The Natural Point of View
by Thomas Belton
The concept of “environmentalism” is like that elusive old Hindi myth of three blind men stumbling upon an animal in the jungle and trying to decipher what it is with only their hands. One feels a long skinny creature that undulates around his arm and exclaims, “It’s a snake.” Another feels a solid wall of flesh and declares, “It’s a wall!” While the last blind man grabs hold of a smelly bushy appendage and says unequivocally, “It’s a toilet brush.” In fact, all three are standing on different sides of an elephant.
So, it seems to me that environmentalism is perceived as different things to different people based on where you happen to stumble upon it. Some think environmentalism is all about toxic chemicals released to air and water by rapacious industries. Others think it is about saving the whales. Tree huggers go abroad in the forest and seek a Zen-like oneness with nature, not necessarily hugging trees but committed to preserving natural landscapes and animals regardless as to whether it makes sense. More egregiously, others feel that environmentalism is a curse that impedes them from making a profit through an unscrupulous and unsustainable use of natural resources that they only see as natural capital.
A fellow scientist friend of mine recently was asked to develop a birth control method for brown bears by the government (yes, IUDs for Smokey) to forestall a politically criticized bear hunt. The absurdity of this endeavor was driven by a distinct anti-hunting lobby that felt that it was morally wrong to hunt and kill bears for food (and sport) when, indeed, the landscape around the bear’s habitat had filled with people as the bears became entrained to eating from garbage cans instead of foraging. Obviously, dumpster diving is a distinctly unnatural behavior for a wild animal but one that the anti-bear hunt folks wished to preserve at all costs despite the new relationship that had evolved between bear and man. The hunters, on the other hand, respected the bears as part of nature since many of them are staunch conservationists and love the woodlands, but saw themselves as part of that ecology for culling the bears for food and sport. Two diametrically opposed points of view.
I have inadvertently stumbled upon this environmental “elephant in the room” several times in my career and from multiple angles. Trained as a marine biologist and employed as a research environmental scientist for the past few decades, my journey has taken me from one end of the “elephant” to the other. During this odyssey, I have met honorable people on both ends of the environmental nexus; both tree huggers and corporate executives, and surprisingly have found contradictions in my preconceived notions as to what may be the right action in each circumstance.
Not everything is so black and white. Life is complex, I’ve found.
In ecology, we have a term called hysteresis, it means a point at which an ecosystem has been pushed too far from its natural state, that no matter how hard you preserve, treat, or attempt to turn it around, it will never go back to its original environmental state. This phenomenon can be man-induced or natural. The ecosystem will simply move into another state of equilibrium and be stable there because the expense in minerals, carbons, as well as biological energy, is too high for it ever to go back to what it was before. A natural example might be the small lake left to its own devices. Over time, it will fill in with sediments eroded as part of the hydrologic cycle, the shoreline shrinking, the bottom rising until it slowly evolves into a pond, then a swamp, and finally into a grassy meadow with a stream running through it.
Hysteresis is the ecologic point at which it’s impossible to push the equilibrium backward to make it the way it was before. Of course, one might argue that with a major investiture of money, time, and engineering we could induce nature to move backward. We could dig a new hole, dredge the lake, stabilize the shoreline, set up storm drains upstream to reduce the amount of sediments coming downstream, and “Voila!” we have the old lake. But it’s not, is it? It’s just an artificial “Koi Pond” on a grand scale.
Now think of a larger scenario: a weed-choked and eutrophic estuary due to fertilizer run-off or the anoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, for example. For some systems, the costs may be too high, and the efforts to fix the perturbed ecosystem so invasive and severe that we may never drive it past the hysteresis point tipping. In fact, we might make it something worse. That is to all practicable purposes, it is never going back to what it was. Examples might include the warming oceans, which have reached a tipping point due to global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, that at this late date cannot be reversed in our lifetimes to get the glaciers back up onto their mountains or the polar ice cap floating solid over its sea again. Thus, we should start thinking about adaptation to its effects, as well as attempts, to limit further degradation.
