I can’t sleep. The inflatable pad underneath me feels torturously unstable. I am tempted to push it aside in favor of the cold, lumpy ground. Hours pass and I wonder if I have been thinking about anything at all. I roll onto my other side again and listen to the tent fabric scrape against a dead finger of greasewood. I had reached the San Rafael Swell in central Utah just in time to start walking up a narrow canyon patinated with dark streaks of desert varnish. The deep sand slowed my pace as wind-broken rain scattered out of the orange west. I planned to walk for at least an hour and a half, but the storm clouds made evening arrive early. At the first sign of flatness I dropped my pack and listened as caterpillars dropped out of the cottonwoods above me like weighty raindrops.
And now I am just laying here. The fabric scrapes against the greasewood. A faint truck on I-70 gears down to go up the grade that cuts through the San Rafael Reef, a tilted mess of red, white, and orange rock. My heart beats and somewhere near my face nylon moves against nylon with every pulse. An owl calls and the canyon amplifies it. The staccato hoot stretches, becomes watery, expands. Something about this owl’s call fills me with surprise and sorrow. At first, I’m not sure what is surprising me. The ancient hoot echoes through an even older canyon while three miles away, trucks haul plastic lawn chairs and iPad screen protectors from Denver to LA. Is that it? The juxtaposition of natural and unnatural? I notice that I am surprised that owls chose to make this canyon their home. Then I realize I am surprised that there are still owls at all. This surprise becomes concerning. The rational part of me knows that there are still western screech owls, northern flickers, piñion jays, and ravens, but another part of me was revealed in the moment when I was surprised to hear that watery hoot.
My knowledge that humans are crowding out most other species is probably behind this series of thoughts. I have been so inundated with bad news that I am legitimately taken aback by the existence of an animal that I have always taken for granted. My awareness that owls and many other things will be casualties of human existence has accelerated in my mind. The eventuality overtook the present. Time has blurred. My knowledge of eventual tragedy is tantamount to tragedy now. I didn’t know how much that eventual, great death had already taken up residence inside me. In my heart, the owl I hear now is already dead.
Now I am wide awake, shocked by my own negativity, wondering what I should make of this realization. My mind rattles off some choices. 1.) I am realistic. The tragedy is now. My realism is a superior way to be. I am proud of myself for being right, and will bear the twin burdens of sorrow and pride for as long as I am able. 2.) I am just in a bad mood because of some relationship problems I’ve been dealing with. This will pass and I will be able to take owls for granted again tomorrow. 3.) I am mentally ill. A vast majority of people I know would not be having this reaction to hearing an owl. They would be excited to hear it. Why does the same call cause elation in some and sorrow in me? This apparent predisposition to experience things negatively is an inferior trait. I am not a good person. I hate myself. I mull these possibilities over, accepting them all more or less equally.
I roll over. A bird I don’t recognize sends a piercing chirp into the canyon. And again. And again. I open my eyes and see a gray light beginning to form the world out of shadow along the perimeter of my tent. I blink slowly. Time passes. A canyon wren confirms that morning is indeed on its way. After an entire night of tossing and turning, I finally look at my phone. 5:49. I can’t lay here any longer. I get up and put on water for coffee in the gray light.
With summer on its way, I ponder my ability to temper my negativity throughout the process of studying mule deer migrations in southern Utah. I know that I am impacted by tragedy, and the impact is so forceful that I can’t imagine withholding that impact from potential readers. At the same time, I know not everyone is like me. Some want hope. I already know I will be crossing roads, fences, and other detrimental obstructions to animal movement. Will I be able to find hope as I study ungulate migrations in the desert southwest? We’ll find out.
People have been writing environmental elegies for decades and the world is still here. Were they wrong? Did we lose nothing at all? I have been encouraged by some to question my own predisposition for elegiac writing. I’ve had to reckon with it. What other lenses can be used to see the world? How can I talk about things in a more hopeful way? After all, without hope the battle is already lost, right? I think I have to be honest and acknowledge that I can only be hopeful about certain things. Hope is preferential. If I am in love with the diversity of life I’ve known my whole life, then I cannot be hopeful. If it is required of me to be hopeful and that which I love is on its way out, then the attempt to hope for the continuation of film, merino wool socks, and guitars would be disingenuous. I don’t know how much I love these things. I’m not sure if it is my job to love these things. I believe it is someone’s job, and I would never tell them that they are wrong to want to preserve these wonderful human inventions. I don’t know if anyone should ever be told not to love what they love. Likewise, I don’t condone the effort by others to push me to find something to hope for that is more realistic.
Presently, conversations about resiliency in the climate change era emphasize humans, but I am not particularly worried about us. We are one of the most resilient species on the planet. I start wonder what we are really talking about when we talk about resiliency. If we aren’t talking about ensuring survival, we must be talking about ameliorating suffering. The only somewhat attainable thing to hope for is a reduction of suffering for the largest amount of humans for the longest amount of time while the 6th great extinction runs its course. I can understand the sentiment, and in fact I agree with it. Suffering is the one thing all sentient creatures avoid, we know this. I avoid it at every turn, so I pray for it to pass us all by. Look elsewhere for big-eyed hosts. Find another world in which to reside: one where suffering is something else, if it can be. Additionally, we don’t know much about how other things like plants experience the world while we do know how humans experience the world, so it makes sense to try and ameliorate suffering for that which we know. Still, this is not my primary fight. My heart is not fully in it. It shows preference for sentience, intelligence, and culture, and it feels selfish to favor these things.
In a few weeks I will find myself in the desert again, making coffee as the canyon wrens wake the world. I will be following a single deer from her winter to summer ranges for reasons I am not able to fully articulate right now. But I do wonder if by matching my life to hers, and attempting to see what she sees, I may unearth sentience, intelligence, and even culture in the more-than-human world. The things that qualify humans as deserving of preferential treatment, if found in other worlds, could unsettle the hierarchies I’m uncomfortable with. And if I don’t find these things? That’s alright. I still feel an obligation as the dominant species, the apex predator, to consider lives outside of my own. Doing so may be one way to deal with the guilt of being partly responsible for so much ecological destruction. So yes, there are curious, noble, and selfish motives behind my research. Forgive me.