were replaced in the eighties by more sensitive but soulless detectors known as electronic noses; the underground symbiosis between them had transformed the birds from avian early warning mechanisms into something more like companions. The empty cages ended up in museums and became anecdotal material for a chapter in industrial history, along with Haldane\u2019s \u201ccanary resuscitator,\u201d now on display at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, a contraption designed for the immediate resuscitation of unconscious birds\u2014a cast-iron box with glass sides, its porthole-like opening firmly bolted with a swivel pin. Atop this box, screwed fast in the grip of a pipe clamp, is a shiny black cartridge that strangely resembles an atomic bomb. A nickel-plated copper pipe connects it to the inside. Behind the glass sits a small bird, yellow with green patches, its pale pink beak raised, its tiny black eyes gleaming as they reflect a distant source of light. The bird is dead as a doornail, its stuffed body attached to a perch with invisible wire. Its life\u2014so much is clear\u2014could not be saved by the resuscitator.<\/p>\n

As so often, the obsolete and discarded are to be found hibernating in the parallel universe of language. In metaphor, the pit canaries live on, haunting the news like miniature Cassandras\u2014practical, feathered oracles that fall mute in the face of disaster and drop dramatically from their perches at that precarious point where life tips over into death. These figurative canaries turn out to be every bit as adaptable as their real-life models. In recent articles, the phrase \u201ccanary in the coal mine\u201d has been used, variously, to refer to a species of water flea called Daphnia that is sensitive to chemical substances, the drought-ravaged wine industry of Australia, a foundering baseball star, methane-spewing craters in Serbia, the canceled Batgirl <\/em>movie, and thousands of dead manatees starving off the coast of Florida.<\/p>\n

But the metaphor is not always uncontroversial. In 2021, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, stated with some force that the Pacific Island nations, already long affected by global warming, were tired of playing the part of the plucky little sentinel bird. \u201cWe refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the world\u2019s coal mine, as we are so often called,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cWe want more for ourselves than to be helpless songbirds whose demise serves as a warning to others.\u201dTheir lives, after all, were not figurative; they were actual and actually under threat\u2014and they wanted, understandably, to be saved for their own sake, and not because the nations responsible for their plight saw their predicament as an anticipation of their own precarious future.<\/p>\n

The canary metaphor was on the point of becoming an empty cage, a clich\u00e9. It seemed to obscure rather than reveal, like the 1934 camouflage publication that I came across in the catalogue of the Berlin State Library. Listed as Der Kanarienvogel: ein praktisches Handbuch \u00fcber Naturgeschichte, Pflege und Zucht des Kanarienvogels <\/em>(The canary: a practical guide to the natural history, care and breeding of canaries), this book turned out to contain Molotov\u2019s speech on the second five-year plan at the seventeenth conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Figures of speech are never innocent, and even canaries are less innocent than one might imagine. Buffon, in his Natural History of Birds<\/em>, may describe \u201cthe musician of the chamber\u201d as a \u201cdelicate,\u201d \u201csocial,\u201d and \u201cgentle\u201d bird\u2014\u201cits caresses are amiable, its little pets are innocent, and its anger neither hurts nor offends\u201d\u2014but his contemporary, Goethe, has Werther almost expire with longing when Lotte\u2019s canary caresses her mouth with its bill and then proceeds to kiss his: \u201cHis little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and the delightful sensation seemed like the forerunner of the sweetest bliss.\u201d The meaning of this \u201csweetest bliss\u201d is hinted at not only in the German verb v\u00f6geln<\/em> (to fuck; literally, \u201cto bird\u201d) but also in Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings, in which a caged bird is a common and unequivocal symbol of virginity\u2014a state that is, by definition, precarious.<\/p>\n

While searching for the origin of this association, I came across an image of ravished innocence in Pliny the Elder\u2019s Natural History<\/em>, where, aptly enough, it is mining that is depicted as a nonconsensual act, the rape of Mother Earth:<\/p>\n

\n

We trace out all the fibres of the earth […] We penetrate her inner parts and seek for riches in the abode of the spirits of the departed […]<\/p>\n

