Peter Beard During the Alive Times, In His Own Words

April 26, 2020

“When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen.”

— Peter Beard, 1938-2020

“When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen. Kenya’s population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless “wild—deer—ness.” It was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible.

“Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya’s population of 30 million drains the country’s limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa.

“The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye.

The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK-47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is the end of the game over and over.

“What could possibly be next? Density and stress — aid and AIDS, Deep Blue computers and NIntendo robots, heart disease and cancer, liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamuguchi toys deliver us into the brave new world.”

— Peter Beard, 1938-2020

Remembering Peter Beard (1938-2020)

April 23, 2020

“Peter was an extraordinary man who led an exceptional life. He lived life to the fullest; he squeezed every drop out of every day. He was an intrepid explorer, unfailingly generous, charismatic, and discerning. Peter defined what it means to be open: open to new ideas, new encounters, new people, new ways of living and being. He died where he lived: in nature.”

— Peter Beard family statement

He went to East Africa as a young, hotshot New York fashion photographer in the early 1960s, to photograph supermodels in the African wilderness for Life Magazine. He fell in love with the light, the wildlife, the culture and the way the sun shimmers off the early mist of dawn in an untouched wilderness, and he stayed. He went native. He saw how the wildlife was slowly being ground into extinction, and so he wrote — and photographed — a cover story for Life titled The End of the Game.

It would become the title of one of his most famous books, a record of a vanishing world. He wanted to record the twilight of East Africa’s wildlife migrations for posterity, “to capture the destruction of the region by colonialists.” He was not alone in that regard, but he alone had easy access to celebrities like Jacqueline Onassis, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Candice Bergen and Mick Jagger.

His distinctive style — marginalia in India ink — utilized a collage of handwritten diary entries, transcribed telephone messages and newspaper clippings pasted together with dried leaves, insects, found objects and original drawings. His work seems frenzied, disorganized, and yet there’s a certain order to it. His art is mercurial, but it connects. On an elemental, almost subliminal level, it makes sense.

This past Sunday, April 15, Beard was found dead in the woods near his home in Montauk, New York.

He had been missing since March 31. He was 82, and had been suffering from dementia.

In the prime of life, he was a visionary, one of a kind, and his passing marks the end of an era.

Dementia may have taken him in the end, but he survived a lot along the way. In his younger days he helped rope rhinos in relocation programs, and in the mid 1990s was famously trampled by an elephant. He lived to tell about it, too, even though he arrived at Nairobi Hospital without a pulse.

One of his lesser known works, Zara’s Tales, was a heartfelt collection of children’s tales and scrapbook material for his then five-year-old daughter Zara, who grew up on “Hog Ranch,” as they called it, Beard’s family compound just outside Nairobi. Zara grew up surrounded by outsized wart hogs with outsized personalities, surrounded by a dark forest full of reclusive, rarely seen bongo antelopes. Zara’s Tales is a throwback to a lost but not yet forgotten world.

Photography was both a passion and a calling for the young Beard. Coupled with his frenzied, distinctive writing style, it made for some colourful moments, as in this passage from Zara’s Tales when, while tracking the elusive bongo in the thick rainforest of Kenya’s Aberdare Natiuonal Park, he finally managed to capture his quarry on film. This was in the days of manual focus cameras and print film that constantly needed to be rewound and reloaded.

“Thousands of miles of hills and valleys and stinging nettles for this single vision,” Beard wrote in Zara’s Tales, his five-year-old daughter listening in on every word, “. . . the wildest sight on earth . . . right now. The rarest.

“The intensity of the furious flies, the giant eyes, the neck reaching forward, so much wildness . . . stretching the moment. Gambling out on the longest limb of chance, squeezing the shutter release . . .

“Concentration, consternation, trepidation. Imagination. Exhilaration. Click.

“The loudest ever heard. An Olympic starting gun. Thundering explosive hooves. Crashing bush alive with frenzy — every direction, everywhere. Forget the four! There must be fifty or more, a huge herd, all around. None of them knowing why or what. Galo-Galo was pulling me, tugging me around the tree. Haraka. Hurry. Fwata mimi. Follow me. We raced off again, triumphant, now circling around.

“Snorting the air, noses were blowing. Then a giant lion-sized coughing, BARK, an explosion — like a buffalo bull, a lion, a leopard — brief, inquiring, a loud calling out. Nothing quite like it. The fearsome utterance sounded again, and then again. We pursued it, madly crazed. The forest cover got darker but the ground was open, with movement all around; the great hollow bark was just ahead. I checked the aperture: F 3.5 still in place. Speed down to 1/60 of a second. And then there it was in the gargantuan silhouette: buffalo-sized, frozen in place, almost calm, the biggest blackest bongo bull in the forests of Africa. This was the high point of a thousand lives, a million-to-one odds. Great blackness and sleekness and togetherness and gentleness in the darkest black baseball-sized eyes . . . looking right down at me, completely open without fear or malice of any kind. Visual poetry of vast composition, purring muscle. Fluid, ready. Mighty.