One of the pivotal issues of the late twentieth century was the rise of an environmental ethic and the sense of planetary ownership. This movement to a large extent arose in the United States as an activist offshoot of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the pro Civil Rights struggle. State governments championed this ethic because they couldn’t wait for the long debate and codification of federal legislation to protect its citizens from imminent threats to public health. A key driver in this philosophical shift in the 1970s was the palpable Dickensian pollution that hung over American cities in shadowed smog, the acid rain that ate forests, and the lagoons of hazardous waste that dotted suburban backyards. As we eventually learned, there were willing municipal officials and corporate financiers who hid pollution, brokering this imbroglio with mafia-owned companies that transported poison to illegal dumps all over the region. This was the unhappy state of affairs in 1970 as the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which I worked for, was created. A cat and mouse game ensued, NJDEP chasing down those industries that spread cancer-causing chemicals amongst the poor and disenfranchised in cities and hidden farmlands and we as the government’s representatives to address those iniquities.
There is precedent for government funding environmental research going back as far as Aristotle. The famous Greek philosopher and natural scientist received a grant from one of his favorite students, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, for 800 silver talents to write up his Natural History of Animals and Plants. If not for Alexander’s largesse, we may never have seen the peregrinations of Aristotle, which form the foundation of natural science in Western civilization. In some ways, this gives me pleasure to think that my role as a facilitator of environmental research between government and academia could have similar results. That is to bring resources to bear that may shed light on a question of interest, not only for the sake of knowledge but also because of the unique way that environment science is married to public health, to find answers to questions that have immediate use in protecting natural ecosystems and the people.
Recognizing how my professional life—invested in the arcane language of environmental science and marine ecology— might be of interest to a larger and less technically informed public, I decided to write about it from a perspective that the public would understand, in a format more inclined towards creative non-fiction than straightforward journalism or scientific reporting. This resulted in the publication of my professional memoir Protecting New Jersey Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State, published by Rutgers University Press in 2010. The book was subsequently awarded honors by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities for its ability to explain scientific and environmental information in a way that the general public could understand.
This epiphany to the stylistic approach in writing my book occurred at Walnford Historical Farm, Monmouth County, Upper Freehold Township, New Jersey, where I sat pondering a question key to my dichotomous interests. Should I write what I know or write what (or where) the questions are that intrigue me? Not necessarily the same. As I wrote those few sentences, sitting at a sun-dried picnic table under a century-old apple tree in Walnford Farm, an inchworm made her way across the greyed surface towards my journal with the herky-jerky motion so essential to its vermiform locomotion. Its comical yet efficient motion, the parabolic lengthening then shortening of its small black body with the red stripes and orange head. She seemed so determined, so anxious to get to where she was going, pulling her posterior after her in short staccato bursts of locomotion. Curl, stretch, curl, stretch; covering a body length with each contraction. So seemingly strange compared to the undulating legs of the centipede or the hopping of the fly on its six legs.
And here was a small answer, or perhaps an antipode to my initial question. Part of me is intrigued by the urban world I sprang from and the human animals that inhabit it. The other part of me is more fascinated with the myriad creatures that fill the voids in humanistic attention, for I am one of those who waits while a daddy-long-legs spider crawls across his notebook to finish writing a sentence. Maybe the truly unique thing to do is merge them in a way that no one else has done. Regardless, it has to start with people. For without the introspection, the emotional and purely human context, reality is just description. So, I begin!
Etude 1- Liz’s Point of View (POV)
Liz was short-haired and dark featured with the broad face and determined mouth of her Calabrian ancestors. As she rolled the wheelbarrow filled with steaks through the echoing underground tunnel, she thought back on her conversation with Eric in the locker room when she’d come in that morning for the first shift. “You’ve got to think what you’re going to do with the rest of your life, Liz. You can’t go on shoveling shit all through your formative years.”