[…] we probe her entrails, digging into her veins of gold and silver and mines of copper and lead; we actually drive shafts into the depth to search for gems and certain tiny stones; we drag out her entrails, we seek a jewel merely to be worn upon a finger!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure whether to feel happy or fatalistic about such serendipity. The story I\u2019d set out to tell seemed to be a very old one.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the main tipping points lay so far back in time that, rather than simply damn their consequences\u2014the part that was usually faded out\u2014we should learn to value them. It occurred to me that plenty of ruined landscapes that had been abandoned by humans were now places of refuge for threatened species and would soon be conservation areas. It was getting complicated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe extraction of ores and other mineral resources,\u201d I dictated to myself, just to get things straight in my mind, \u201cis inextricably linked not only with almost all human achievements in technology and civilization, but also\u2014more than any other trade or industry\u2014with massive overexploitation, devastating destruction, and a state in which nature and culture are no longer distinguishable and produce such strange amalgams as canary birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The birds I was trying to set free were all flying straight back into their cages. They were no longer natural beings but cultural products of a centuries-old history of domestication, shaped above all by the unimaginative laws of a market\u2014a history that began with the breeding monopoly of Spanish monks in the fifteenth century and was still going strong in the late nineteenth century when the rise of the mail-order industry ended in the deaths of so many birds. This wasn\u2019t the story I wanted to tell: the dull, powerful, ubiquitous interplay of supply and demand, which had given us, on the one hand, the homogeneous cultural landscapes of Central Europe that I liked to escape to in my free time and, on the other hand, these birds\u2014virtuoso warblers with a range of up to nearly three octaves, whose trilling I had listened to for a time on endless YouTube videos and could no longer hear without getting a headache.<\/p>\n

For a particularly mellifluous specimen, old canary guides recommend keeping a male bird on his own, though some manuals have condemned this as cruel, pointing out that canaries sing to impress potential mates and rivals and to mark their territory. I was reminded of a theory for why evolution has given us not only an inexhaustible variety of biological answers to the question of what life is but also such peculiar, decadent, and superfluous gifts as beauty, ornament, and culture\u2014the hummingbird\u2019s iridescent feathers, the baboon\u2019s pornographically bare bum, and, of course, the delights of birdsong. The theory had what I considered one of the best names a theory can have. It was called singing for sex, and in its out-and-out obsession with v\u00f6geln<\/em>, it rivaled the writings of Sigmund Freud.<\/p>\n

But there was another, more modest\u2014and moving\u2014interpretation, which saw birdsong as something that behavioral biologists refer to as the contact call. Also features of human behavior, contact calls are sounds made to convince those around you\u2014and also, to an extent, yourself\u2014that you still exist. An \u201cI\u2019m here; where are you?\u201d A whistling in the dark\u2014at once self-reassurance and protective magic.<\/p>\n

The best canary singers are said to have lived on Fuerteventura, before deforestation and overgrazing transformed the island into a desert. There are still flocks of Atlantic canaries on Madeira, the Azores, and the western Canary Islands; my research told me that, with a population of about 1.5 to 2.5 million pairs, the species was classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. What was<\/em> concerning, however, was the dwindling populations of a number of other animal and plant species native to the Canaries, such as the dragon tree, the Canary Islands Large White, the Iberian water frog, and a handful of endemic species of giant lizards.<\/p>\n

More concerning still was that, although a glut of poisonous golden algae had been identified as the cause of the fish kill, it remained unclear what had triggered it. Not for the first time, factors were too complex to allow the incident to be treated as a straightforward criminal case in which the perpetrators had only to be tracked down, brought to justice and duly punished. An affair that had destroyed the lives of millions of creatures was at risk of petering out in inquiry committees and mutual finger-pointing. Volunteers were called on to gather the hundreds of tons of stinking fish corpses from the riverbanks and dispose of them in dumpsters before they sank to the bottom of the river and further polluted the water by consuming oxygen as they decomposed. I didn\u2019t have the words to comprehend these tons of dead fish\u2014creatures that, more than any others, are proverbially mute, even in life.<\/p>\n