“The whole form filled my lens — the hunter’s dream. Click — and he disappeared into the moist darkness, an apparition.

“I left the film advance on motor drive, left eye open. By now the herd was out of sight.

Deep silence restored. In my left eye the rewind spool remained unmoved, unturned, unbelievable . . . It hit me like a flash through the stomach, aching emptiness and despair — a searing pain — the film was not turning in the camera.

“Try the shutter, wind it, crank it, bang it — nothing moves. I would have to wait till dark to look inside and feel for torn film, sprockets probably ripped.

“Had I missed the goggle-eyed face of flies? Mind searching for reasons with groans of darkest hope. From mountain peaks of ecstasy my mood began to match the gloomy forest. I’d got nothing and I knew it.

“Time for desperate action. Grab the other camera from bewildered Galo-Galo. Change the lenses, run through the forest, find the herd. Find any one of them. Reach the next ridge, lungs on fire. Go for it. Quietly now . . .

“Galo-Galo came up behind. We were all there. You could feel it. Forms were flowing through the bush, slightest rustlings here and there. We would see nothing, though. *@#%)&4@}@&$@!!+=)@!!

“It was darkening now — at the very end of the afternoon. Below me in a vast stretch of primeval forest canopy cover was a single gap of low-lying bush, a clearing of sorts. We watched for anything that moved.

“Just when I was despairing over why old Mungu couldn’t throw us down a single crumb, just when I was really beyond hope and knew all was lost . . . the great elegance appeared in that one and only waist-high clearing . . . barely glancing in our direction, easing by, on his own time. Never a sound, back in the flow, heading up to the left . . . a sleek bongo.

“One last glorious chance. Click. Check the rewind spool, open-eyed. It winds . . . Got you!

“And here he is, a male bongo, in the wild.

“Over the years, no one has ever noticed this picture. No one knows what it is.

“No one could ever guess the months and years of trouble that lay behind it.

“Shauri ya Mungu.” Don’t make too much effort. It’s all God’s plan.”

Indeed. All God’s plan.

Peter Beard: 1938-2020. They were giants then.

A Snapshot View of the World, on Earth Day’s 50th Anniversary

April 21, 2020

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.”

— George Bernard Shaw

The world has changed. And so has Earth Day.

When, at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco in 1969, peace activist and Earth Society Foundation founder John McConnell first proposed a day to honour the Earth and the concept of peace, hardly anyone could have imagined that, five decades later, the bear population would have quadrupled in Yosemite National Park in just 16 short weeks, or that leatherback sea turtles would be nesting unmolested on abandoned Florida beaches in unprecedented numbers; or that a kangaroo would be seen hopping down a deserted street in downtown Adelaide, in Australia.

Then again, hardly anyone in 1970 could have foreseen a pandemic — caused, ironically enough, by a zoonotic virus, meaning that it jumped from animals to people — would drive half the world’s population indoors, waiting for the signal that it’s to go outside again.

Hardly anyone, that is, but for avid readers of dystopian science-fiction novels, and anyone who lined up to pay to see a sci-fi movie called Soylent Green.

Soylent Green was released in movie theatres in 1973. Today, 1973 doesn’t seem that long ago, all of a sudden. Will the movie theatre experience be the same ever again?

Earth, the green planet we call home, is in trouble. There are 8 billion people in the world today; in 1970, there were just 4 billion.

Worse, overconsumption of the Earth’s resources by q a handful of rich, developed northern nations has created a societal, environmental and climatological imbalance. Wise minds — Jane Goodall and David Attenborough among them — tell us that this Earth Day, the first celebration of the natural world during the age of Covid-19, presents a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to press the reset button.

Those who follow history know differently, of course, but they’re reluctant to say so. They’re staying silent. No one wants to be pegged as the Cassandra who scolds anyone who’ll listen that we’ll go straight back to doing what we were doing before, only more so — even if, deep down, the Cassandra knows it to be true.

So Jane Goodall, age 86, looks at Greta Thunberg, age 17, and sees a kindred soul. She can be forgiven, though, for worrying about Thunberg’s future, and the generation like her.

The medium is the message, as always.