“Formative years!” she laughed at the stupid cliché, as if a thirty-three-year-old divorcee, mother of two, still had any forming to do. “Believe me, Eric, the only forming I’ve left in me is pouring myself into this silly uniform every day,” splaying her hand across the khaki shorts and safari shirt she wore, her name tag fixed above her left breast like a price tag in the deli.
Angry at herself for letting her anger show, Liz dropped the wheelbarrow legs into the holes gouged into the cement floor with a bang and threw open the iron gate to shovel a pile of red meat into the Cheetah cage.
Etude 2 – The Cheetah’s POV
The meat arrives on cue, and the small door—not large enough to squeeze through—opens and closes with a sudden snap. Once again, I’ve missed the timing. The plan is to seize the small white paw that appears with the meat and pull the rest of the creature into my cage. As I squat down and begin to devour the flesh delivered, my mind wanders inward and sees the ancestral Savannah I was stolen from where antelope graze, elephants stride like mountains afoot across the grasslands, and birds fly overhead with a joyful motion that my memory gropes for in meaning- perhaps freedom? Of course, I don’t mean freedom as an unfettered concept that hovers above my feline brain, but I do know that I was meant to live in an endless sea of grass with no horizon to hem me in, born to smell the earth open with the first drops of rainfall releasing odors that move something deep inside of me with longing. For I know, remember, feel, sense, that the ground is alive beneath my paws with life as much as the air is with its birds, the mountain in the distance like grey snakes writhing in the heat wraiths that come off the Veldt. I still feel the earth beneath this bower cage and its clanging bars, know that somewhere outside birds still fly and sing, the food still moves over the land on four hooves, wandering in ignorance of my hunger. And I think about that little white paw that throws me my meat every day and wonder what it would mean if I could pull it here into my cave. Could the creature explain to me where my world has gone? And if not? I’d eat it!
*****
I look up from my journal and wonder if it’s too treacly, the anthropomorphic Cheetah one step away from Aesop’s moralizing creatures. Is that how animals think? I look around at Walnford Farm frozen in time, a Heritage Farm Site preserved to teach our twentieth-first-century children about life in the nineteenth century when people and animals co-existed more completely. Out here in horse country, the summer lingers if you take the time to see its slow pulse, the farmers driving their tractors across harvested fields laying up long brown rooster trails of wheat dust in their wake. The asparagus plants have their green brushy Afros on, and the bean plant tassels are golden with pollen. The colts and fillies I first saw in the spring, newly born weak-legged and skittery, are now a head taller, their limbs strengthened by running after their mothers in the meadow. The mares still huddle close together in confabulation, but the colts and the fillies now chase one another, manes flying and hooves flashing in the noon-day sun, their youthful exuberance a jolt of sudden motion to my sleepy preoccupation with words.
Some of the leaves have changed color in the summer heat, and some have fallen beneath the cherry tree and the willow. They look like golden coins on the verdant green, while cicadas hum overhead in their scratchy song of love and mating. Stillness, like a linen kerchief, draws across the farmyard, swells—then rises—on wind puffs through the tall trees. The broken picket fence that runs along the red clay road from the main farmhouse to the blue grist mill seems silly in the absence of anything to enclose inwards. Mourning doves perch on its white strakes, docile and smug in their lassitude. Sunlight filters through the overhead branches onto my picnic table with my journal open to its light and dappled shadow, the sun-scoured wood and noble bench in the wood of my dreaming.
What about birds, I think, to write about?
Suddenly, I remember a friend of mine, an ornithologist and a falconer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who invited me to watch as he caught and tagged peregrine falcons for a census of the species. Some birds he kept and trained for falconry. I said yes, thinking about how you catch a wild raptor to put a bracelet around its foot. Perhaps, that was another way to juxtapose the human with the animal point of view.