Somewhere there was mention of damage limitation, but what I wanted was a face, a character, a hero. Someone who would rescue rather than repair\u2014an expert like Haldane, an eccentric scientist who was on the side of the good guys and would make ground-breaking discoveries with his tests and experiments, preventing not only humans but freshwater fish and mollusks from death by asphyxiation. Hundreds of tons of dead fish\u2014it was apocalyptic. But there was no lake of fire. It had even begun to rain. Life went on.<\/p>\n

Before a canary falls from its perch, it begins to teeter. Before a system tips over completely, there are often major fluctuations and complications: populations rise and fall, and inconclusive test results cloud the already murky picture. But by then, as scientific models\u2014and experience\u2014teach us, developments cannot be stopped. The shit hits the fan. The situation spirals out of control, setting off an unpredictable chain of irreversible and, indeed, irreparable events, which for some reason I imagined as a custard-pie showdown in a silent film, in which the pie lands in the face of an innocent bystander, triggering a series of unlikely but inevitable chain reactions before the picture fades on a disconcertingly tranquil-looking scene of devastation.<\/p>\n

There was no way back. The canary metaphor was teetering. It might be a compelling image, but it was no use to us, because, like it or not, Earth wasn\u2019t a coal mine\u00a0that could be evacuated in an emergency, even if tired fantasies of colonizing nearby planets had recently made something of a comeback.\u00a0It would take more than the behavior of a bird to\u00a0bring home to us that the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the extraction of coal and other fossil fuels was so drastically altering conditions for life on Earth that the future had become not only an uncertain place but a frightening one.<\/p>\n

In Aristotle\u2019s time, the Canary Islands lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, at the end of the world, and those who didn\u2019t have the time to make the pilgrimage to Delphi, Olympia, or Claros relied on the observation of birds and the interpretation of dreams to provide them with oracles in their day-to-day lives. While dreams in those days were divine prophecies\u2014the medium of choice for communications from higher spheres\u2014in our culture they are at best expressions of the fears and desires buried deep in our psyches. I knew from years of analysis that such fears and desires can be almost impossible to tell apart, so I was unimpressed to hear that dreams about falling into pits have, not very originally, been linked to the discovery of having a vagina rather than a penis.<\/p>\n

There can be few concepts that so closely interweave human fears and desires as the Anthropocene. Man-made, like all words, whether grace<\/em>, or Gaia<\/em>, or greenhouse gas<\/em>, the term Anthropocene <\/em>was coined to give a name to the world-dominating part played by our species in the drama of life on Earth and, at the same time, to sanction the rapacious work of industrial societies as human nature. The dilemma surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene is an old one: there is no such thing as unbiased description. With every word we utter, with every metaphor or idiom we use, we are shaping the world. The trouble is, as experience has taught us, that, despite their far-reaching consequences, life\u2019s tipping points and turning points are often revealed to us only with a certain time lag. Moments that seem innocuous enough as we live through them later realize their fateful and inevitable potential. Historiography, whether concerned with one\u2019s own life or with the use\u2014or abuse\u2014of the Earth, doesn\u2019t identify the linchpins until it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

When did this desperate state of affairs begin? With the extermination of the saber-toothed tiger in prehistoric times, or with the introduction of the steam engine in the early modern era? With the Mesopotamian accounting system which invented stockpiling and the concept of ownership, or with the Neolithic or Industrial Revolution? With mining, that most unfathomable of arts? Or with one of Fritz Haber\u2019s inventions? But which? The one that led to the production of artificial fertilizer and the feeding of billions, or the one that enabled enemy soldiers to be wiped out with toxic gases in World War I? It was good old Haldane, the secret hero of this essay, who braved the front as a human canary in May 1915 to identify the lethal vapors at the Battle of Ypres as chlorine gas, and immediately invented a makeshift gas mask to protect against them. It all linked up. No creature is imaginable without its environment. Or as Haldane put it, rather more soberingly, in his 1935 study The Philosophy of a Biologist<\/em>\u2014having progressed with admirable logic from breathing specialist to environmental physiologist:<\/p>\n