Covid-19 has driven planned commemorative actions like the Great Global CleanUp indoors and online, in the digital sphere — online. Not even 1970s futurist Alvin Toffler could have predicted that, one, day, in the not-too-distant future, humanity would be honouring Earth

Day indoors, “sheltering-in-place,” in front of a computer screen,. George Orwell might have predicted it. Aldous Huxley might have predicted it. Ray Bradbury did predict it. Civic engagement has moved into cyberspace.

Toffler published Future Shock in 1970. He defined the term \as a psychological condition of both individuals and entire societies.

When asked to describe what he meant, using simpler language, Toffler replied simply: “Too much change in too short a period of time.”

Well, yes and no.

Humankind has been present on planet Earth, in one form or another, for no more than a blink-of-an-eye in geological terms. Weigh that millions of years of planetary evolution. Four months of Covid-19 is but a blink in the proverbial blink-of-an-eye.

The irony, of course, is that the past 12 months have also witnessed dramatic, unprecedented discoveries in the study of early humankind. Receding ice and melting permafrost, brought on by climate change, has uncovered dramatic evidence of early humans’ day-to-day lives.

Back to Earth Day today, on this day, 22 April 2020.

Coyotes have been seen on Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Deer are roaming a housing estate in Essex, in the UK. Animals are moving into the spaces we humans have vacated, The Guardian noted in an editorial, just the other day. “When days seem so indistinct, the appearance of a new bird in our backyard suddenly seizes our attention. . . Birdsong is clearer now that the traffic has hushed. ”

The news is not all good.

Poaching is said to have spiked in Africa, as desperate people turn to other means to survive. Work to protect wildlife has slowed or in some cases stopped altogether, due to social distancing measures. Nature conservation groups — both the big NGOs and smaller, homegrown conservancies that work at the local, community level — are strapped for cash at the best of times. The sudden absence of tourism and the revenue it generates, coupled with the scaling back of monitoring and enforcement, has created an untenable situation in many developing countries.

“When the pandemic is finally over, wildlife may vanish as fast as it emerged – and we may not really notice. The need to feed families may soon subsume broader considerations of wellbeing. Yet this strange and frightening interlude is reminding us that there may be better ways to arrange our lives.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. We can only hope. Hope, like spring, springs eternal.

The Quiet Earth: In the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic, A Greener World

April 12, 2020

“We have to get the message out that we need to change. Let’s have hope that we’re going to come out of this better people. We have to push our politicians in the right direction.”

— Jane Goodall, April 11, 2020

It isn’t Day of the Triffids exactly but with humans in hiding, wildlife is reemerging in areas previously crowded by homo sapiens. Where late the sweet birds sang, they’re reappearing anew.

“It took just a few days of lockdown for baby rabbits to dare to cross once bustling roads in Christchurch, New Zealand,” Laura Millan Lombrana wrote for Bloomberg News mere days ago, “and less than a week for a puma to descend from the Andes Mountains into Santiago, one of South Americaʼs busiest capitals.”

Wild boar, a familiar sight to residents of Barcelona’s outer suburbs, have made their way deep into the heart of the Catalonian capital.

“It’s surprising and strange, yes, but also meaningful,” Lombrana added. “Research suggests that ecosystems can rebound (quickly) once human intervention subsides.”

That’s a familiar refrain to conservationists the world over, where even in war-torn regions of West Africa, for example, herds of wild elephants have been seen to recover more quickly than anticipated once they’re left alone for any length of time — provided there are enough wild wetlands for them to recover in.

And that, right there, is the crux of the matter, and the answer to the inevitable question, Where to from here?

Our wanton, collective destruction of nature was responsible in part for Covid-19 in the first place. Wet markets, places where living wild animals are sold for food — and the jumping-off point for a zoonotic virus that was bound to escape sooner or later — don’t just happen of their own accord. Ebola jumped into the human population in January, 1996, when villagers who had carried, skinned, chopped and/or eaten a dead chimpanzee in a patch of rainforest in northern Gabon later came down with a deadly hemorrhagic fever. In that instance, 21 of the 37 villagers reported to have been infected later died, and not in a pleasant way. Ebola’s astounding casualty rate, and the speed with which it spreads, leaves Covid-19 in the shade. Even at that, though, Ebola was not enough on its own to convince villagers in remote regions of West Africa, let alone the wider world outside, to change their ways. No matter how many sociologists insist Covid-19 will change our thinking, there are countless others — students of recent history, for one — who believe it’ll be back to business as usual, only even more so.

This is despite the emergence of a new discipline, “planetary health,” which focuses on the increasingly visible connections between human beings, other living beings, and Earth’s complex web of biospheres and ecosystems.