Etude 3 – The Falcon’s POV and the Falconer’s POV
The false lake was horseshoe-shaped, what they called an oxbow, just a bend in the river that swept around a meadow of tall marsh grasses, whose brushy tops swept back and forth in the morning air as night crept from the sleeping waterway and opened the morning like an oven door. The lark, her heart of glass pounding in shrieking terror, struggled within the falconer’s gloved hand as her legs were pinioned and hung upon a tattered branch like a broken marionette, set to lure a peregrine down. The birdman had gentle hands that caressed the lark, fluffing her smooth breast with blowing kisses that stilled her screeching heart, just long enough to slip the snare over her ankle and peg it to the tree limb, as he retreated to the viewing blind and peered skyward in anticipation of the raptor’s sudden scream.
The peregrine, his knife beak curved downward, crested the rolling waves of moistened air, the warm musk of spring burgeoning upward to awake an ancient memory of desire in him, a need to seek the north-blowing wind, to join the throngs of songbirds, his food, pulling him forward with hunger until he saw the struggling lark from on high. The conjunction of time and place in the predator’s heart is precipitant, inexorably fated; the narrow purpose of strike, kill, eat begins; cunning lost to strength, the raptor’s strike a scream of abject despair as he pulls his wings into a parabolic dive; absolute certitude, the arc of his strike as inevitable as the first moment of time’s persistence.
The dead larks litter the oxbow’s width, as the long rushes whisper shameless questions that go unanswered in the morning wind, for the snares man has captured his falcon and with them Jessie has tied it to his arm; hooded and cloaked against the terror, he blows soothing kisses against its pulsing throat and murmurs into its covered mask. “Hunt for me!” as the songbirds sing overhead.
*****
I wonder if this approach is still too dichotomous, pondering the man and the animal simultaneously. What if I become more microscopic to capture the true animal spirit devoid of human conjecture? A thought struck me then of graduate school and taking a course in marine microbiology at the City University of New York. Our field trips involved taking a workboat out from Staten Island to the Atlantic Ocean past the Verrazano Bridge, where we dropped ponar buckets to pull mud from the thousand-foot-deep Hudson Canyon, as it tipped down across the continental shelf into the abyssal depths. Once retrieved, we put sediment samples into agar jell tubes where the microorganisms could grow happily until we got back to our lab, filtered and decanted the tiny creatures living at the sea bottom onto petri dishes then observed them under a compound microscope. What strange microscopic creatures lived there at the limits of the habitable planet.
However, as this thought hit me, another came on unbidden. I remembered what I was thinking as the workboat pulled back into New York harbor that day and saw the skyscrapers appear in the distance on the tip of Manhattan. It was an auditory as well as a visual image, the opening minutes of Jerome Robbins's movie adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical, West Side Story. In an iconic opening, Robbins let Bernstein’s musical prelude play for ten minutes as an abstract set of white lines on a field of red, then blue, then green, repeatedly faded and brightened onscreen until eventually this scrim faded and resolved into an aerial photo of lower Manhattan, the small lines made into large structures, the same skyscrapers I’d seen from my boat. In the movie, the music stops when the photo resolves, and you hear a lone human whistle, a long ascendant, and a short return, as the camera pans closer to the city. You hear this whistle repeatedly, echoing across the canyons as the camera pans over one neighborhood after another, flowing uptown from the Battery to Chelsea and across the Garment District and on into the West Side slum. The camera suddenly zooms in and resolves onto a playground where kids are playing basketball like tiny ants, then snaps closer to the individual players, and then a shot of a gang of boys watching them, immobile and draped against a high cyclone fence, like emotionless mandarins, snapping their fingers uniformly in time to the music that slowly swelled into the first song. “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way! From your first cigarette to your last dying day!”
These two things juxtaposed in my mind at that moment on the boat, seeking a theme to write about, the microscopic world of marine zooplankton and the rabbit warren of the city as microcosms. So, I took pen to paper and tried once again to get it right. What it’s like to be an animal, an animal so small and so bizarre in form and function at the extreme edge of human vision that no one could help but see the beauty there. Could I convey the joy at seeing what very few have the privilege of seeing? But, this time in verse, as it seemed appropriate to my telescoping method.
