David Quammen
"Large Predators: Canaries in the Coalmine"
Thursday, March 07, 2002, 11:30 AM
One of America’s finest nature writers, Dr. David Quammen travels the world, tracking current themes in conservation and evolutionary biology. His most recent book is Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, which has been acclaimed as one of the top five non-fiction books of 2003 by the New York Review of Books. Quammen is a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for his science essays, author of Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, and numerous other books. Quammen has also documented the 2000 mile mega-transect across central Africa’s last wild tract of rainforest undertaken by ecologist Michael Fay, and frequently contributes to the National Geographic Society. Quammen also wrote a popular column for Outside magazine for 15 years. His books include, The Boilerplate Rhino, Natural Acts, The Flight of the Iguana, Wild Places, and the fiction works, The Soul of Viktor Tronko and The Zolta Configuration.
LECTURE SUMMARY
By "Monsters of God", Quammen means man-eating predators. These animals are not just “deadly,” they’re in a special category, one that puts us in our place in the food chain. Unlike venomous snakes or rampaging elephants or cranky hippopotamuses, these animals – lions, tigers, Komodo dragons, crocodiles – look at us as food. They don’t just kill us, they EAT us. And unlike pack animals, they kill and eat us one-on-one.
Many of us probably expected David Quammen to speak about the role of large predators in ecosystems around the world, perhaps to echo the concepts that some of us heard a few years back when Michael Soule spoke about the Wildlands Project.
Instead, Quammen focused more on the long-term relationship humans have had with man-eating predators. Egyptians, Assyrians, and various peoples of Judea were all lion hunters. Large predators, monsters really, figure prominently in the near-eastern creation myths of Gilgamesh and Tiamaat and in the story of Beowulf. Perhaps the most influential predator story for western civilization is recounted in Job 41, the story of Job and the Leviathan – not a whale, but part crocodile, part sea monster. The message from God: “You can’t handle this nasty beast. Do you really want to mess with its creator?”
Quammen recounted numerous rituals from shark-kissing to predator worship that remind us that in some quarters of the natural world we’ve long been regarded simply as meat.
But that’s changing. The Berber lion is gone. The Caspian lion is gone. The Bali tiger, gone. Next on the list for oblivion: the Nile crocodile, the polar bear, tigers everywhere. Quammen maintains that locking away these beasts in isolated sanctuaries does not recognize our historical and psychological relationship with this part of nature. In any case, the four to five percent of the earth’s surface that is protected is simply not enough to sustain large predators in the long run.
A promising alternative to the lock-up approach to protection is integrating human societies and natural areas that support large predators. A few examples: the Siberian tiger, the Asiatic lion in western India.
Quammen dwelled for a while on the Asiatic lion Panthera leo persica which diverged from the African lion 50-100,000 years ago. Once a dominant predator in the Middle East and southern Asia, it was extirpated from Syria by 1885, last sighted in Iran in 1940. Its last outpost is the “Gir population” in western India, where perhaps 325 animals live in unique co-habitation arrangement with local herders and wood-cutters.
Local attitudes toward the Gir lions range from “the animal is good” to a post lion attack comment of “be more careful.” Do locals think life would be easier, simpler without the lions? Yes. Do they think it would be better? Not necessarily.
Quammen also talked at length about wildlife in Romania, where brown bears are more abundant than grizzlies in Yellowstone. Why? Because locals tolerate these “jewels of the woods” and because they bring in cash through hunting permits. The system isn’t perfect. It's probably not a model for other large predator management programs, but it represents one place’s solution to people and large predators sharing space. In both these cases, large predators are connected to humans. The two species share their claim to the landscape. But in most cases, humans are disconnected from predators. And Quammen believes that with increasing human populations, large predators may well be extinct in the wild by the year 2150. With their passing, Quammen worries that we will sashay toward an unimaginable level of hubris. After all, what other animals will challenge us one-on-one? What will be left to put us in our place?