\n

The fact that the life of an organism extends over its environment implies that the lives of different organisms, although they are distinguishable, enter into each other\u2019s lives. There is no spatial separation between the lives of different organisms, just as there is no spatial separation within the life of any one organism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When I tried to tell Sibylle about it that evening, she waved me away. \u201cExactly. It wasn\u2019t a weapon, it was a bag,\u201d she said, somewhat incoherently, \u201cand the whole of early history, with its bragging myths about hunting and killing, was a masculine, heroic, imperial narrative that\u2019s left us screwed.\u201d Some of the Post-its lay scattered on the floor. She had discovered Ursula K. Le Guin and decided to transfer Le Guin\u2019s \u201cThe Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction\u201d onto the epic arc of her series plot\u2014a story without heroes, blending character and background; a Where\u2019s Waldo?<\/em> picture effortlessly spanning multiple universes. I was convinced, but had no idea what it meant for my writing\u2014no idea how to convey such obscure mycelial webs in language, in a script that depends on gaps to create a readable text, in a grammar that, however sophisticated, tends to rigidity. The genre question also reared its head again. I\u2019d never been much of a fan of that bourgeois, individualistic genre that is the novel, but that hadn\u2019t stopped me from devouring its prototype, in which a white man on a desert island reenacts a rather questionable version of the processes of civilization, slavery and all. It came back to me that Robinson Crusoe\u2019s main problem was not hunger but loneliness, which he attempted to ward off by taming a young parrot before turning his didactic attention to a member of his own species.<\/p>\n

I tried to envisage a world without birds. I tried to imagine the horror, the total quiet, the end of the world. Could silence be loud? Could it spur humans to action? In Silent Spring<\/em>, a book by another heroic scientist, the marine biologist Rachel Carson, the silence of birds is an urgent warning sign, a call for retreat, and the book, although it makes no mention of pit canaries, is often credited with kick-starting the environmental movement. First published in 1962, it frames birds\u2019 silence as both reality and metaphor\u2014and the absence of birdsong as the salient feature of a wasted region that has been hit by \u201ca strange blight\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Carson leaves no doubt as to who is responsible: \u201cNo witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The chapter is called \u201cA Fable for Tomorrow,\u201d and Carson\u2019s narrative trick is to warn of acute disaster by writing as if it has already struck, and then proceeding to interpret the signs. It was, I thought, the reverse of a strident alarm. The silence of the birds made sense as a signal only if someone had previously heard them sing\u2014only if their absence was noticed. For something to be missed, the memory of it had to be alive.<\/p>\n

Carson\u2019s study, an appeal written with both literary sensitivity and scientific vision, was certainly heartening proof that by influencing legislation, books could prevent the extinction of species and save the unmetaphorical lives of countless creatures. Laws and regulations are, in the end, also a kind of literature, with interpretations debating their value, application, and validity.<\/p>\n

In 1969, seven years after the publication of Silent Spring<\/em>\u2014and five years after Carson died of breast cancer\u2014a hearing held in Madison, Wisconsin ended with a breakthrough in the ban on DDT, a toxic, carcinogenic and non-biodegradable substance harmful to vertebrates as well as insects. Not only did scientists at the hearing attest to a sharp decline in the robin population following the use of DDT, and to the universal contamination of human mother\u2019s milk with the pesticide; representatives of the US Department of Agriculture admitted in court that\u2014unlike Haldane\u2014they hadn\u2019t tested for toxicity, but simply accepted the information provided by the manufacturers.<\/p>\n

That same year, Kurt Vonnegut addressed an audience of physics teachers at the American Physical Society. Vonnegut, who had himself studied chemistry and German\u2014an interesting choice in the late thirties\u2014spoke of his doubts about the usefulness of the arts, \u201cwith the possible exception of interior decoration,\u201d and went on to present what he called \u201cthe canary in the coal mine theory of the arts\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.<\/p>\n

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over right now. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is unlikely that Vonnegut wore a canary-yellow suit to give this speech; he was probably wearing one of his fawn jackets\u2014another color to be found in the canary breeder\u2019s palette. Nor did he keel over at any point in the course of his address. But he did tell his audience of the urgent and seemingly simple advice that he liked to give young people to warn them out of the deep, dark pit:<\/p>\n