Etude 4 – The Microbia’s POV
Yet even as the day becomes night
so does my love for this breathing living space
shelve itself in a myst about the elements,
the selfsame itself a dinner for grubs and vermi
as slush slush the water descends slowly
through the mouth of earth to the vadose zone
gurgling beneath my feet
in its gulping of air
and water sliding sideways
through the fractured beach sand.
Thus, the subterranean world of tardigrades and mites
where pebbles loom larger than boulders
and oxidations burn grains of sand
into scalding earth and molten lake,
a world where miniaturia roast their feet
else splash down in a shallow loch
where still smaller animalcules
swim gracefully
using carapaced shells like rowing skulls
their feet for paddles and antennae for rudder.
At the edge of this abyss there exists yet smaller hulks,
barrel-bodied Rotarians spinning on waves of cilia
nor eyes nor ears yet tasting their environments
with the very cells of their skins,
seeking bacteria and plankton,
grazing on surfaces like cows to pasture,
else sounding like their cousins the whales
to depths of glory in a drop of water
more formidable than any known to a cetacean.
And I imagine that they have devised songs for ranging,
seeking companions in the dark of their abyss
where the ocean may stretch across the skein of a molecule
that we in our ignorance swallow
while thrashing in the surf
having been tumbled from a wave while bathing.
All goes inward and yet all goes out,
all the animalcules stretch from us
through us and beyond us
to worlds within worlds
that are where we stand,
where we dream and where
we are swallowed
while the universe so much larger than ourselves
is yet again swallowed by universes unseen.
*****
Maybe this comes closest to my initial goal of merging the human mind into the animal sense of marvel. The mikrokosmos of bacteria and viruses are so foreign to anyone’s idea of what an animal kingdom may look like, organisms so small they avoid our perspective although they too have communities with needs, instincts, and desires to survive and reproduce.
Nature writers partake in a unique dialogue with wildlife close to anisotropy where creatures have a different value when measured in different directions, whether upwards to the falcon in the sky or the bacterium in the drop of pond water at our feet, which gives us a unique perspective to our place in the universe based upon your “point of view.” Natural scientists have the latitude, based on our training and interests, to look where others fail to see and find the absurdity of the fear for our own mortality.
As field biologists, we become inured to death and suffering, watching the predator-prey dance, but we are also a part of it, partaking in the capture of fish, birds, bats, insects - the whole panoply of Aristotle’s “Animal Inquiries” – as we trap, hook, or cage them for study. Yet, I’m often struck by the ephemeral beauty of the animals that so intrigue my analytical interests and how we humans fit into this bestiary as we scientists try to understand the interplay between habitat, genetics, and random luck in animal survival. As a naturalist writer, I’m challenged to convey this ineffable mystery, the intelligence in nature that is the least humane yet the most uplifting, the passion in a rutting buck’s eye, the sibilant hiss of a snake’s warning, or the herky-jerky efforts of a dung beetle as it rolls offal uphill to fertilize its nest.
It’s there - at the extremes of nature - that I find transcendence in the natural “point of view!” It’s through my animal portraits, or the words I imagine in the mouths of bats and whales, hippogriffs and sphinxes; it’s there that I partake in the truly marvelous epiphany that existence is enough for me without the myth of human exceptionalism. For I’ve awakened the wondering creature within me who is a branch in nature’s flora and not necessarily the root and truck of its overarching canopy.
And I’m alright with that!
BIO: Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. He is a marine biologist, an environmental scientist, and a public health official for the State of New Jersey. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State” (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. In non-fiction, he has published hundreds of scientific articles, essays and creative non-fiction pieces. His most recent creative non-fiction essay “Escape from the Cancer Ward” (2024), was published in “Ars Medica,” a Canadian journal out of the University of Toronto that specializes in literature that addresses public health issues. In addition, his essay “The Making of an Environmentalist,” was published in “Transformations” a project of the “Narrative Storytelling Initiative” at Arizona State University and a publishing channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.