Before I get ahead of myself, I want to say something about what I believe. I believe in the kinship of all life—a genetic kinship that’s also a spiritual kinship. I believe that the only way to protect our own wellbeing as a species—climatically and biologically speaking—is to protect the wellbeing of every other species, and the habitats they belong to. For they are our habitat, and we are theirs. More to the point, I believe that from an evolutionary perspective, the existence of every species has exactly the same validity, the same importance, as our own. Every species that has ever lived is, by definition, a success, just as we are. And every story we’ve ever told about human superiority to other species is just that: a story. Coexistence shouldn’t have to be just a word. It should be a fact, a state of affairs so implicit and so self-evident that it requires no name. We all participate in Being.
Can I live up to that belief? Can I live up to the premise that humans and other species all have a biological equivalence? The answer is no—I can’t. It’s a nearly impossible ideal, and not only because we tend to be so unaware of the way our lives overlap with and harm the lives of other species. We believe in the significance of our consciousness, our awareness, our intelligence—we believe in it so much that it blinds us to what we stand to learn from other creatures. In a way, believing in the evolutionary equivalence of all species is a little like embracing a religious faith, in the sense that it’s so hard—sometimes impossibly hard—to live up to such an exalted standard. All you can do is try. But then trying is everything.
Here’s how I came by what I believe. I once had a small farm—only four acres—on which there lived a couple of humans, a couple of dogs, four horses, two pigs (in summer), chickens, ducks and geese. Oh, and for a while a Royal Palm turkey. One morning, I was in the chicken yard, doing chores, and I heard the turkey emitting what sounded like a high electronic warble. It was an alarm cry, but I could see nothing nearby to be alarmed about. Eventually, I followed the turkey’s line of sight and found myself looking high up in the sky, squinting against the light. And there it was—barely visible to me, almost entirely out of sight—a red-tailed hawk.
That was one of the moments—and there have been many—when I realized how limited a sensorium humans live in. The turkey was alarmed by something I could barely discern in the sky, something I would never have noticed if the turkey hadn’t noticed it first. That was one of many times the animals on my small farm reminded me of my shortcomings. True, I had skills my animals didn’t. I could fill the water tank and put feed in the feeders and open a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed with no trouble. Plus, I knew how to turn on the lights. And yet every single day the animals reminded me how carefully framed and limited my perceptions are. I suspect the animals all knew that there were other ways I was strictly bounded, ways in which humans always fall short of turkeys, for instance. But they never let on.
I’ve often thought about the three of us—that turkey, that hawk and me. Each of us belonged to a different habitat, though our habitats overlapped—and we each had our own manner of being, our own situation of being. Something about that configuration—three creatures: domesticated, wild and human—strikes me as significant. I wasn’t standing outside the realm of the turkey’s concern. I was standing in it. I was within the radius of its alarm. What the hawk made of me is a good question.
Recently, I experienced another version of that moment, though this one is extended in time. Three weeks ago, I was fifty feet underwater diving along a reef in a national marine park on the coast of Mexico. I’m not yet a good enough diver to be as patient and observant as I’d like to be. So the guide—Jorge—brought me and my diving partner over to peer under the lip of an overhang, the entrance, it looked like, to a flattened cavern. And there was a huge green moray eel—easily 8 feet long and as big around as a soccer ball. It turned its head when I came near—as if Jorge was offering me as a sort of canapé. I’d like to say it looked at me, but the better way of saying it is that the eel shifted its field of vision and perhaps, thereby, included me in what it was noticing.
That’s two of us—me and the moray eel. The third member of this creaturely triad is Teddy, our eleven-year-old wirehaired Dachshund. Last week his hind legs stopped working, and when we took him to the vet, it was clear that we might be looking at euthanasia before long. You all know, I’m sure, how unbelievably painful that realization can be. (Happily, Teddy is himself again—which means that my wife and I get to be ourselves again.) So. There are three sets of eyes: the eel’s, mine and Teddy’s. The eel, smiling with what I took to be grim dispassion; Teddy, hurt and wounded and afraid and looking to us for assurance. And me, looking at each of them, in their separate worlds, and feeling overwhelmed by the fact that that we are all merely beings, and all of us part of Being.
It’s easy to feel kinship with a loving Dachshund—easy to impart an almost human intelligence to Teddy, easy to believe that he even sees a dachshundly intelligence in me, though I always wonder if he wonders why I’m not sniffing the air the way he does when we face into the wind. In other words, I know that Teddy and I overlap—that our sensoria—the worlds of our perceptions—converge, at least to some degree. It’s easy—though it also seems very hard for some humans—to understand that that convergence forms a bond between us. But what about the eel? I said it was smiling with grim dispassion, which, of course, is a phrase I made up and attributed, without evidence, to the eel. In the narrow sense, our habitats can never converge. The eel can’t breathe air, and I can’t breathe water. But when the eel turned its head in my direction—grimly, calmly, even studiously—we became connected nonetheless, if only for a moment.
Why do I talk about this? Why does that grouping—wild, domesticated and human—matter? Because only one of us—the human—can care for the other two. You could easily argue that an 8-foot moray eel needs no one—certainly not a human—to care for it. But it does need a human—every human—to help protect its habitat, the very ground of its survival. Caring for a coral reef and its inhabitants doesn’t seem to resemble caring for a beloved Dachshund, or, for that matter, being cared for by a beloved Dachshund. We share an emotional space with our pets—in fact, we have pets largely to help shape the emotional space we inhabit. And though we may experience emotions while diving, we bring them with us as a form of admiration, of marveling.
Our job—it seems to me—is to shelter every species from the effect of our human presence, from the consequences of our obliviousness, the limits of our perception and understanding. But we are not the keepers of that shelter. We are occupants of it, along with every other species. The shelter is our planet. “Shelter” is a bare minimum of a word, a stripped-down term for something almost every species requires. And of course it’s a word we use when we talk about harboring unwanted pets. But we’re all in this together. The unsheltering of any species unshelters us. We have a very hard time seeing that, largely because we believe we belong to a superior species, even an “intended” species if you’re speaking in religious rather than evolutionary terms. But when it comes to natural selection, we are no more intended than a green moray eel—and perhaps even less intended than a well-bred wirehaired Dachshund. Just how I’m “superior”—in wetsuit and scuba gear, fifty feet down in an alien environment—to a green moray eel perfectly at home in its habitat is debatable.
Life always wins, if given a chance. Habitats fill with the creatures that define them, if given a chance. Species evolve, even ours. And yet we live within a misunderstanding. It should be our task, our duty, to shelter every species we judge to be important. But we fail miserably at it, because human caring can be so diffuse and so self-centered. Perhaps it’s worth approaching the problem from a different direction. Perhaps we need to recognize—and remember—that we are sheltered by every other species, all together. I think of those millions of species, and their billions—if not trillions—of individuals, as a kind of biological magnetosphere—the magnetic field that surrounds the earth and helps protect us from cosmic particles that would otherwise bombard us. And what are all those other species protecting us from? From solitude. From emptiness. From ourselves.