\n

When I speak to students, I do moralize. I tell them not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self-defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury. I tell them not to work for people who pollute water or the atmosphere or who raid the public treasury. I tell them not to commit war crimes or to help others to commit war crimes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The main character in Vonnegut\u2019s novel Slaughterhouse-Five<\/em>, also published in 1969, is quite definitely a canary. But rather than keel over, Billy Pilgrim comes \u201cunstuck in time,\u201d because he is too sensitive to cope with the atrocities he witnessed during the bombing of Dresden. In a plot that jumps wildly back and forth, disregarding all chronology, Billy is abducted by extraterrestrials, who here assume the implausible\u2014but no less surprising\u2014role of deus ex machina, that higher power that traditionally intervenes at the last minute to untangle a snarled narrative or avert disaster. Because the horror has already happened.<\/p>\n

In a frame story, the narrator, who is evidently closely akin to Vonnegut, writes repeatedly\u2014like me in this essay\u2014of what can be described only as a failure. The failure in his case is his powerlessness to narrate, and thus communicate and share, his experiences of the war\u2014although he does at one point claim that, as \u201ca trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations,\u201d he has \u201coutlined the Dresden story many times.\u201d When at last he gives the manuscript to his agent, the agent is disappointed that it\u2019s so short. The narrator defends himself:<\/p>\n

\n

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is except for the birds.<\/p>\n

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like \u201cPoo-tee-weet?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I found it heartening that Vonnegut allowed the birds to survive the massacre. My mind still refused to grasp that the story wasn\u2019t about us\u2014that Homo sapiens<\/em> wasn\u2019t the hero of the drama but only a blurry character blending into the background, doing what birds do when they make contact calls. The canary bird was me, and it was calling to me, reassuring me that I still existed, in a present whose precarity was not only identified as such by science but brought to life by art\u2014a world full of midpoints, X factors, and unsettling beauty; a web of unconditionally interdependent life.<\/p>\n

I was exhausted. A lack of knowledge didn\u2019t seem to be the problem. The Club of Rome had just published a new report which, fifty years after its infamous diagnosis on the limits to growth, came to a verdict that left me reeling. \u201cThe biggest challenge in the world today,\u201d I read, with faint dread, \u201cis not climate change, biodiversity loss, or even a pandemic. It is our collective inability to distinguish between fact and fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

I shivered.<\/p>\n

It had dropped cold overnight. In Sibylle\u2019s hall, logs were stacked in front of a now bare wall. All the Post-its had vanished. Her gas supplier had shut off the gas and she had ordered a wood-burning stove on the internet, which would, with any luck, be delivered before the frost set in. Come winter, we would do what Aristotle had done when he was cold: we would make a fire. And perhaps we would tell ourselves a story that mattered.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Postscript<\/em><\/p>\n

Months later, at the end of a warm winter with little rain and even less snow, the environmental organization Greenpeace published a report identifying three hard coal mines in Upper Silesia as the cause of the Oder fish kill. These mines dump the highly saline water that is a waste product of coal mining into the nearby tributaries of the Oder and the Vistula. Polish law places essentially no limit on the chloride levels of industrial wastewater discharged into rivers. It is safe to assume that the disaster will repeat itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980, is an acclaimed writer and book designer, and the publisher of a prestigious natural history imprint in Berlin. Her books, including<\/em>\u00a0Atlas of Remote Islands, the novel<\/em>\u00a0The Giraffe\u2019s Neck, and the International Booker Prize and National Book Award nominee\u00a0<\/em>An Inventory of Losses, have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have received numerous awards. This essay won the Crespo Foundation\u2019s Wortmeldungen Literaturpreis 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n

Imogen Taylor is a London-born, Berlin-based literary translator. Her translation of Sasha Marianna Salzmann\u2019s <\/em>Beside Myself was shortlisted for the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator\u2019s Prize. Other work includes <\/em>How We Desire\u00a0by Carolin Emcke<\/em>,\u00a0Promise Me You\u2019ll Shoot Yourself\u00a0by Florian Huber, and\u00a0<\/em>Two Women and a Poisoning\u00a0by Alfred D\u00f6blin.<\/em><\/p>\n

The lines of Aristotle’s<\/em> Poetics in this essay are translated by Imogen Taylor from a German edition:<\/em>\u00a0Aristoteles: Poetik, translated and edited by<\/em> Manfred Fuhrmann<\/em>, 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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