Former Guardian environment editor John Vidal noted in an op-ed piece last month that research suggests outbreaks of animal-borne and similar infectious diseases such as SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, swine flu, Lassa fever, the Nipah virus and now Covid-19 are growing with each passing day. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans in growing number, and many of those pathogens are quick to spread to new places. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-in-four new, emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.

Climate scientists and conservationists alike — everyone from the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum to primatologist Jane Goodall and teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg — say our response to climate change and the coronavirus are linked. “We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats,” WHO climate change advisor Arthur Wyns wrote earlier this month on the World Economic Forum’s website. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/climate-change-coronavirus-linked/) “All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps.”

For now, signs of green recovery — no matter how temporary and fleeting they may prove to be — are there, for anyone willing enough to look.

Wyns again: “Crises like these offer an opportunity for a regained sense of shared humanity, in which people realize what matters most: the health and safety of their loved ones, and by extension the health and safety of their community, country and fellow global citizens. Both the climate crisis and unfolding pandemic threaten this one thing we all care about.

“When we eventually overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, we can hopefully hold on to that sense of shared humanity in order to rebuild our social and economic systems to make them better, more resilient, and compassionate.

“Ultimately, public health is a political choice. A choice we are now confronted with, and one we will have to make over and over again as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just and healthier future.”

Andr à tutto bene.

In truth, though, will everything be better the day after? We can only hope — and along with hope, our prospects for a greener Earth.

On COVID-19 and the Six Stages of Climate Denial

April 09, 2020

“The reality is that climate impacts are here. They are now. And they matter to all of us already, because they affect everything we already care about.”

— Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, director Texas Tech University Climate Center

Where late the sweet birds sang, they’re singing again.

One of the unintended consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is that the air is clearer, the water clearer and creatures great and small are reclaiming the garden of Eden. Or what’s left of it.

Hardly anyone doubts that when — if — things return to normal, many of us will go back to living much the way we were before, burning through fossil fuels by the barrel, driving the biggest car we can find to drive two blocks to the supermarket — what’s with the parking in this place? — importing fresh strawberries in January (northern hemisphere) and June (southern hemisphere), all the while blithely ignoring the inconvenient truth that the polar ice sheets are melting, sea levels are rising and the Great Barrier Reef is no longer so great, owing to the latest bleaching event.

If human history teaches us anything it’s that some things never change. Climate denial, for one. COVID-19 may be a shock to the system, but the climate deniers are still singing from the same hymn sheet.

The six stages of climate denial are:

It’s not real.

It’s not us.

It’s not that bad.

It’s too expensive to fix.

The solution does nothing to fix the underlying problem.

It’s too late anyway.

Some things do change, though. The right wing’s response to climate change, for example, has shifted dramatically, in keeping with the right’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: “It’s a hoax!” is now, “Let millions die, it’s nature’s way.”

The new catchphrase is “herd immunity.” If enough people are exposed to COVID and survive, the reasoning goes, their antibodies will protect them against any relapses likely to occur.

Never mind that the next virus will throw a whole new sequence of indecipherable RNA into the mix.

The right’s auto-response to climate change — “It’s a hoax! — has changed to, “If your island home is vanishing below the tideline, move to higher ground.

“If you’re starving because of drought, move to where it rains.”

The six stages of climate denial were framed and named by Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian climate scientist with the Texas Tech Climate Center. Hayhoe is a professor of atmospheric science, one of Time’s magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year, a UN Champion of the Earth and a self-described knitter, pastor’s wife and mom. She has 153,000 followers on Twitter, and most recently tweeted, “Just when I think I’ve heard all the bad news, I learn something new.”

(This is a common theme among climate scientists, as opposed to climate deniers: Scientists admit when they don’t know something; climate deniers know they’re right about everything, and so don’t bother to question anything.)

“I’m not suspicious,” Hayhoe is fond of saying. “Just Canadian.”

Was coronavirus caused by climate change? “No!”

So does that mean climate change has nothing to do with the spread of viruses and diseases? “No!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruOl1R5cpnw

The right question is not, did climate change cause something, but, did climate change make it worse?

In the past week, Hayhoe and other scientists have cited research that shows that air pollution nearly doubled the risk of dying from the 2003 SARS outbreak. Now COVID is following a similar pattern: Even a small increase in long-term exposure to [particulate matter] increases the death rate for COVID-19.

The six stages of climate denial again:

It’s not real.

It is, actually.

It’s not us.

Even if nominally true, which it isn’t, we’re not helping

It’s not that bad.

Ask the polar bears.

It’s too expensive to fix.

The cost of not fixing it may be more.

The solution does nothing to fix the underlying problem.

Which is?

It’s too late anyway.